Navigating Music Publishing, Sync Deals, and Industry Politics

Ole Dreyer

Thank you, thank you Jacob. Good to see you again.

Jakob

Good to see you again. We haven't met face to face for a couple of years, but I'm just going to briefly tell this story. I was a young songwriter that was sitting in my room writing songs and you came by my house because you and my dad used to swim together. And I showed you my music and I think I don't know if you liked it, but you think like at least this guy is interesting. And, you know, fast forward a few years, I ended up signing with your publishing company. And which is also why you're here, because you are a music publisher with a really interesting story. So thank you for introducing me to the music industry, but now we're also going to hear a bit about you. Oli, can you explain to the audience who are you?

Ole Dreyer

Yes, who am I? I'm 61 years old, that's first of all. I started in the music business by playing in punk bands in 79 and today I have my own record label and publishing company called Nordic Music NMS. I'm also holding the position of... of the leader of the board or chairperson of the MPA Denmark Music Publishers Association and I'm a member of Kodas Board. I've been at Kodas Board for 15 years now. Koda is like the Danish CMO we call them, copyright management organizations like Tono in Norway for instance, Te Osto in Finland. So these positions are extremely valuable for a publisher.

Jakob

Yeah, because so there's not a lot of people in Denmark who has more experience with publishing than you have. So that's also one of the topics we're gonna dive into today. But before we dive very deep into that topic, I just wanna hear about your story a bit more from you getting into the industry and developing because you have a really, really interesting story. But could you start from the start? You said you started in a punk band, what happened?

Ole Dreyer

Yeah, okay. I went to high school and we started a few punk bands. Like, it's really do it yourself. I couldn't play and the whole philosophy of punk was don't learn to play, just do it. So we grabbed the bass, I grabbed the bass because I've always been fascinated by bass guitars. So I grabbed the bass and we started playing. Of course, there was one guy who could play, the guitarist. He... He was actually maybe too good at that time. And we formed a few bands and I was part of the whole first wave of punk in 76, 77. And the very early days of the class, Sex Pistols, Ramones, so on, and saw them live. It was like a small, small club in Copenhagen, mostly, a little bit in Aarhus in Denmark, but 300 people, I would say, the whole punk wave was in Denmark. So it was, we knew, everybody knew each other from gigs. And if you saw a band playing and you didn't like them, you'd simply went home, said, we can do better. Yeah, why not? Let's form a band. And you talk to the guy next to you and you form the band. That's how punk bands started in Denmark. And some bands were really good.

Jakob

Okay.

Ole Dreyer

like Sots came out as Sort Sol, a couple of others were really good and they became like idols and then we in 1709 somebody put together a concert called Concert of the Moment which was meant to be a festival for punk bands in Denmark, was a guy called Eddie Harcourt who had a Danish name as well. But Eddie was like, he looked a bit like Johnny Rodden these days. And he was chaotic, but he did it. And he was in an 800 capacity venue. And it came out being an enormous event. And we all think back, that was the day that punk in fact started in Denmark being well known. It went live on radio. And we, the whole thing ended up as a three album, not a double album, but a triple album. on vinyl, obviously, in these days. And I played in two bands on the event and I entered a third band later. But the label releasing this kind of set me off like, OK, you can release records yourself, a label called Jemgads in daily terms, but they were Jemgads twice, three times, and so on. That was the label, it was all the way around. It was a Danish like stiff records in the UK. They signed some of the first punk bands. I started hanging out at the label.

Jakob

Mm.

Ole Dreyer

became friends, played in a band with one of the founders of the label. And we released a single and the band was called Gate Crashers. And we sold 1,500 copies of a 7-inch, which was really good. We could sell tickets in Copenhagen so people would see us. And I really liked that, the whole philosophy. So I formed my own label as well, no problem. At my high school, a few great bands came out of that. One of them got quite famous in these days. days called Kalashnikov. So I like the business idea more, business side of music, then I was a good bass player. I always say that I was a bass owner, not a bass player. And that kind of set off the whole philosophy. Then I started saying, oh, people are distributing records. So I started working. Working means working, no money, no salary, for a big distribution company called Samp, Danish Samp. It was a Norwegian Samp, a Swedish Samp, S-A-M, Samp. And they were kind of bunch of old hippies, but the punk... environment could have their records released because you could walk in straight from the street. These days releasing music was really difficult. Producing a record was very difficult and it costed a lot of money. So it was hard to get music released but these people could at least help us having a distribution. So it was completely do it yourself. You had to fix everything. You had to send something to Sweden to cutting room. I think they still exist to do your mastering and you would maybe eight weeks later, get a test copy of your record back. And if you liked it, they could produce it. So it could be a process of six, 12 months to make a record. And I liked the whole thing. We distributed great labels like Baker's banquet, factory with Joy Division. We had lots of great.

