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LOU LEVY PUBLISHERS ROUND TABLE 1998

LOU LEVY (1912-1995)

Former ASCAP Board member Lou Levy began a successful music publishing career in the Tin Pan Alley era of the mid 1930's and then went on to amass a catalog of some of pop music's greatest hits. Serving on ASCAP's Board of Directors from 1958 to 1970, Levy was honored by the Society in 1986 for "outstanding contributions as a major force in music publishing." In 1987 he was the recipient of the Songwriter's Hall of Fame Abe Olman Award for Excellence in Music Publishing.

Levy established Leeds Music in 1935 with his friends, lyricist Sammy Cahn and composer Saul Chaplin. Levy is credited with the discoveries of such writing talents as Cahn and Chaplin, Bob Dylan, Charles Strouse, Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, and Henry Mancini. He also either discovered, managed, or developed the careers of such artists as the Ames Brothers, Petula Clark, Bobby Darin, Eddie Fisher, Connie Francis, Woody Herman, Steve Lawrence, Les Paul and the Andrew Sisters.

Levy supplied numerous other singers with hit material: Frank Sinatra with "All or Nothing At All," "Strangers in the Night," and "I'll Never Smile Again"; Petula Clark with "Downtown" and "Call Me"; The Everly Brothers with "Let It Be Me"; Tom Jones with "It's Not Unusual"; and many others. He published The Beatles' first American hit, "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

ASCAP is proud to honor the memory of this innovative publisher and great friend of ASCAP with this discussion series.

Participants (l-r): Big John Platt, Vice President Creative, EMI Music; Jem Aswad, ASCAP Online Editor; Barbara Vander Linde, General Manager Creative, Rondor; Antony Bland, International A&R Manager, Chrysalis Music; Benjamin Groff, Creative Manager, BMG Music; Leeds Levy, President, Chrysalis Music

Part 1: The Cut-In

Barbara Vander Linde: My biggest concern right now is artists who want a piece of publishing who weren't even in the room when the song was written! Huge artists, and even not-so-huge artists, want a piece of the songs that we place.

Leeds Levy: What do you do when a major artist who sells millions of records insists on cutting themselves in? Just say no?

BV: I evaluate on a case-by-case basis. Who is the artist, what is the sales history, is the writer someone I'm trying to break?

LL: So in the last year you've seen this increase one hundred percent?

BV: Absolutely. And I think the reason is: everyone now understands the value of publishing, so even an artist who is not really a songwriter is going to try to write half of their album so they can make the publishing money. So the window for getting an outside [-written] song has gotten so small that you have to come to the table with something that everyone agrees is a smash, and nine times out of ten, it's an up-tempo.

Jem Aswad: The market for good ballads is that small?

BV: The easiest song to write -- for someone who can't write -- is a ballad. It's not easy to write a great ballad, but it's harder to write a great up-tempo. Co-writing is the best way to go, but when you're talking about an artist who's not really bringing anything to the table, you've got to balance out the odds. So unless you've got a writer who can do everything, you're going to have to put somebody else in the room, and then you've got three writers -- and the pie gets that much smaller.

LL: In the old-time music business, that was called the "cut-in." Very famous artists said, "Great -- I love that song. The only thing that's missing is my name in the writing credits."

Big John Platt: I haven't seen it as much, but I do know it happens. You just know that with a huge-name artist, you may have to give them a piece. If you wrote 100% of the song, you have to be somebody with an incredible amount of clout not to.

LL: I could almost understand the artist wanting a piece of the publishing, but this is a share of the writer credit -- the official records in the Library of Congress will say that it was a collaboration. The "cut-in" on the economic side has been with us forever -- record companies, by the way, are the biggest co-publishers of all -- but artists actually wanting a co-writing credit...

BJP: I think if it's a huge-name artist that's going to sell tons of millions of records with or without your song, you say, "Okay, I'll give you a piece of this use. Not of the next or the next or the next."

LL: Yeah, business is business. Ben, have you come across much of this?

Benjamin Groff: Not really, not that blatantly. I have had the occasion where someone co-writes with an artist and the artist demands more of the share than he is properly entitled to.

Antony Bland: I see it a lot more when writers get together with maybe a lyricist, and suddenly the lyricist is taking 60-70% when it should be equal thirds. But a lot of it may have to do with the "cred" factor -- more people are looking to see who wrote the songs, so a lot of artists don't want to be accused of not writing their own songs, and they want to establish credibility.

LL: We had one situation where an artist didn't want the royalty but wanted the credit.

