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intellectual property

When deadmau5 got the masters of four of his biggest albums back from Ultra Records last June, his team had a plan to capitalize on the newly acquired intellectual property.  
The first move was the release of a remix of the 2009 deadmau5 and Kaskade classic “I Remember” by current house phenom John Summit. After that dropped last July, the entire deadmau5 catalog saw a 45% streaming bump, the producer’s team reports. Additional remixes from these albums followed, wiht each LP subsequently seeing a 48% to 82% streaming increase. Vinyl reissues of the albums sold 25,000 units.  

“All for albums that are over ten years old,” says deadmau5’s longtime manager Dean Wilson. 

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With The Circuit Group — the company launched last year by Wilson and his wife/business partner Jessica Wilson along with Brett Fischer, David Gray and Harvey Tadman — the mission is to create this type of increasingly valuable IP for electronic artists at all levels, and in so doing help them create and maintain independence.  

Upon launching last October, the company – which brought together members of management companies Seven20 and Ayita — outlined plans to acquire 50% ownership in artists’ IP portfolios and partner with them to build opportunities across verticals while also offering traditional artist management.

Now, The Circuit Group — which has offices in L.A., the United Kingdom and Miami — is expanding as it works to fulfill that mission, announcing seven key hires on Wednesday (June 12). They include James Sutcliffe, who joins as chief strategy officer, bringing years of leadership experience at companies including Ministry of Sound and LIVENow; and Simon Birkumshaw was hired as director of operations of label services, having formerly served in A&R roles at companies including LabelWorx and Defected Records.  

Elsewhere, Ian Massoth, who helped launch projects including Chris Lake’s Black Book Records and Fisher’s Catch & Release label and event concept, joins as director of A&R of label services. Shivani Phull is the company’s new CFO advisor, Bianca Price joins as social media manager, Nick Sung is the new director of marketing and Charlie Tadman was hired as director of A&R. Together, the group of new hires have served in roles at companies including PIXELYNX, Spotify, various Insomniac Events properties and a variety of high-profile artist projects.  

The company’s artist roster currently features more than 40 acts, including original clients like Chris Lake and Fisher, whose collaborative project, Under Construction, drew 12,000 people to a party on Hollywood Boulevard last October. (Dean Wilson says such events “are all done independently” under The Circuit Group umbrella in conjunction with various partners.)

Recently signed clients include longstanding electronic singer/producer Anabel Englund, ascending electronic act Clonee, and producer and vocalist Aluna, who will work with The Circuit Group to grow the events side of her Noir Fever label. While artists work with the company in varying capacities across publishing, management and development, Jessica Wilson says the focus is “all driven to the IP at the end of the day.” 

“It’s finding and building opportunities outside the core business of making a record then putting a pair of headphones on and some USB sticks in and playing to fans,” adds Dean Wilson. “What we’re trying to show with The Circuit Group is that we can help artists grow their business better than anybody else, from the label, to publishing, merchandise business, tech ventures, touring IP and so on.”  

The Wilsons say it’s especially crucial for artists to identify such business opportunities given how low, and volatile, streaming rates are.  

“Even if they’re in a current deal or not, all of these artists want to get involved in building their own indie brand,” says Jessica Wilson. “They don’t want to be a so-and-so label artist. They want to be synonymous with their own label, and we’ve put the right people in the right places to help artists build their own brands, make their own output and do it as they want to do it.” 

Below, Dean and Jessica Wilson talk to Billboard about expanding the company, creating independence for artists and electronic music’s growing value in the marketplace.

So an emerging artist signs with the company, then what happens? 

Dean: It’s building a plan. In dance, you can be making records at home, then all the sudden one of them starts to get traction and suddenly they’ve got an agent and shows and are making real money.  