Jakob

Wow.

Ole Dreyer

fantastic music in the 80s, the Smith, New Order and... That whole, I liked that environment. And then I started thinking, why don't we export some music to the UK? Why don't all these people we helped play it against, they still exist, peers in Belgium. And we, I decided to go to London. So I brought some boxes of records and went to London and said, why don't you import some of our stuff? And some of the people, ah, we could buy 50 copies of that one, 50, or maybe 10 of that. It kind of, and that, I love that whole thing. could export music and I've been working with exports ever since actually so that's how it all started just to frame it

Jakob

Mm.

Jakob

Yeah. But the story that I know you the most from is your work at, I think at PDH Music, where you signed a very famous Danish band. Could you tell a bit about that?

Ole Dreyer

Yeah, I got interested into management and I worked in London. I had one band signed, could I tell that first, to Warner Brothers in London called Misbehavin, an old girl group with four beautiful, wonderful rock girls. They were wonderful people to work with and I still see them from time to time. Lisa Karple, who's a famous songwriter in Danish, who run a couple of the European song contests.

Jakob

Yeah, sure.

Jakob

Oh yeah.

Ole Dreyer

And they got signed to Warners and we got a very big advance and Jeff Lin produced a couple of tracks for them and a few others. And I was definitely, I was hit by this adventure. So I went more strong into management. I got a job at PDH, as you say, Booking Agency and Management. I wanted them to focus on management. And I looked around for new bands and I found a band called Inside the Whale with Markus Winter John, a songwriter in Denmark as well, in 91, I think. And they were to perform at a competition called Danish Championship of Rock, DM in Rock. And there was another group performing called Dissimis Lizzi and I was like blown away. They were absolutely fantastic. The same way another band called Cashmere, they were the two I really liked besides from Inside the Whale. And I signed Dissimis Lizzi on management, decided they're going to be good together with Inside the Whale. And the whole thing exploded after they won that competition. It completely took off. They were... They won the release of a four-track EP on a CD. And it got powerplayed on national radio. And it was rock. It was the Danish Nirvana, you could say. It was guitar, bass, drums. But they were not as hard or tough or foul as Nirvana.

Jakob

Hmm.

Ole Dreyer

or Pearl Jam for that sake. But they had great melodies. You could hear that they were big Beatles fans. And I got them signed to EMI Records because the singer Tim Christensen was a big Beatles fan. And he wanted to be reached on Palo phone, which EMI owned. So it was kind of no competition for all the others. They thought so, but, and Dizzy Miss Lizzy, we put together a wonderful strategy. And that's the first time I worked with a major label. And we had a strategy of keeping them a little secret, even though they sold 80,000 albums within the first couple of weeks. And we cancelled the whole tour and set up in bigger venues. And it was really, the snowball started rolling for that whole wave of great bands like Cashmere and Psyched Up Janis. A couple of other, Passion Orange.

Jakob

Mm. But you've got an amazing career and I think we needed at least two or three episodes in order to cover everything. Because I've known you for a while and it's always interesting talking to you because the amount of things you've done. So we'll skip over a few things even though they're extremely interesting. Yeah, no.

Ole Dreyer

Yeah.

Ole Dreyer

Yeah, yeah. Finally, it was very detailed, I know, but it's just to say, I love this whole idea of do it yourself. That's what I really like. And I like to walk on new ground all the time to say, okay, nobody's done this before, that sounds like an amazing idea. And I know you're similar to this, Jacob.

Jakob

Mm.

Jakob

Thanks for watching! Yeah, and I think that's also why I really consider you a mentor. So I think that's also because I do see a lot of myself in the way that you've worked. But fast forwarding quite a few years, you ended up with EMI in a publishing position. Could you explain first and foremost for everyone who doesn't know, what is publishing?

Ole Dreyer

Thank you.

Ole Dreyer

Yeah. In 1999.

