Sarah Liversedge and Jake Gosling, founders of boutique publisher The Movement have highlighted the lack of proactivity in the market from numerous publishing companies in an interview with Music Week.
The Movement is a boutique publisher unconcerned with the accumulation of catalogue. The result of a collaboration between Liversedge, owner/MD of BDi music and creative director A&R for Bucks Music Group, and in-demand producer/writer Gosling, it exists purely to discover and develop songwriters and is all about creating hit makers rather than acquiring hits.
One of its major USPs is the work ethic of both Liversedge and Gosling and their commitment to uncovering new talent – an asset the pair feels is not always evident in other publishing businesses.
“We’re here all the time,” said Gosling. “If someone wants to pick up the phone to me or Sarah, we’re here. If someone wants to send a track, we’re here, and we’re responding straight away, with suggestions or introductions or just encouragement.
“In some ways I guess we’re not just publishing them, we’re managing them. But we’re obviously not getting the 20% management commission!”
Liversedge added: “That’s how I’ve always operated as a publisher. To be a proper publisher you have to be extremely proactive, because if you’re not, then you’re not properly exploiting your writer. And I think there are quite a lot of publishers who aren’t as proactive as us.
“Maybe that’s partly because we’re independent, so any decision that’s made is made by us, it’s not going through the labyrinth of a major where to get even a response is quite hard sometimes.
"It is interesting that the people we’ve signed to Bucks who have come away from major publishing deals always say ‘I actually never had a day-to-day relationship with my publisher, I didn’t know who they were; I signed on the dotted line and got my advance and that was kind of it’".
You can read the interview in full here and in the latest issue of Music Week.
