Music Business Journal

Marc Senasac is Senior Music Engineer at Sony Computer Entertainment. He has worked on Disney productions, engineered the critically acclaimed “Uncharted 2,” and recorded the thrash metal band Exodus. He is currently working with the Playstation music team on ”Infamous 2”, a large collaborative project involving funk band Galactic, drummer Brian “Brain” Mantia,  Jim Dooley, and music director Jonathan Mayer.

MBJ:  What do engineers need to know to keep pace with technology?

Marc Senasac:  Some fundamentals never change, i.e. the speed of sound, how sound travels, or how electricity works.  It also helps to keep an open mind. Movies and games are glamorous, but there are also podcasts, regular broadcasts, and news programs to mix for. Look at the production value of sports television.  Every time I watch a sports game I am blown away by all the transitions and segues.  Do not limit yourself by making your target market too small.

MBJ:  What other traits are necessary for an audio engineer today? 

MS:  Music engineering, which is mostly what I do, is subject to trends, be they in games, CDs, or records. What sounds cool today, and what people want in their music production, is not what they wanted fifteen years ago. Being flexible and understanding this is very valuable.

MBJ: I understand that the music for Playstation’s “Infamous 2” is dissonant and heavily layered. Can you tell us more about it? 

MS: I’m a facilitator of the project.   Jim Dooley, for instance, would compose something, ship it to us, we’d mix it, and then we’d send it out to “Brain” or Galactic.  There’s been a huge exchange of creativity.   The music’s role is mostly to provide a structure for collaboration to happen.  Not all of it was in person- some of it was Galactic recording in their studio in New Orleans, and some of it was us recording with a couple guys here in San Francisco, and Jim is in Los Angeles.  So there is some travel, some stuff recorded live, and some virtual stuff.

I think this is one of the examples of a new product that didn’t really exist a while ago.  They call it a game, but it’s really an adaptive movie/entertainment experience that reacts to what you do.  It’s like a movie in so many ways, but you can control what you’re watching.  The scores in games like this, or Uncharted 2, or God of War 3, have a production value comparable to a film.

We do record differently because in film, it’s a static medium, so they can get away with recording the whole orchestra only once, or they record the orchestra in passes.  But the end result, the end target, is hearing the music all at once.   In our case, we record the orchestra or other in layers, and then the game engine mixes that in real time. If there’s a high-tension moment in the game, like a fire fight, we can tell the game engine to bring in the brass.  It makes things very complex.  For me it’s very exciting and more interesting.  There’s much more going on than a static medium, and we have to account for many events when we’re recording .We have to ask, “Hey what will this sound like when it’s played by itself?  Will it sound cool?”  In a 24 track tape or some kind of multi track piece, when you solo a track it may or may not sound interesting. In our case, we’re trying to create something that is always interesting when taken apart.

MBJ:  In February, history was made when “Baba Yetu”,  a piece by Christopher Tin from the game ‘Civilization IV’, won a Grammy for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying  Vocalists. What is the significance of the event?

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Jim Vellutato is Vice President of A&R for Sony/ATV Music Publishing in Los Angeles. He is one of the most recognized executives in the field. Vellutato was involved in placing and releasing songs for many hit artists, including Pink, Carrie Underwood, David Cook, Josh Groban, Fergie, Leona Lewis, JLS, the Black Eyed Peas, Fantasia, and Daughtry. Under Vellutato, and in part because of him, well over 75 million albums have been sold worldwide. His current roster of hit songwriters is made up of J.R. Rotem, John Shanks, Walter Afanasieff, Rune Westberg, Zac Maloy, Evan Bogart, Chantal Kreviazuk & Raine Maida, Midi Mafia, Louis Biancaniello and Billy Mann.

MBJ: Where did you start?

Jim Vellutato: I graduated from UCLA, and then worked in the tape room at Chappell Music.  This was 1984 and I have been in the music business ever since.

MBJ: What is a typical day of a music publisher like?

JV: Music is really a worldwide industry, and I see this day to day. In the morning

I make calls to New York, Nashville and London and catch up on current news with Billboard and other media. My job is all about connecting people, so I spend a lot of time calling A&R personnel and managers to see what songs their acts are looking for.  Then I speak with songwriters, and find out their availability. After a few days of going back and forth (where, when, and how much it will it cost), I look for a budget approval. I set up sessions, check that they run as scheduled, and that people are showing up on time. I spend most of my time putting what I feel is the best combination of artists, writers and producers together.  READ MORE

by Ben Scudder

Services like Rhapsody charge a monthly subscription fee to grant users, with browsers or mobile apps, access to an extensive music catalogue. The content is stored on a server somewhere other than the user’s hard drive (i.e. “the cloud”). There is no need to safe-keep a personal music collection or move it around devices.  MOG is an example of a pioneering cloud-based service, and we wanted to know more. Anu Kirk, is the Lead Product Manager of Mobile Content.

MBJ:  What is MOG doing to acquire licenses/content?  Where do you feel MOG has the most potential for growth in terms of its catalogue?

Anu Kirk:  MOG uses a company called MediaNet as the provider for our catalogue.  We also have our own in-house licensing team of people with some legal background, some label background, and we proactively reach out to specific labels that we want to make sure that we have on board. This process is based on feedback from our users, who request such content, but also on our knowledge of the industry and our desire to bring in, so to speak, cool labels.  We reach out and ask these labels if they’d like to be part of MOG.  We have contracts, or terms that we offer them, we send out an agreement, and hope that they sign.

MBJ:  Do you find that MOG has been reaching out to smaller indie labels lately, or is MOG still focused on trying to make deals with larger independent or major record labels?

AK:  Well, I feel that ‘indie label’ is sort of a vague term.  Fifteen years ago, an indie label would have been something like Amphetamine Reptile, or something like SST [Records].  But today, an indie label can literally be a guy that’s made a couple of records on his computer.  I definitely think there’s a difference between that and a company that has been around for a couple of years with a sizable catalogue and sales of physical product.  And sometimes, if it’s a label that people have heard of in spite of the tiny genre it serves, we go after it. But many smaller labels that are genre specific, or even just digital, come to us directly because they’ve heard about the service and they want to make sure their music is placed. Many are happy to go through an aggregator like IODA, CD Baby, Tunecore, or a service like that.  One of the interesting things about being a record label today is that it is  not all that different from what running a label was like back in the days of physical media.  Think about what you’re trying to do at a label: you’re trying to sell your product.  In the old days, you would be on the phone with distributors trying to make sure that your record was at Tower Records,  the Virgin Megastore, Sam Goody, and the warehouse. Now you make sure that you’re on MOG, iTunes, Rhapsody, and Rdio.  The label has some interest in getting their stuff to us as well. Continue Reading full interview…