BJP: I think a lot of bigger-name writers and producers do to the newer writers what was done to them. It's an ever-evolving cycle. For instance, there was one record produced by a big-name guy -- two other guys wrote it, 100%. The version that came out was exactly like the demo, but this producer said, "Just give me 10% of the song." Which is fine -- you may think 10% is nothing. But -- the perception is, when you see this producer's name, you think he wrote most of the song, because he had all these other hits. So this producer gets more and more work because of this #1 record that he didn't write.

JA: This is not a new thing -- why is it so much worse now?

Antony Bland: People are wiser about the amount of money in publishing.

BJP: Publishing isn't really something that you can touch, so a lot of new writers don't really know what it is until they see their friend get a big publishing deal or big royalties off of a song they co-wrote -- "Wait a minute! I didn't get that!" "Well, remember that piece of paper you signed a year or two ago? You signed those royalties away!"

LL: Did you ever see Ma Rainey's Black Bottom? It's a show about the Chicago blues scene in the '20s, when the writers would sell all of the rights to a song for $50. But I think now, people are more educated, deals have skyrocketed, and although the general health of the business seems flat at the moment, it's still a huge industry, and it's a great way to continue to receive income.

I remember when I was at MCA, a very big producer -- who did not need the money or the prestige -- working on a very big project, called and said he wanted a piece of the publishing. And I said no. I could do that because it didn't matter as much to MCA -- someone might get mad at me, but the company would still go on. But if you're a smaller publisher, you have to think twice. You can't be so bold as to tell them to get lost.

BV: No, every situation is different. Once I had a writer -- I hadn't even signed him -- and we sort of accidentally got a huge rock cut, and the artist wanted to come in as a writer, but he genuinely contributed to the song: even though the song already existed, there were lyric and melodic changes that made it more specific for them.

LL: Then again, I've seen people like [songwriter/producer] David Foster bring a song to life through an arrangement, maybe even change some of the melody a little bit, and not take anything for it -- "that was my job as the producer and arranger." You might say that he can afford to be that way, but he's always been like that -- when he was coming up, he probably produced a lot of records that he didn't get credit for, and refused to turn around and do that to other people.

JA: Does it happen to the biggest writers?

BV: Yeah. I don't think anyone is bulletproof against it. They'll ask major, legendary songwriters for a piece -- my response is, "Are you kidding?" A major recording artist asked one of my major writers for a piece of one of his songs that she recorded -- I said "Here's his number: you call and ask him! I dare you!" And she chickened out. But it's fascinating when they approach you.

Big John Platt: The approach is funny: it's different each time, and each time you're like, "Here it comes," and it takes them about 20 minutes to finally get to it. But we have to stand up for our writers: I had a situation a while ago where one of my writers did a song with another writer, and there was a sample in the song that took 50%. So his publisher called me and said "Your guy doesn't get anything" -- "What are you talking about?" They said, "He wrote the music but there's a sample" -- "No -- these guys were together from day one, so any sample comes off the top and they split it." "Well, the record's coming out next month" -- "No it's not, because I'm about to put a stop on all this!" They said, "But you're gonna hold up the project" -- "Well you're saying my writer isn't getting paid anyway!" So they called back the next day and basically said what I said in a different way. But many people in that situation would have just crumbled -- either said "Oh, okay," or they'll be mad but not say what's on their mind.

BV: And maybe one writer won't do it out of principle, but there are ten others behind them who will.

LL: I'll give you a reverse of that story, something that I heard happened in Nashville. A song on the current album by a big country artist was originally cut by a new artist. And the record company kept pushing back the new artist's release date, pushing it back, pushing it back. Two independent publishers copublished the song, and they finally said, "Enough already! No one's paying my bills -- I know I can get this song cut." And now the new artist's record company is trying to sue them, saying that they'd damaged their artist and all that -- but only after the song exploded for the big country artist!

Another rumor I heard says that if that same country artist puts a song on hold, she will pay the publisher $30,000 -- assuming you control 100% of the song -- as a deposit. If she cuts the song, great, it comes out of the mechanical royalties you're owed. If she doesn't cut it -- the money's yours. Because she wants to put the best songs on hold, she wants to lock them up, she wants to make sure that you bring them to her.

BJP: That's a businessperson enticing you, saying "If I love a song, we can do business today." She means business -- you're on my "AA" list, you get everything first, and I also know you're only going to pick what you love.

BV: She's showing you how committed she is -- that's a lofty amount! Most people would probably give you five!

LL: I also heard the reverse of that, from a company not represented at this table, where, let's say you signed a self-contained country act, thinking you're going to get at least half the album, with maybe a couple of outside songs. The act gets signed to a record deal, they assign a producer, and the producer is an exclusive writer who has a co-publishing deal with another publishing company -- and suddenly you find out you have one song on the album. All of the other songs are published by the company that the producer writes for -- even though he may not have written the songs -- and he's getting paid $5000 a track to cut his company's songs, whether they come out or not.

