Are “artist searches” the same as “music searches”? Mostly yes, but a little different. In this episode we discuss our successful search for an artist to re-record the theme song for the T20 Cricket Womens & Mens World Cups, and also to be the star of the tournament’s Opening Ceremony. Harts!
You’ll find the full transcript below:
Bruce:
Hi there again, this is number three in a little music licensing mini-series, a case study looking at the song we licensed for T20 Cricket and finding an artist for that.
Today we’re going to focus on the whole process of finding an artist, and we needed an Australian artist who could do a cover version of the song, ‘Gotta Get Up and Dance’, but also perform at the opening ceremony. So it was a pretty big requirement. And the winner was Harts, as you know from the last episode. Do you remember when we first saw Harts?
Clare:
It was at BIGSOUND Conference in Brisbane a few years back. It was just him and his guitar, and he was pretty impressive.
Bruce:
Yeah. I’ve done a few artist searches over the years, and in many ways they’re much the same as doing a song search. We go out to our suppliers with a list of criteria. They send us a list of suggestions, and we go through them and pick out the best ones. But there are some differences.
Clare:
Well, availability has a larger scope, because it’s not just if the song’s available, it’s whether he is touring or not, or in the studio or on holidays. Just whether he is available and can fit a re-record in.
Bruce:
And a performance, because the performance was on a specific date. Of course, COVID has changed that a lot, because artists aren’t going anywhere, they’re all at home waiting for the call. In this case, I think we received about 50 suggestions for artists who could do the job, and we culled it down to about nine. Most of them were well-known names, of course. I won’t go into who they were, but Harts was a wild card because most people had not heard of him.
Clare:
And all the credit to Cathy and Tony at Wise Music for putting him forward. They put Harts forward on many briefs, so we were well aware of him. And of course having seen him, it was great brand awareness.
Bruce:
Yeah, we knew who he was, and he immediately got our attention. We thought they might go for a safer, big name, but we put the list forward and had a big conference call with them. And we thought they would come out with a short list of two or three, but much to our surprise, Harts came out of that call as the favourite. So we got him to do a quick demo of the song, and then he and I attended a really big meeting in Melbourne with the T20 committee people and the agency people. And we played the demo, and it was astonishing because they gave him a standing ovation, and as they say, after that it was all history.
Clare:
Well, Harts should have been on a national tour around about now, playing Jimi Hendrix, which is his thing.
Bruce:
His thing, yeah.
Clare:
It is his thing. And he’s so good at it. But COVID killed that for him.
Bruce:
And I wish we could have been able to go because we had tickets, and it all got canceled, like a lot of things.
Clare:
But anyway, let’s check one out now.
Bruce:
Let’s do that.
Please contact us if you need help with music searches or licensing songs for advertising campaigns, or just want to chat about music and advertising. We would love to hear from you! About anything really.
bruce at musicmill.com.au
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bruce-tweedie-musicmill
Website: www.musicmill.com.au
Credit: the opening and closing sequences feature “Strong Hands” from Ben Catley:
The song: https://soundcloud.com/bencatley/stro…
About Ben: open.spotify.com/artist/66OGdUyXn2WSipn6ZYq7id
Disclaimer re copyright and fair use: https://www.musicmill.com.au/fair-use/
