Whats the most important thing for music publishers to worry about or to take immediate action on?
CM: Two things. First, from a music publishing point of view, it’s important to understand the new dynamic of the relationship between the record company and the publishing company. In the old days, it was very simple because the music business was essentially the record business – it was all about records. But these days it’s about other things, too. Notwithstanding the legal opinion of the RIAA, quite simply, things like ringtones, online video, and most importantly, user-generated content are not records. The guy that we are licensing for those uses, and so many future uses, isn’t the record company anymore. It’s the other guy. The other guy gets a license from us and a license from the record company. We are both content holders. We license our rights, our content, to the other guy in parallel to each other. In the American context, in recently going through the effort to reform the music licensing process, I think the biggest single obstacle to that reform was the reluctance of th
