Getty Images Buys Pump Audio

Jun 20th, 2007 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Licensing

Welcome to spinme.com, where we help working musicians make more money making music. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed or our weekly newsletter. Thanks for visiting!

It’s a $42 million price tag for Pump Audio, the little independent music rights clearing house that could. I remember that, when they first launched, Pump Audio looked dangerously like one of the song sharks we often write about here. But they reached out to the independent music community and did a great job building relationships with established music supervisors and video production professionals. By providing a well-curated library of ready to license tracks for the booming cable/satellite and online video markets, they’ve been putting more than just spare change into the pockets of their musicians — the company did over $10 million worth of business last year. This, in a sector of the business where tape editors still sometimes look the other way and tell bands that “exposure is good enough.” (Exposure + $25 is even better, IMHO.)

Today, Getty Images purchased Pump Audio, which offers the chance for music licensing to make another quantum leap. Creative directors at ad agencies and television editors in post houses all rely on Getty to make stock image licensing easy and fast. By plugging Pump Audio into that established network of Getty clients, Pump Audio’s music library just became incredibly legit to a big, influential crowd. Instead of the creative industry’s best kept secret, they’re going to be way more out in the open, which means good things for artists who offer up a portion of their catalogs for sync licensing.

Congrats to the whole team at Pump Audio, who managed to push a rock uphill and keep it there.

Technorati Tags: music+business, pump+audio