IN THIS FEATURE WE FOCUS ON THE CREATIVE RIGHTS MANAGEMENT COMPANY ROUND HILL MUSIC. THE COMPANY IS DESCRIBED AS “A FULL-SERVICE, CREATIVE MUSIC COMPANY WITH A CORE FOCUS ON MUSIC PUBLISHING.” WITH OFFICES IN NASHVILLE AND NEW YORK AND EMPLOYEES ALSO IN LOS ANGELES, THEY ARE ABLE TO TAKE ON A LOT OF PARTS OF THE MUSIC PUBLISHING INDUSTRY. IN NEW YORK WE SPOKE TO MALLORY ZUMBACH WHO WORKS AS THE SENIOR DIRECTOR OF CREATIVE.
Can you give a history of how you got to your position today? Did you always want to work in the music industry?
I was in band and choir, played piano growing up and was just generally into music. Then [I] ended up going to Berklee for college to do jazz voice, but I knew when I got there that I was going to do a second major as well in addition to that. Basically I kind of narrowed it down to doing either songwriting or music business, so I took intro courses to both music business and songwriting. Funnily enough the songwriting class is what ultimately made me choose business – not in a bad way – but because first of all I realized that I was way too self critical to be a songwriter, it really stressed me out, but they split the class so half of it would be the creative part of songwriting and half would be the business part. The teacher told us a story about Paula Cole who was a Berklee graduate, and how as a recording artist she was unrecouped in her deal, but as a songwriter because of that one synchronization use that she got for the Dawson’s Creek theme song, she had made so much money through publishing that she was able to buy a house and build a studio – basically use that money to fund her career so that she could do whatever she wanted musically. She made a career out of being a songwriter, whether that be for herself or whatever else she wanted to do. He told us that story and it really got me thinking about ... “if I could help people that write songs have a career, and if I could do it by combining my love of music but then also my love of TV and film and that kind of stuff that that would be a pretty ideal fit for me.” So I decided to major in business, and by the time I was done at Berklee I knew that I wanted to be on the publishing side of the equation working with the writers and doing synch on some level.
Then I interned at an independent record label called One Little Indian Records. ... I ended up getting hired. I worked there for a little while doing a lot of digital stuff, and then also doing some in house synch – we had always used somebody outside the company before – and I basically told the head of the office that synch was where my interests lied and I wanted to try do more of it in house. I kind of cut my teeth on it. I knew I really didn’t want to be on the label side. Even at an independent label there were things that I didn’t love. I don’t love that when you’re at a label you have to focus on the release cycle, so it’s a very short period of time where something is getting all of your attention, and then when that time is up you move on and don’t really revisit the project. [I then ended up working at Warner-Chappell through connections with Neil Gillis and Michael Lau]. The funny thing was I had done film and TV stuff when I was at the label, but I had never really worked on advertising pitching before and I ended up in this department where the whole focus was advertising and video games – the two media that I hadn’t really worked on yet. It was a seriously strong education right from the get go.
Then ultimately a whole bunch of us got let go when a new person came in and I ended up moving to Colorado for a year and working at an advertising agency – kind of on the flip side of what I did. So I did license some music while I was there and I also did a whole bunch of other stuff like working with talent and general business affairs. I did that for a year and I knew by the end of the year that it wasn’t the right fit for me and I missed dealing with music every single day.
Lucky for me, this company Round Hill had opened. They were about a year down the road and had enough stuff to justify bringing in a full time synch person. I was the first person hired here to do synch and I had to do everything – pitching for everything, licensing for everything, quoting – the whole process from A to B for the first year and a half. Now the department is up to three.
I definitely relate to going into publishing because I could never write a song, but it’s great that other people can. I also like the smaller company because I’ve had five internships, and I’ve worked at Sony/ATV which was much more corporate and a bigger company.
I’m glad that I worked at a big publisher. You make a lot of great contacts for what I do. If you work at a big company like Warner Chappell or Sony/ATV or BMG where they have such large catalogs, it makes it that much easier to make connections with music supervisors and music producers at ad agencies because they kind of have to find their way to you eventually. There’s going to come a time when they want to license something in your catalog. So it’s a little easier to get your foot in the door. I think it was a great training ground to see how synch works. It’s nice to be here with a big company background because people don’t think they can mess with us per se [laughs]. If we were an indie company with a bunch of people that had never done our jobs anywhere else before, I think we would have a lot of people trying to pull the wool over our eyes. From my standpoint I’m not someone who likes the way the big companies function. I like the nimbleness of having a smaller team. I love that even though we have people scattered in three different cities we’ve all met each other in person at some point. There’s a very nice connected-ness to having a smaller team together.
What are you day-to-day tasks?
Without a doubt every day I’m inside of our pitch system which is where we keep all the music we represent. Working on song searches. It’s interesting some days are much busier than others because obviously the amount of pitches I have to work on are totally dependent on how many people are looking for music on any given day. There’s kind of two levels: we pitch stuff and people come back and say “yes, we want to use something,” but then also you just get people reaching out knowing what song they want already. ... Beyond that trying to stay in touch with all of our writers. Definitely the ones that I myself signed, but also anybody else that’s in the roster and just making sure they feel stuff is going well from the synch standpoint.
What do you think sets Round Hill apart from other publishers?