We’ve all been there in this company, and we all made the decisions that, at that point, we were told to make, which was that you signed to a record label, got an agent and signed publishing. Those label and publishing deals paid you some money, so you’re selling your rights at that point. No one’s thinking 10 or 15 years down the road. They’re thinking, “I’m broke right now, so I need to do these deals.” And the manager, who’s also often a friend of the artist, is broke too, so he or she is happy to do the deals. 

That’s not bad. We’ve all done those deals. What we want to impart is our knowledge of, “You don’t need to do those without the right infrastructure and the right team. You can do all of that and hang on and control your rights.” 

How? 

Dean: The first step is sitting down and planning with each artist what they want to do and showing them how we did things for [a variety] of artists. Each artist has a different brand and a slightly different mindset and might not want to do something a certain way. It’s about how far down the road you can look and work your way back from. That’s hard to do without a team infrastructure and people who’ve been there before who can help and advise, because otherwise you’re going to continue doing those short-term things that you have to do to pay the bills. 

Jessica: We’re geared up and ready to go. We have a distribution deal we’ve put in place. We’ve got a beautiful backend for rights that is going to make it easy for every label to plug into and automatically get everything uploaded… The excitement for us right now is that we’ve hired all of these key people to actually make it work. You’ve got deadmau5 bringing in great talent, you’ve got Chris [Lake] bringing in great talent. You’ve got people attracted to Fisher and Cloonee. All these people want to come and work with us, and we’re giving them a direct output line to go and do this themselves instead of helping to rely on a major. 

How fundamental has deadmau5’s career as an independent artist been as a model for what you’re doing with The Circuit Group? 

Dean: We’ve learned from the stuff that hasn’t worked more so than the stuff that did. He was the first electronic act to ever do a 360 deal when he was with EMI/Virgin. It was a complete and utter f—ing disaster. I put this beautiful business plan together and showed it to them, and within the first couple of months I’d gone, “Oh my god. They don’t get it.”  

I remember talking to the chairwoman at the time and saying, “If we own the business together and we owned an ice cream shop and were 50/50 partners, and I had six people working full time and you had no one working full time, do you think that would be an equal partnership that would work?” She said no, and I said, “Well that’s how you’re behaving. You’ve done a deal for all the rights, but all you talk about is when the next record is coming.” It was that dawn of that moment of “Okay, we’ve got to work out how to do this independently.” 

In terms of intellectual property, are there opportunities that are unique to electronic music?  

Dean: In electronic music we’re really lucky because we do remixes and stem packs and remix competitions. And you can move quickly because it’s not like pop or country where there’s 20 writers on a record. And [The Circuit Group] can do all of these things because we’re in control of it all.  

So you can jumpstart pre-existing material with strategic moments like John Summit’s “I Remember” remix? 

Dean: It’s exactly that. That’s the opportunity in dance. We’re still a baby genre when it comes to real business. Yes, dance has been around since the early ‘90s, but it wasn’t a real business. It’s really only been 10 or 15 years that it’s been a multibillion-dollar business.  

So now you have all this material that’s now 15 or 20 years old. Look at how many “Sandstorm” remixes you’ve heard. It’s still as big now as it was when it first came out, maybe even bigger. Those classic dance records just keep getting remade and resampled, and they live on forever and actually keep making more money. So, you’re creating more value and more IP on top of the original. The material has two value streams that we in the dance world can really only do at the speed that we do it, because of the way it’s made.  

How do you see The Circuit Group continuing to grow? 

Dean: It’s important to make it clear that we’re not trying to grow a massive management company, we’re trying to grow a business that is IP-centric and that supplies all the services as a flywheel around it. We don’t want 100 acts. We’re not trying to build Red Light. We want to get it right with the people we’re invested in and who we can see growing into the next Chris Lake or the next Fisher.  

Jessica: Or the next Aluna. And to reiterate what Dean said, scaling management is not an easy task and not something we want to do in that regard. We are laser-focused on IP and on building those brands.

The digital age has democratized both the production and the distribution of music, but getting paid for it, especially on the songwriting side, is still confusing. Some of the information gets complicated – neighboring rights don’t actually involve the rights of neighbors, for example – and much of it is biased.