Ole Dreyer

Publishing is, we get a share of the songwriter's copyrights. And we get that share for a certain period, which is in the agreement. It can be life of copyright. It can be one year. It can be anything really. But we are the partner, the business partner of the songwriter, I would say. Our role is to exploit the music, exploit the songs that the songwriters write, but also to develop the songwriters, put them in the right rooms if they like to co-write, put them in studios to write with artists. And by all means exploit the music.

Jakob

Mm.

Ole Dreyer

My former boss, Marty Banjie, who's one of the most legendary publishers in the world of music, told me once, it's a penny business, Ole. It's a penny business. It's all the little money we collect that become the big fortune. And he's completely right about that. Of course there's big chunks of money coming in, but it's about thinking how can I exploit the music all the time. Of course we can't think of a catalogue like EMI, they probably got millions of songs.

Jakob

Mm.

Ole Dreyer

You can't think of all songs at one time, but you can think of structures. There's always a gem hidden somewhere. Old publishers always got a great song in their little secret stash somewhere that hasn't been a hit yet, but we still think it's a great hit. And that's the nature of the publisher. We don't mind songs are old. We don't...

Jakob

Hmm.

Jakob

Mm.

Ole Dreyer

They don't have to be new, like on the record side or live. You need to have hits, you need to have proven hits or you need to have the right sound. The sound of today has always been the big aim for them to reach the record labels, whereby the publishers, we have the little gem of a song and it can be produced in all kinds of ways. It can be... Yeah, you know, arranged or it can have a different sound, it can be played as an electronic version, it can be played with a full orchestra or just a three-piece band acoustic versions. The same song can be great in many ways. And the publisher's role is to think like that all the time. Can we exploit this song somehow?

Jakob

Yeah. And one of the big parts of publishing, at least, the revenue is also synchronization, which is very closely tied between the intersection between publishing and master rights. Can you also, for the listeners, explain a bit what that is?

Ole Dreyer

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Synchronization is about one third of the income for publishers globally. And synchronization is music to pictures. It's synchronized with pictures. The music, that's where the name comes from. And pictures can be a movie, a theatre play, it can be an opera, it can be anything. TV series is very big for synchronisation and probably most known is the commercials. All commercials got music in them, better or better. It's worse. And synchronization is a certain market because there's a whole chain, the food chain is pretty long to get to the product. You have to know a lot of people to get a synchronization. You have to make sure that the music is right for synchronization, but what is right for synchronization as long as you don't know the product. So you have to have supervisors who explain to you. What the music is going to be like in a TV series. Okay, we're looking for 1960s style music and blah, blah. And we all know great films with great music in them. And it's my role to push that music. We got in our catalog to these people who decide what's going to be in a movie. Think of Quentin Tarantino, for instance. Music is such an important role in his movies. And that takes a good supervisor.

Jakob

Yeah, but obviously...

Ole Dreyer

But also a good publisher to suggest this art music to the supervisor. So that's synchronization. It's just another ball game. It's about knowing music, knowing your catalog.

Jakob

Yeah. Because it's a

Jakob

Yeah, because it's also a complicated industry. The way that I see it, and I might be wrong, is I sort of picture the synchronization in just your music supervision role as something in between the music industry and the film and TV and advertising industry. And it's not really the music industry exclusively. So it's kind of like it's different kind of people and it's different things. Actually, the episode that's released right before this one is with Ina Hiltif from AIMS API, who also works within music supervision.

Ole Dreyer

Yes, I know, Aina. Yes.

Jakob

Yeah, so and they also have a lot of, you know, thoughts about where this is moving. But, but obviously publishing and synchronization has changed over the years. Could you explain a bit, how was it 25 years ago and how is it now? And what's the change that's been there?

Ole Dreyer

Yeah. I don't think it changed that much because the core is the song. We need a song and there's no publisher without a song and there's no music business without the song. This is the first ride. You know, the songwriters can always say yes or no to a recording. So I think it's essential to have publishers to communicate between songwriters and the labels. And then the role has always been to exploit the music. Back in the day... Oh, this must have been 30s, 40s, 50s. There were some factories all over the world, especially in New York, especially in Nashville, where they had coal rights like we do today. They have little studios and people would go like the Brill building, which you should Google. People would go in there and... write songs together, like we do today. We have much better studios. We have the freedom of being able to write on a laptop. We can travel with our laptop and write songs. That's amazing. We don't even need to travel. We can do it online. During COVID, people could still work as songwriters. They could not work as artists because there was no venues. There was hardly impossible to travel. So publishing is still the core business is...

