In 1995, Mark Fried was a veteran executive at BMI, the performing rights organization, working with songwriters and publishers at a time of turmoil.
“By the mid-’90s,” he recalls, “publishing had had about three decades’ worth of consolidation, and four or five companies represented 500,000-plus songs each, making the actual job of publishing — which is focused on royalty collection and thoughtful song promotion — nearly impossible.”
One of BMI’s songwriters, a ’60s pop hitmaker, challenged Fried to change things. “It was John Phillips of The Mamas & The Papas who, on discovering his publisher’s lack of interest in even having a meeting, said to me, ‘If you don’t get out and do something about this, you’re part of the problem.’ That was all the inspiration I needed.”
Spirit Music Group, founded by Fried, with headquarters in New York, marks its 20th anniversary in 2015 as an independent publisher known for its support of veteran composers, its development of new talent and the diversity of its deals with acts from T. Rex to T Bone Burnett.
“A big part of the inspiration was search and rescue of the greatest writers and writer-artists I could find,” says Fried, 55, who is president/CEO.
Among publishers, Spirit is considered midsize, and it’s fine with that. “We don’t aspire to have millions of copyrights,” says chairman David Renzer, 55, former Universal Music Publishing Group chairman/CEO, who joined Spirit in 2014. But among the 75,000 songs Spirit represents are the catalogs of Pete Townshend, Charles Mingus, Muppets creator Jim Henson and pop-standard writers Alan & Marilyn Bergman (“The Way We Were,” “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers”).
The T. Rex revitalization remains a bragging point at Spirit, with lesser-known tracks like “Teenage Dream,” written by the band’s late frontman, Marc Bolan, getting more movie exposure. Spirit senior creative vp Peter Shane, 42, worked at length with the makers of the 2013 film Dallas Buyers Club to “curate multiple T. Rex songs, so it almost became a sonic character in the film.” He worked on clearing tracks for use in the movie and negotiating affordable synchronization fees for the catalog “so the filmmakers could use it to that degree.”
Spirit also placed T. Rex’s perennially popular “20th Century Boy” as the theme for Spike TV’s Jimmy Fallon spinoff, Lip Sync Battle, which premiered in April. “You get the benefit of that song being lip-synced by two of the stars in any given week, and often that opening-title lip-sync goes viral,” says Shane. “We couldn’t have asked for a better promotional vehicle for that song 40 or 45 years later to get it right into the middle of youths’ pop consciousness.”
Spirit’s joint venture with Grammy winner T Bone Burnett is more unusual. It represents the songs written by the singer-songwriter and producer known for his film and TV soundtracks (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Nashville). But it also allows Burnett and Spirit to co-sign writers.
“You get a very unique A&R source,” says Fried, “and it’s fun to get into his head. He’s really enjoying the conversation we’re having, because I suspect he hasn’t had a publishing partnership like this before.”
And Renzer won’t deny the degree to which they expect to enjoy the cachet that Burnett brings: “Talent attracts talent.”
Burnett’s experience in the placement of songs in films and TV shows — the process that requires a synch license from a music publisher — fits right in at Spirit. “Over 40 percent of our income comes from synch,” says Renzer.
Beyond traditional screen use, Spirit is seeing greater use of its copyrights in digital video — while developing some of the same concerns as the rest of the music-publishing business. “We’ve seen growth in our YouTube collections and that area,” says Renzer, “but as an industry we’re still batting digital streaming rates and in particular the kind that songwriters and publishers are seeing. The ratio of what writers are receiving compared with labels, and compared with what digital services like Pandora are receiving, is still very troubling.”
Spirit has succeeded in striking deals not only directly with songwriters, but also with other companies that extend its creative and financial reach. A joint venture in 2011 with The Jim Henson Company allows Spirit to collaborate with the team behind Fraggle Rock and Dinosaur Train. Spirit’s acquisition in 2014 of Cal IV Entertainment, whose catalog includes hits like Faith Hill’s “Breathe” and Jason Aldean’s “Big Green Tractor,” led to the creation of Spirit Nashville. And a deal struck in September with B-Unique Music in London gave Spirit a stake in on-the-rise British singer-songwriter James Bay, whose album Chaos and the Calm reached No. 15 on the Billboard 200 in April.
While it had focused mostly on back catalogs of established hits for its first decade, Spirit started signing such newer acts as MGMT and Scissor Sisters to develop itself in the mid-2000s. Notably, its biggest recent success with a new artist was generated in-house, literally. Spirit creative director Alan Wilkis, who moonlights as an electro-pop producer, hit No. 1 on the Alternative Songs chart with “Dangerous,” credited to Big Data featuring Joywave. Wilkis has since quit his day job.
For all of Spirit’s dealmaking, Renzer says its business goals “are not about volume. We turn down more opportunities than we act on.”
And there’s a focus on how to best capitalize on opportunities already at hand. “We have eight to 10 catalogs that represent iconic, classic standards,” says Fried. Owning repertoire from multiple genres or eras “allows us to avoid bringing in a lot of new catalogs that compete with [existing holdings].”
“We always wanted to work with the favorite things in our collective record collections,” says Fried of Spirit’s personal touch, “as opposed to building a company based on what catalogs other people happen to be selling.”
Twenty years on, the founder of Spirit declares: “I’m still looking to find things that haven’t had the benefit of real publishing management and that sort of hands-on daily support. I chased Al Stewart and I’m excited to find things, not just for ‘Time Passages,’ but for some of the deeper cuts that Al has given us over the course of something like 15 studio albums since his heyday in the ’70s.
“And we just closed a deal with Joe Walsh, who hasn’t had a publisher at his side since the first deal he did with his original manager during the James Gang years,” says Fried. “So we’ll get to paint with his entire solo works and all the things he has done with The Eagles. Plus, we have been talking about kind of a classic, funky blues record, where Joe can do his thing and maybe get in with some of the youngest generation of blues players out there.”
As Spirit seeks to maximize the exposure — and earnings — of its songs, Fried acknowledges that getting the exposure level just right is a creative art for publishers. Consider the use of C&C Music Factory’s 1991 No. 1 hit “Gonna Make You Sweat” in a current Target ad campaign. “That’s an example of a song that will have bursts of time [for exposure], and it could be two years, with lots of energy, before you can feel an organic pullback,” says Fried.
“Like a good farmer, we let the field recover and plant new seeds at the right time, then reintroduce the song when we think it has cycled back around. We have a responsibility to get the cycles right.”