This is the second in our four-part mini-series focusing on a particular sync licence case study – the use of “Get Up And Dance” for the T20 World Cup ticket-selling campaign. The focus this time is on the challenges we faced in licensing the song and getting permission to re-record it with a local artist.

You’ll find the full transcript below:

Bruce:

Hi everyone. Welcome to the Music Licensing  video Vlog again. Today, we have Spike making his second appearance. Probably grown a bit since you last saw him. This is actually number two in a little mini-series, looking at T20 Cricket and the song we did for that.

In the first one I talked about the Genius of Sean Cummins in identifying the song. If you missed that, just search for Bruce Tweedie on YouTube. I’m sure you’ll find me there and you can watch it. This time I’m going to talk about the music licensing deal and how complicated it was. The idea was to sell tickets to the World Cup. Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? Well, it wasn’t that simple after all. It wasn’t just a matter of sticking an ad on YouTube and Facebook and flogging it for all it’s worth trying to sell a lot of tickets. It’s actually one of the more challenging music licensing negotiations we’ve done in 20 years of our history.

Cummins actually approached us about a year before ticket sales started, which is just as well, ’cause it took nearly all of that time to get the licensing deal done. First we had to look at the territories. I mean, there were some obvious countries we had to look at, Australia, New Zealand, England, India, and so on. But then there are all these other countries like Afghanistan, and Nigeria, and Canada. And the problem was no one knew which ones were going to be in the World Cup because there were a whole series of qualifying tournaments that weren’t going to finish until much closer to the time. Now, that was an interesting discussion.

And then there was the media spread. I mean, TV and online for ads was pretty obvious and a few other things, but it was interesting because the T20 Cricket, at the end of the day, the product is actually a television program.

To some extent. There were ticket sales to the games, but what about if they wanted to play the song, the ad during the games between overs, things like that made it more complicated again. And of course, they definitely wanted the song to be used in the opening ceremony. I’ll talk about that more in the next episode. But that was another facet of the copyright negotiations. When I look back through my emails prior to making this vlog, I discovered that I had 800 emails back and forth. And like I always say, when you start a music licensing negotiation, most of the time you have no idea whether it’s going to be really simple or really complicated, which is why people come to us of course, our job is to shield you from having those nightmares, lying awake at night, wondering what’s going to happen next.

And I suppose the biggest part of the licensing deal was that they wanted to freshen up the song with a modern version rerecorded by a local Australian artist, which meant getting permission from the writers for a rerecord. And the key guy was Mutt Lange or Lang. I’m not sure how you pronounce that. He produced the song for Supercharge back in the day, and he’s a really big guy in the music world, but fortunately he’s a cricket fan. And in a rather unusual twist, not only did he approve the rerecord, but he volunteered to help remix it to make it even better. That does not happen very often.

800 emails, it was obviously really complicated and I’ve only scratched the surface talking about it today. That’s how it goes sometimes. But we got there in the end. And here’s the big reveal, the TVC. It’s a wonderful piece of creative animation, but I love the track as well of course. Let’s have a look.

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/