Ole Dreyer

Songwriting and we need to exploit that. The media has changed but that's all the platforms that's on the record side I think they changed from in my lifetime it's like from cassettes vinyl it changed to CD and now it's streaming with a little bit of vinyl but it doesn't really matter to a publisher because we have to make sure and we have to ensure that we get a cut or something is paid for the copyright.

Jakob

Hmm.

Ole Dreyer

No matter the media, if it's radio, TV, if it's records, it should be paid some money for the copyright, which means to the songwriter, and we get a share of that. So it has changed a bit, but not that much. Of course, lots of structures have changed. Synchronization is playing a bigger and bigger role. But even when I started in publishing in 99, synchronization was a big thing. It just happened in America and a little bit in the UK. And it took me a couple of years to understand what it was really. But when I got into it, we got some great things for EMI writers in Denmark, in the US. And so...

Jakob

Mm.

Ole Dreyer

It's still business. The business is still selling songs to the right artists, to the right platforms, seeking for opportunities.

Jakob

Yeah. But also the publishing world is, I would say, is a bit difficult and funny. Like we, you and me, we co-own a company together with a few other people that's called Mansic Music Group. And what I've realized over the last five years is the finances around publishing is, in my interpretation, about scale or about, you know, big success. But everything beyond that is quite difficult. So building a career as a songwriting, having medium sized songs, or even larger songs on Danish radio or Nordic radio doesn't necessarily amount to a lot or to sustain a living. So what is your take on the economics around publishing from a creator's side?

Ole Dreyer

Yeah, it's a penny business. I must stress again, it's a penny business. And you have to spread out your business to lots of different platforms. And unless you've got that wonderful number one hit worldwide that will last forever, like all the classics we know, it's a struggle.

Jakob

Yeah, okay.

Ole Dreyer

You have to fight to get the next hit. You have to fight to be better as a songwriter. You have to seek opportunities. I'm here to help the songwriters to seek opportunities. Many of the people we work with in Mantic or in NMS. They probably heard about Sync because it's been talk of town for a couple of years, but they don't really know what it is and how difficult it is to work with that. But I also, I still see big opportunities as songwriters, but it's harder and harder to export. That's one of the big changes for the past couple of years, that the export is getting harder and harder.

Jakob

What do you mean by that?

Ole Dreyer

I saw a report by Will Page and I had a discussion with him the other day at a conference that we see something he calls localization, he calls it, which means that local or domestic hits kind of... rule the charts in every country, which means that in Denmark 10 out of 10 songs, maybe 90 out of 100 of the top 100 of last year was with Danish lyrics. That is no window for an export from an import from abroad and that picture is seen all over Europe and the western world. It's different in Korea for instance, songwriters can still write songs over there, but the artists need to be local. So some writers can still export, they can write songs in the US for US hits, but make creating big global hits is very, very difficult because for some reason, maybe after the pandemic, I don't know, people are more and more looking towards the local artists with native language. That's a big change.

Jakob

Hmm.

Ole Dreyer

I don't really like it, but I'm not a nationalist as you can hear. I think... That gives a lot of opportunities for songwriters. We need to nurse them and they have to understand the market. I don't think songwriters necessarily know the market, but we are here to explain it to them. Say, okay, we can bring your songs over here. We see opportunities over here that might fit with you. And that can be in any aspect of the business. It can also be in synchronization. Like when you... I haven't heard the podcast with Ina yet, but I guess she talked a lot about... The music has to be right in his format for TV and commercials, which he's very good in exploiting music for. But I also... The part of the business I'm in, the songwriter need a name, they should be known and that's very important for me. And they should get a piece of the cake no matter what their music is used for.

Jakob

Hmm.

Jakob

Yeah.

Jakob

Hmm, that makes sense. And you know, one of the things about publishing, which is also really complex, is the collection part of it, because that must also be something you guys work on, on a board level in some of the positions you do, because the very complex infrastructure is on a global level for collecting money. Could you describe a bit what is collecting money and what are the problems that are in that?

Ole Dreyer

Yep.

