What does iV Music Group do exactly?
“Audio Branding and anything that touches that brand sonically. The core of what we do is look into how we can support the brand’s IDENTITY with the use of sound.” The iV Music Group specializes in original music, re-records, post scores, music licensing, sound design, music supervision, audio post and branded content strategies.
- Your company started out doing jingles (Whistler’s Music). Since then, how has your company evolved, pivoted, and reset?
In 2005, Steve took over as CEO of iV Music Group. “I felt like iV’s brand had been pretty diluted because it was doing a lot of different things; it was a record label, management company, promotion company, IT division. So when I took over the company, I basically divested it of everything and brought it back to its core competency, which I felt was audio relationship with commercials. And it was from that, that I made the decision to position the company as an audio branding company.”
- Advantages/Disadvantages of working out of Nashville
When Steve took over iV Group, he realized that for what they do, Nashville is an amazing location to do it. “The talent pool that’s here, the individuals to draw from, from a lot of different communities, not just the music community, that could help strategically. And yet, I also found that there’s a real disadvantage in Nashville, in terms of the perception from the major markets (Los Angeles, New York, Chicago). It seemed that no matter you played for them, there was still the perception that they would call if they needed a banjo. So I needed to develop a strategy that would resolve that problem. We needed to change that conversation to where Nashville is seen as a real destination.”
- What was the next step into expanding the perception of Nashville as a real music destination?
The narrow perception of Nashville as a real music destination and audio branding outlet forced Steve to re-think his approach and expand his resources globally. “That was in part of what drove my decision to go to Europe to refrain the conversation. I felt like I could do it there because I had more of an opportunity to relate Nashville as a brand to people who didn’t know a lot about it.”
- How did iV2 come to fruition, and why in Berlin, Germany?
“The opportunity presented itself that fell in line with the strategy. The strategy was to go to Europe to see if I could make some connections with global agencies there and meet less resistance in Europe that I was having in the states. I made some trips to London, and in the process, I met a fellow named Uli Reese, who at the time, had just signed a deal at Peer Music in Hamburg, Germany. We met and became friends. Uli’s background was working in the commercial market in Germany. It became very clear to me that Germany, because of it’s economic strength and central European location, was a hub where a lot of the European businesses were running through the agencies (Hamburg, Frankfort, Berlin). We worked up the pitch, the narrative about Nashville, and in September of 2008, we did our first run of agency meetings in Germany together. It was amazing! The story perked everyone’s interest. They thought it was cool that we from Nashville and not New York. We wound up with the door opening and got our first job, which led to more jobs. People were blown away with the quality of the music and brand strategy that no one else seemed to be doing for them.” In 2009, things started to blow up for iV Music Group and they realized that they needed to incorporate as a German entity. This led to a grueling process of creating iV2 and creating the company and new marketplace in Berlin, Germany.
- Who are your customers?
There are 2 levels of customers for iV Music Group: 1. The brand’s themselves. “Ultimately, they are the one’s paying the bills for what we do.” 2. Advertising Agencies. “Typically when I am pitching for business, I’m not going to directly to brands. I’m going to the advertising agencies to have them hire us with their brands. The interesting thing happening as audio branding is developing, particularly in Europe, is that there are more opportunities to work directly with brands. So hopefully what we’re going to see happening for us is more opportunities to work directly with brands or brand designers. We don’t want to take an adversarial stand to our advertising agencies because they are really important partners and we think they should be part of the conversation, but I think more and more we are going to see opportunities open up where brands will be working directly with us to develop things for them.”
- Tell me more about this new audio branding initiative that you are currently developing.
I spoke about his online blog on www.ivgroup.cc. “That blog, at the moment, is more of a news feed. So part of the new initiative is really going to be to create a blog that’s much more of a two way street. Much more interactive. We are going to focus on specific issues about audio branding, use of audio in the marketplace, research studies, the best practices, controversial issues. The hope is that this new blog will be a place where folks can see it as a community to talk about audio branding and audio brand initiatives. Part of that will be interviews that we will be doing with top thinkers globally in the advertisement market. Right now we have about 20 interviews that we will be using in this blog and hopefully might turn into a book at some point. That will launch a Facebook and Twitter page for us. The new blog initiative is about focusing things away from just a 30 second piece of music in a commercial, and going towards ‘Why would you choose THAT particular piece of music?’ ‘What are issues around that?’ ‘How can we educate agencies and brands and change the conversation about that?”