We’re an independent company, and there aren’t a lot of independent companies that are our size anymore. A lot of them are now inside of BMG and a few of the other bigger publishers. That’s part of why the timing of this company’s existence is what it is because our founder looked around and said “hey there aren’t that many publishers that are that small to medium sized indie company.” A lot of writers don’t want to be at a huge company where they’re lost in the giant, vast, unlearnable catalog. They don’t want to be on a roster that would cover this whole office, they want to be on a roster that fits on half my door. That’s why I think we’re able to then provide a level of service to our writers that goes above and beyond what other people are capable of. Even though we’re a smaller company and we have a smaller staff, we’re still able to answer emails or texts or phone calls. Neil, our president, always says in meetings that he gives out his freaking home phone number to writers. And they call him or they call his house, and he picks up and answers if there’s something going on. That’s important to us. Pretty much everybody that works here has a musical background, with the exception of maybe our CFO, I think she might be the only one. Even she is a huge music fanatic.
What’s your favorite part of your job here?
There’s a lot that I love about this job. I love when writers send us new music and we get to check it out before everybody else, there’s a lot of simple stuff like that. But I think the greatest feeling is when a music supervisor hits you up with a search and you pitch something and you end up landing that spot. You’re super excited about it because it’s a win for you, but you’re also super excited about it because it’s a win for the artist.
What do you think are some challenges facing women in the music industry?
I think when you’re at my level you don’t necessarily feel it every day, but I do think that there’s still definitely a ratio of a lot more guys to girls. Especially as stuff becomes higher up. Let’s be real, in a position that I have where a big part of the job is to go out to shows, that gets harder when you have children. It’s hard on the guys too, I will say that a lot of the men here don’t necessarily go out to shows that have kids because they do need to get home. So I don’t know that there’s an element of gender problem to that, but at the same time I will say there’s still the problems that people still face in the workplace in America in general. I do think it’s highly frustrating when Billboard comes out with its list of ‘Top 100 People’ and it’s all white men [laughs]. ‘Oh, there’s three women and two people of color.’ That’s amazing to me because, it sometimes makes me think this is why there’s a lot of very homogenous music out there because there’s a certain amount of people controlling stuff who are all kind of the same. Where is the diversity? I see a lot of women in my age range in the middle management down to assistants. You see a lot of women in that area. You don’t see as many at the top. ... We have a female CFO here, that’s pretty huge that at least one of the people in our executive management team is a woman. ... It’s kind of interesting.
Then you look at the Grammys and it’s like ‘wow,’ you do wonder if the voting behind things like that is because so many people in the music industry are dudes. I also just don’t think it really is as unbalanced as things like the Billboard 100 Most Powerful People make it look. I almost feel like that’s an even bigger exaggeration of it, so it’s like ‘why aren’t more women who are at the top getting called out for doing awesome stuff?’ I think that’s kind of the challenge, is that there has to be a perception shift because how will there be room for the women in my generation to rise up if it looks like there’s not that opportunity there? I’m not really sure how we can address it, but I definitely see that as being very obvious. It’s very obvious when you look at it, and I’m sitting over there going ‘I know a lot of great women that should be on that list! Why aren’t they?’ Is it because they’ve got their heads down, killing it at their job, and they’re not doing anything to self promote?
Do you have any advice for women looking to get into the music industry?
You have to learn how to speak up on your own behalf, and you have to learn how to do it early and often. Not in a rude or off putting way, but I think a lot of guys have no problem speaking up on their own behalf. I don’t know what that is, I don’t know if that’s just that we’re taught when we’re little to be polite little girls [laughs], and guys are taught that they run the world. Maybe we were raised in a pre-Beyonce time. I think that I’ve noticed that I have friends who I personally think are awesome people, women that I’ve worked with before, that I know are killer at their jobs, but they don’t know how to get the word out about it. I think sometimes we fall into the trap of ‘if we just go along and do a lot of really hard work, and do great things then people will notice.’ And people will notice on some level, but if you have a guy sitting beside you doing similar stuff and he’s being twice as vocal about it, twice as self promoting or aggressive about it then the person whose voice is the loudest is going to win. Obviously to a certain extent the hard work that you do gets you to where you need to be, and the beyond that you have to be smart about making people aware of it. That just means speaking up in meetings. Reminding people that you kind of know what you’re talking about. That kind of stuff makes the difference. And not being afraid to know when you’ve stayed at one place too long or to see that yes, maybe your boss at this company is great, but he’s never going to see you beyond a certain level if you don’t get out and do something else. ...
I think that as women we can kind of default to that ‘taking care of people and being too much of a people pleaser’ and that was really hard for me. I am a people pleaser. I want to make everybody happy, and I have no problem being like ‘sure, you want me to do this favor?’ but then you do start to be aware of ‘oh, I’m still doing that, and that’s why I keep being asked to do stuff like that.’ Turn and look at your male colleague because I can guarantee you when he gets to a certain level he is not doing any of that assist stuff anymore. He’s not going to schedule a meeting for somebody in the calendar. ... If you want to lead you kind of have to start leading. Where you can. The women that I have seen that have risen up, they all seem to have that in common. They have a confidence about themselves, and it’s not necessarily an arrogance. ... You have to act like you deserve it. Don’t question yourself into being timid.
This article originally appeared in the 4th issue of Songbird magazine.