Ole Dreyer

Yeah, collecting money is for every time a song is played on the radio. Radio will pay a certain amount per second. And that's an agreement they make with a PRO like Koda, PRS in the UK, BMI, ASCAP in the US, so on. And that is every time music is played on radio, on TV, in commercials, live. Every time a record is printed and that's also including printed as a stream. That is also a mechanical print for some reason that you make a file. But that is the fact. Every time they have to have a license from a PRO like Coda. And Coda will issue licensing according to how much money they make. And it's very complicated. And there's millions of different licensings. So, um...

Ole Dreyer

That's collection. And all this money goes into Coda. And somebody got to find all the money for the songwriters. Coda will do that automatically. But sometimes they make mistakes. Things got mixed up. Names are spelled wrong. Song titles are spelled wrong. There's probably millions of songs with the same title. Something like, I love you. I miss you.

Jakob

Mm.

Ole Dreyer

Something like that, Great Summer Day, whatever. And then these songs should not be mixed up when it comes to payment. I want my money. You want your money for your songs. So somebody got to check that. And that is the publisher's role. He will check Coda, see if everything is calculated correctly, see if there's income, if you, for instance, make music for a film, it's a long way from, for instance, Italy to Denmark, that you get your pay.

Jakob

Mm.

Ole Dreyer

for your 30 seconds of a song in a TV series in Italy. And the publisher will make sure you get your money. There's lots of instruments to find the money for you. Still, that is the publisher's role. But I cannot be in Italy. I cannot be in Korea all the time. So I need people to work with. So I make agreement with other publishers. We call them sub publishers. They look after my rights in their territory. I could look after other people's rights in Denmark being a sub publisher. I'm not, but other people are. And that's the whole structure of publishing. We help each other. Of course we get a revenue and we get some commission and we... We seek money all the time. It's a constant search. Whenever I talk to Koda, there's like, oh, something is missing here. And being a board member, my role is also to ensure that Koda is doing the best business for the songwriters and publishers. We get the highest tariffs from TV, radio.

Jakob

Hmm.

Ole Dreyer

So on, we issued license to new medias. It took us eight years to license YouTube. They were actually a piracy service until they were licensed. YouTube ended up doing a lockout of Danish songwriters. That's something that Koda stood up against for all the songwriters in the world, not just the Danes. It took us, I think, two years to issue a license to iTunes. You could not have iTunes in Denmark in the early days. Spotify took us more than one year because we wanted the best possible tariff for the songwriters. Other countries were eager to make, issue a license, like Sweden, for instance, because Spotify is invented over there. So that's all the collection. Imagine how much...

Jakob

Hmm.

Ole Dreyer

little details, how much data there is from a streaming service like Spotify coming in all the time. It's really little money but all in all collected together it's a lot of money and sometimes there's no way songwriters can get their own money so they need to stand together in what we call collective licensing.

Jakob

Mm.

Ole Dreyer

or collected administration like CODA. It is so essential to understand that these are instruments for the songwriters. And I could add that I'm really happy to be at CODA because they see songwriters and publishers as customers and clients. They don't see us as members, as many other societies do. CODA is a service.

Jakob

Yeah.

Jakob

Yeah.

Jakob

That makes sense.

Ole Dreyer

And that's what it is you do. Collect money the best way you can do it, at the highest tariffs, at the smallest amount of administration. That's what I want as a publisher on the songwriters we have.

Jakob

Makes sense. But there's also a lot of things happening right now and we wrote briefly about it, but there's a lot of AI happening right now and especially within the AI-generated music that's on its way. And you're also vocal about the financial aspect of that. Could you tell a bit about what are your worries about AI-generated music and how is that going to affect songwriters and publishers?

Ole Dreyer

Yeah, I must say I'm not against AI. Some people think we should stop it. No way. I was... I think AI is a great tool. We use AI in our daily business. We use it for searching for the right music for synchronization. That's very important to say. I use it for like chat, GBT for writing a text, get inspired by something. And what is wrong with it that is that they started doing a copyright infringement when they used old music to get inspired by. And you can't do that without license in my world. You simply need a license before you start building something commercial as AIS. because you have to ensure that you have a license. And it's actually not that hard to get a license because we have collective licensing like Coda. They could issue licensing for Europe, for instance. So that is wrong. They haven't got a license for the material they used. And now they say, it's really hard to reset. Yeah, but probably you have to. Yeah, that's going to be expensive. Yeah, but you made a mistake. I didn't. I was not asked, did I want my music? One of the tricky parts of AI is what about all the songwriters that have the full right in any law in the world to say no, to have their music used for a certain thing that is going to be the big, big. Question mark in AI, I think. We all heard wonderful, funny versions of music where they mixed together lyrics and vocals and musicians like the one we heard at our last seminar, Johnny Cash doing Barbie Girl, which is fantastic. But it's illegal. You can't do it without asking the people involved in writing the song, the artist, the name. You can't do that.