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Now the Music Rights Awareness Foundation, a Sweden-based nonprofit founded by ABBA songwriter Björn Ulvaeus, producer-songwriter Max Martin and songwriter Niclas Molinder, has teamed up with WIPO – the World Intellectual Property Organization, which operates as part of the United Nations – have teamed up to create CLIP (“Creators Learn Intellectual Property”) a website that will educate songwriters.

“I know firsthand how important it is for creators to know and manage their IP rights,” Ulvaeus said in the announcement. “Today, it is an essential foundation for a successful career in the music industry.” 

Music Rights Awareness launched years ago, with the mission to empower songwriters with knowledge about the business. But CLIP, which offers an array of information and resources, took some time. “We started this work four years ago but the actual platform took a bit over a year,” Molinder told Billboard. “The audience is music creators around the world, but the plan is to grow it to creators in other areas.” 

Billed as offering “everything you need to know about your rights as a creator” and introduced by Ulvaeus in a video, the site offers explanations of rights that are accessible as well as smart. The resources on songwriting, for example, include information about composers, topliners, arrangers, as well as explanations of their rights and how they interact.  

The site is in English, but there are also plans to translate it into the five other official UN languages – Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish.  

WIPO plays a largely unseen but important role in regulating patents, trademarks and copyrights – although mostly as a place where treaties can be negotiated, rather than as a top-down lawmaker. It often plays a role in explaining intellectual property but rarely in such an accessible way.

“Creators draw on their talent and artistic vision to give us music, art, song and dance,” said WIPO director general Daren Tang in the announcement. “We must do what we can to ensure they are recognized and fairly rewarded, so that they can thrive in their work and contributions to society.” 

Ulvaeus, Martin and Molinder are also behind the app Sessions Studio, free software that allows music creators to assign and track songwriting credits to make sure they get paid. But CLIP and the Music Rights Awareness Foundation operate separately. 

On Monday (May 8), President Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate Deborah Robinson as the next Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC). The role was formed in 2008 as part of the Executive Office of the President and advises the president on U.S. intellectual property strategy.

Robinson most recently served as the head of intellectual property enforcement at Paramount Global (formerly ViacomCBS), but before that, she worked at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for five years, protecting music rights. She also spent seven years as an assistant district attorney for Philadelphia.

Along with her strong history of employment in the entertainment business, Robinson serves as co-chair of the diversity committee of the IP section of the New York State Bar Association and as a Board Member of Aequitas, a non-profit focused on access and quality of justice in cases of human trafficking and gender-based violence.

Robinson would replace Vishal Amin, who was confirmed as IPEC under President Donald Trump and left the post in 2021. Since then, the position has been vacant, something pointed out by Congressman Adam Schiff and Mark Cohen — a distinguished senior fellow and director of Asia IP Project, Berkeley Center for Law and Technology — in a recent meeting for the Congressional subcommittee on courts, intellectual property, and the internet.

“RIAA applauds President Biden’s nomination of Deborah Robinson to serve as Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator,” said RIAA chairman/CEO Mitch Glazier in a statement. “Deborah is deeply qualified to serve our nation as IPEC and will bring unmatched policy depth and appreciation for the economic and cultural importance of strong IP enforcement to this vital role. Deborah will be an extremely welcome and effective addition to the Executive Office of the President, filling a position that has been vacant for the past three years and leading an exceptional team. We thank President Biden for selecting such an outstanding nominee to advance smart, pro-growth IP policies and enforcement practices around the world.”

“We welcome the nomination of Deborah Robinson to serve as the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC),” added NMPA president/CEO David Israelite. “Ms. Robinson brings incredible experience and insight to the role which serves an important function to spotlight and safeguard creator’s work across the globe. In addition to an extensive career as a prosecutor, she has held senior positions specifically in the field of music and copyright enforcement. We look forward to engaging with Ms. Robinson and supporting her important work once confirmed.”