Part 2: The Sky's The Limit/The Death of Artist Development

LL: Let's talk about how crazy deals are right now.

Antony Bland: We do deals with songwriters that have cuts out, and they're fairly decent-sized deals, but not stupid. But if we sign a rock act or a rock writer, they'll want $250-300,000 when they don't even have a record out.

BJP: I sit in our acquisition meetings and my mouth drops when I see what these rock bands are getting, and a lot of them aren't even signed yet. They will get signed, but you're paying $400-500,000 for a band that doesn't even have a record out. I've got R&B writers that might have five cuts on platinum records, and their deals are like night and day compared to rock bands.

I just try to make fair deals, where a writer gets what they should and we get what we should. I explain to them what it is from the get-go: if you want a million dollars, you have to make a million dollar commitment, because I don't like my writers stressed! They can't really create when they're stressed, whereas if we lower this or that commitment, they can create freely. I just think it's out of control with these rock bands -- an R&B writer doesn't get two million dollars unless he's had three or four #1 records.

LL: So how does a big company rationalize that that's a valid deal to make?

BJP: Because it could be "The One That Got Away." You could give somebody a million dollars today and it could seem like a lot, but a year from now, after they sell ten million records, it was a good deal. No one wants to miss that next Nirvana or Green Day or Alanis. The managers and attorneys are the ones who are really doing it, because that's what they get paid to do.

LL: It's the blockbuster mentality. One record -- Fastball or Smash Mouth or Blink 182 -- will take off, and it's almost like that's the only record the label can promote. It's much more efficient and profitable for a record label to press ten million copies of one record than a million copies of ten records, so they'll put all of their resources into that one act -- and if they're lucky enough to have that one hit, they make 32 to 1 rather than even money. It's almost like the pricing of publishing has followed that, so you have this blockbuster that will sell four or five million records, where before there would be four or five acts selling a million, or ten or eleven acts selling half that. There's no artist development anymore.

Big John Platt: You almost have to earn the right to develop your artist or your songwriter these days. It's like you've got to make some money first, and then they'll say, "Okay, now you can go off in the corner and play with your new little writer who you think is gonna be the next #1." Everybody's looking for the quick turnaround. If you sign some name artists or name acts, then the company trusts you, so when I sign a Warryn Campbell or a Tamara Savage, they say "Go do your thing." Then they see those writers getting cuts and making money, and that leads into the next writers I want to develop. But at some companies, it wouldn't be that way if I didn't have Jay Z or Usher -- people who are generating some dollars. It's different at EMI -- a lot of my newer writers went to other companies and their first question was, "What do you have coming out?" "Nothing." "Okay, keep in touch!" Whereas if I love the music, we can do the deal.

LL: What's your window?

BJP: A year. If I can't get anything going in a year, knowing how I work, then it's just not happening.

JA: You don't start sweating at the ten-month mark?

BJP: Nah. It takes about a month for us to get our bond together, usually six months to get them a cut, and then it's getting them really out there. Two contract periods, sure -- I don't sweat after ten months because I'm going to pick up the option anyway.

BV: I like to give myself at least 18 months. You can certainly have activity in the first six to 12 months, but you have no control over when their record's going to come out.

Benjamin Groff: I think two years is a good period of time to see if we're going to move forward. Unless it's a writer who I think is a headache or just not the right person.

LL: Yeah, what are the telltale signs of "Oops! This was a mistake!"?

BG: Bad songs. Maybe the deal got done because of one good song and the rest just aren't happening. Or there may be ego issues or management issues that make it less attractive. I haven't really had a situation like that.

AB: I'd say two years too. After a year you want to be able to look at the situation and say, "Okay, I believe in this" -- I'm speaking about bands more than individual writers. But if you've signed a new developing band that no one knows about, after a year you want good quality demos and live performance, hopefully get a deal six months after that, and hopefully have a record out six to ten months after that. It can take a couple of years or more. It's about belief.

But sometimes the problems can rest with yourself: if you sign something and see it going downhill, you shouldn't be afraid to step in and say, "Look -- these songs are okay, what if you change this chord? Or what if you used this melody here?" That can be crossing the fine line between being a publisher and being a writer, and you can't ask for a writing credit unless you actually have earned it. But if the writer is not open to any suggestions and just says, "This is my song -- it's personal," then you can't work with them. "Fine, go be successful with someone else rather than fail with us!"

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9

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