Ole Dreyer

in the real world and the real world is the internet, AI is part of the real world. That's the tricky part. We have to solve that and I'm sure some of the major players in the world say the three major companies, Warner's, Universal and Sony, they're working on it, I'm sure at the moment. Whether it's going to be licensing song by song, I don't think so. It will be some kind of

Jakob

Hmm.

Ole Dreyer

licensing we use for what we call background music, but it's a huge chunk of background music, I must say they used. But background music is music in shops and shopping centers and shopping malls and so on. They pay a certain amount of money, but nobody identifies each song. So the money paid out of the collective licensing, it's getting a little complicated already, I'm sorry, but it's based on other factors.

Jakob

Hmm.

Jakob

No, that's good.

Ole Dreyer

We have to give some money to the most popular songs probably. And that is the problem. And they got to be willing to pay for it. They got to be willing to pay for it. Accounting the users, accounting the use of music. Is music an important role for AI services? For some yes, for some not. And that is always, that's always a struggle. It's nothing new really.

Jakob

Mm.

Jakob

Mm.

Ole Dreyer

Think about, I mentioned YouTube, but TikTok, Twitch, we just issued a license for Twitch. There's been a big, big debate with them. I know with lots of PROs they had some trouble with Twitch because they live from donations. And musicians should get a part of the donation because music is used to create the product. But they don't see it that way. They see it as donations, tax-free black money. It's probably the American way of looking at tips. As you know, in Denmark, even tips are taxed here. So we also have to pay for the music. So, but that's the tricky part. And we are up against some of the big, big tech corporations in the world. And I know they are extremely powerful.

Jakob

Mm.

Jakob

Hmm. Yeah.

Ole Dreyer

And you have to judge every time you see a statement from any of the tech companies. It's very political and they have a goal with it. And they spent more money than the music business and film business altogether on lobbying in EU or Washington or Beijing. They spent more money on lobbying than we can never reach the amount of money they spend. So they are extremely powerful. And I don't want to stop them. I just want my fair piece of the cake really.

Jakob

That makes sense. But it also speaks into the complexity of publishing. And just in this conversation, we've covered like four or five super complex areas. And there's no school degree that's called Bachelor's in Music Publishing. How did you learn publishing and how would you recommend new people coming into publishing to learn about it?

Ole Dreyer

I'm happy to say that it's much easier today than it was before. I worked together with a guy in London who was a great publisher, who worked for a company called Inter Song, became Chapel, Inter Song became Warner Chapel, one of the great publishers in the world today. And I learned a lot from him really. He taught me what a contract was and blah. But the first time I saw a publishing contract, I didn't know anything about it. And I have to give advice to an artist and it was rather a big one in London. And I was really like, I have to read this. And I didn't understand a word of it. So I had to see lawyers. I spent a lot of money on lawyers to explain what is this about. So it's learning it the really, really hard way, I must say. But I realized that the guy I met in London, Chas, he's the guy who found U2, by the way. He produced their first two singles. He learned me a lot about the whole music business and how publishing could be used.

Jakob

Mm.

Ole Dreyer

For songwriters, but also for artists to be another tool beside of the record labels, maybe to find the right record label you could have a publisher. Same thing happened with Dissimilissi, the Danish rock band I managed. They had a release in Japan that was truly a publisher's work. He saw a window with some DJ on a radio station and he power played it. So they entered at number one in Japan. When their album was released because the publisher did their homework. So that's how I learned it really. I worked with great people and they taught me what is this about. And then I got this job at EMI and I was like, it takes, I would say it takes three to five years to become a great publisher. And the whole EMI system, there were some amazing people who I owe a lot really. And one of them is Guy Moot, who's now the CEO of Warner Brothers, Warner Chappell.

Jakob

Mm.

Ole Dreyer

Marty Benjieri mentioned before. It's like great people who took the time to explain to me how poppishing could work and I wanted the songwriters we signed to be exploited worldwide. So I had to talk to other publishers. Then you learn the lingo a bit, I would say.

