2020, with all of its challenges, has been full of positives for Anara Publishing. It’s almost impossible to write a summary about this year without of course mentioning the Covid-19 pandemic. Whilst this changed many of our usual plans for the year, such as travelling to various music industry events and conferences, I am proud of how our whole team adapted so very quickly to working remotely and finding new opportunities for our songwriters. We were able to continue delivering the same level of service to our whole roster, pitching to sync opportunities and finding new, creative ways to work. I continue to be thankful that our team and roster remain in good health throughout the ongoing pandemic and hope that we can see each other again in person in the near future.
On the road, at home
Despite working from home, we were still able to attend a number of events virtually to grow our network and make new connections for our songwriters. This included AIM Sync, MIDEM digital, ADE, BUMA Music In Motion, WOMEX, A2IM Indie Week as well as a number of seminars ran by The BPI and The MPA covering sync, music publishing and market focuses on India, China and Brazil.
At the beginning of the year, before we entered into a lockdown, I was able to take a short trip to Mumbai to catch up with our artists based there and continue to develop business opportunities in India. It was during this trip where we were able to secure our first sync license in India within an advert for Pratilipi which featured the track “It Is Time” by Bombay Acoustic People.
Growing the roster
We welcomed a whopping 13 new artists to the roster in 2020 from countries such as Israel, India, Belgium, North America and the UK.
Please join us again in welcoming the following artists to the Anara Publishing family:
David Cava / Swarathma /Agat /Loren Noyman / The Penniless Wild / KAVYA / Martha Phillips / Nivid / Ramsey Noah / re:tract / Subhi / Stph.
Sync success for Swarathma
This year saw us sign off on one of our biggest sync licenses yet with “Khul Ja Re” by Swarathma being chosen by Apple for their advert to launch their online store in India being available for the very first time.
In the words of the band “Khul Ja Re is a happy song – a song about opening doors and all of one’s troubles and fears are overcome with a little help from friends.” It was a pleasure to work on this campaign alongside the Apple and Media Arts Lab team
Our first ever virtual songwriting camp
At the beginning of December, we ran our first internal songwriting camp for Anara Publishing songwriters which ran over 3 days. Due to the pandemic, this took place entirely online with the group using Zoom and Whatsapp to collaborate. In total, four songwriters took place in the session all based across different timezones – Ed Geater, Loren Noyman, Subhi Khanna and Ricardo Jacob from Los Importantes de la Noche.
The group was given a couple of briefs to choose between which were created by the Anara team based on real sync briefs we have received from our clients. The camp was a huge success and we can’t wait to share the finished track! It was nice to end the year on a positive note and we are already planning our next virtual camp for our writers in 2021.
New revenue streams
This year has been particularly challenging as musicians saw their live revenues completely stop. We are always striving to find new revenue streams for our songwriters in relation to their publishing rights, so we were pleased to be able to start delivering our catalogue to two new platforms this year.
Pretzel is a music licensing service for live streamers using platforms such as Twitch. With our catalogue being available to their users, this means that our writers are fairly compensated for the use of their music. We are really excited to be part of Pretzel’s journey especially as live streaming continues to be on the rise.
We were also pleased to start delivering our catalogue directly to LyricFind which licenses lyrics to DSP’s such as Amazon Music, Deezer, Spotify, YouTube and Google. This is another important revenue stream for songwriters, so we are pleased to be able to collect this on behalf of our roster.
On to 2021
Despite the year panning out slightly differently than we first imagined, it has been a busy and productive year for us at Anara Publishing. I hope that we will be able to see all of our writers and clients in person sometime in the near future, but we have a number of new, exciting projects in development for 2021 in the meantime.
Happy Holidays from the whole Anara Publishing team. Here’s to a positive, healthy and happy 2021!