- I read that you and your company have done some work with FlickerLab and real time animation. How do you think real time animation can benefit/hinder how advertisement branding functions?
“The opportunity for real time animation is one that’s sheer time and economics. The advantage is the bulk of your costs for real time animation are up front. If you’re doing something that’s series driven, or a longer-term character that you’re using for a brand, you can get to the point where your animations costs are virtually zero. The other advantage for brand is if you have an animated character, you can actually make your character have live performances that don’t have to be scripted and totally interact with someone in the audience because you have a puppeteer behind the scenes that’s controlling the character. So it gives you a lot more flexibility. It’s an amazing piece of technology. The folks at FlickerLab are great and we’re happy to work with them with a lot of the audio projects that they do.”
- Compared to the competitive brand companies, what makes you and the iV Music Group different?
“When I do pitches at agencies for new business, one of things I tell them is at the end of the day, you’re not going to come to iV simply for the audio that we do. One of the most important things is the experience for our clients. When I pitch iV, I actually pitch Nashville. The Nashville brand for to me is one of community and collaboration and I think that’s what makes this town very unique. The way the town can work together, very quickly, and work at a price point that’s affordable for a lot of clients. Those are things that differentiate us as a company. At the end of the day, the clients that we have, that aren’t just clients, but our fans, will tell you that the experience of working with us is… it’s easy. We come to the table thinking not as music people, but as brand people, as marketers. We speak their language, first and foremost. We have an uncanny ability to get inside their head to figure out what it is they are trying to tell us they want, particularly when it comes to sound.” When talking about the ability to understand what a certain mood means in relationship to a brand that their clients are attempting to represent. “I think we do that as well, if not better, than 99% of the companies out there.”
- What has been a BIG learning event for you at iV?
“Certainly as every other industry these days, technology has had a BIG impact. Because of technology, it has become easier for everyone to create music. As a result of that, you’ll find companies that are more interested in crowd sourcing with what they’re looking for in an advertisement. All of these things have cut into market share and that’s created chaos that we have to figure out how to navigate. For me personally, I love chaos! Reaction to chaos tends to be one of fighting against it or running away from it. Neither one of those things provides you the opportunity to be creative. That, for me, is the ultimate purpose of chaos. I’ll go as far to say that creative and chaos are so inherently bound that they both work hand in hand. The upset in the marketplace for us has forced us to try and look at our business model and how we generate revenues, which is moving us away from simply producing this soundtrack or this voice-over or this commercial spot, and moving towards positioning ourselves as strategists and experts and selling this strategy as a piece of why you would come to us. It’s really been that chaos that technology has forced us to rethink the business model. The flip side is that technology has given us amazing opportunities. “
- What do you see on the horizon for Nashville?
“I have a lot of hope but I also have a lot of concern. I’ve been in Nashville since 1986, so I have seen a lot of changes and I have also seen a lot of discussions about changes that have never happened. I’m extremely encouraged right now that the mayor has a new music council and one of the things they are looking at specifically is branding and the music city brand. With the chaos in marketplace, music business has changed. We are in music business 2.0 right now. Music business 3.0 is where we need to be thinking. The chaos has decimated the traditional models. Nashville has such a great infrastructure of talent. If we would move outside the traditional models and start bringing in the tech community, the education community, and looking for ways to expand what’s happened on Music Row into metro Nashville as a whole. I think we can position ourselves as a center for the music business model. BUT, with all of that hope, the danger is that we will continue to revert back to what we know. As long as we think of music city as a genre rather as culture, we have a problem. I think Nashville has the potential to be an amazing place to draw in a lot of creativity, not just musically, but in a lot of different fields. But for that to happen, we are really going to have to focus on creating even more diversity and figuring out ways to integrate diversity into a whole communication model.”