Jakob

Mm.

Jakob

Is that the same way you need to do it today? Is you need to sort of work?

Ole Dreyer

Luckily, there's something called the internet, something called Google. You can actually learn a lot. You can learn, you know, I don't do lectures really, but I'm invited to do one or two hour sessions at some conservatories here at the songwriter school. I'm just planning a visit there in November.

Jakob

Yeah.

Ole Dreyer

And to tell what I do. And then lots of the younger people will do all the practicalities. How do we work with the songwriters and blah, blah. I can do like the structures of the business, but people think it's really complicated. But I see that there's always a couple who get addicted to say, hey, that's interesting. That is really interesting. And there are some books to read as well. There are some books, but the problem is often that there's a big, big... difference between US, UK and Danish law and therefore Danish publishing. So the best way to do it is get educated, not necessarily in music, I think, but you could be educated in business. You can learn some structures about how to develop a new business and then you can learn music publishing. Not easily, but more easy, I think. I'm educated as a geographer and in 85 have a bachelor and a master in communications, which is like 10 years old. But it's like...

Jakob

Yeah.

Ole Dreyer

You have to do your homework and it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of reading and understanding, talking to people, talk to other publishers. And I'm happy that young people call me when they study business, when they study at conservatories, they study music management. They give me a call. They come, hey, could you spend two hours, learn me a little bit about this? And I'm happy to do so. It's not overwhelming. But I think that's the way to do it.

Jakob

Mm.

Ole Dreyer

You know, you work for three months, six months as a helping hand in a publishing company. That's how I learned the music business. It's, that's how you learn the music business probably. It's hard work.

Jakob

That's how I learned it. There's really no direct way to study it, but I also, you know, I work with you and NMS as an intern for some time and then I sort of did my own projects while also interning. It was a really weird intern position because it wasn't really, but I helped out and learned a lot from it.

Ole Dreyer

No, but internships are a great way to learn, I think.

Jakob

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think it's the best way but only you've you have had a really interesting career. And I'll just touch points on a few of them. Like you've started a very legendary venue in Copenhagen called host you've had a restaurant. There's so many things you've done. Are you are you gonna jump on more projects in the future?

Ole Dreyer

Yeah.

Ole Dreyer

I have no plans really, but you never know. I'm always open for adventure really. I am 61 years old and retirement for some reason I can see it's going to happen within the next 10 years. I never thought about it really, but so... But I still love both having my own company. I enjoy having a lot of influence in politics. I think that's really interesting. And in politics, we have to get some structures for AI to develop. But also in my own business, we have to develop the business so it can still be a business in the world of AI, because there's no doubt that it's going to happen. The customers want it, so it's going to happen.

Jakob

Yeah.

Jakob

Yeah.

Ole Dreyer

And so I don't want to, I don't have any ideas of starting a new company or something. No, no way. Rather not really.

Jakob

No, but there's a lot of challenges in the music industry that you'll probably fight over the next 10 years. Great, Olle, this was a really good talk and thank you for sharing a bit about your story and some touching base on most like high level aspects of publishing. It's a topic that I'm very passionate about.

Ole Dreyer

Yes.

Jakob

Just because I really see a lot of things happening there in the future. When it comes to collection and emerging markets, it's like the same with the whole music industry. It's a part that's growing and becoming more lucrative. Great. Thank you all. I really, really hope we can spend some time together at one point. Again, as I said at the start,

Ole Dreyer

Yeah.

Ole Dreyer

Absolutely.

Ole Dreyer

Look forward to see you again.

Jakob

Yes, as I said in the start, you have been my entry into the music industry. And I have promised you once, and I'm trying to keep it. No, I promised you once that one day I will make you rich. That's my promise to you when you introduce me to the music industry. I haven't figured out how yet, but we've...

Ole Dreyer

I didn't mention Jakob, but please.

Ole Dreyer

Thank you.

Ole Dreyer

No, but I'm open for business. And I can move to Norway, no problem.

Jakob

Okay, good. We'll figure out how it goes, but let's see. Let's see. But thank you so much, it's been a pleasure talking to you and thank you for being a part of Sound Connections.

Ole Dreyer

To.

Ole Dreyer

Likewise, great seeing you again.

Jakob

Cool, so stop right here.