[Fmpro] ASCAP Cues and their great events

[Marinho Nobre]

In 2005 I went into ASCAP's Composer Expo out in LA. Very excited and very willing to meet and talk to the likes of Hans Zimmer and Graeme Revell (which I did ), one of the things that more called to my attention and frequently disturbed me to the point of losing my concentration on whatever panel was taking place, was the amount of teenagers with purple and green hair holding on to demos and sticking to everyone in charge like they were crazy glue. 

Since I am also a songwriter and also played in rock bands for a considerable chunk of my life, I was not upset, but actually confused. What could they possibly be doing at a "Composer Expo" ?  

After a while, I almost sold myself on "song placement" and figured that would probably be all. Then I started talking to some of them. What the first one told me was, " We came to talk to his guy, he said he wants to use our album for the entire score of an indie movie."  Then the second tells me: " We also wanted to come here and learn how to score by hanging out with other composers." 

By that second, everything was very clear. There was a starting trend. A trend set for convenience and bigger income of songwriters by publishers, and obviously by the organizers of the event, ASCAP. The topic of the whole event was already split 70/30 and while there was a thing or two about actual scoring and a couple of pretty nice panels, most of it (for my utter desperation after dashing out $2000 for that trip) was about song placement and kids cornering guest music supervisors against the walls. That same event in the following year was re-introduced with a new face and was called  "I Create Music Expo" and had about 90% of the panels relating to songs, songwiters and whatever conveniences offered by ASCAP would work for their careers. 

I think what we have here is an increasingly bigger number of music houses, publishers and other entities trying to make all of it into one thing. "The one stop jukebox for all modern filmmaker's musical needs" 

The only detail is that we might not be a part of it, since actions like the above would place us indefinetly in the category of "underworld of music" a.k.a. "scavengers of post".

Scary huh ?.. 


Marinho Nobre
Music for Motion Picture
http://www.marinhonobre.com
score at marinhonobre.com
Voice 347-424-4985  Fax - (718) 210-3151

ASCAP has a serious agenda of shoehorning songwriters into
scoring gigs