 Pow! What's up everybody? Once again is Brandon Shawn and I have to introduce you to a very special guest by the name of John C.air Reinecker. Now this woman has been in the music industry for over a decade now so obviously there's a lot of things we could talk about but she currently sits as manager of entertainment relations at tunecore. She's a well of knowledge about tunecore. She's going to dig into some of the things that I can't really answer about tunecore but of course she knows quite a bit it's going to be extremely helpful. There's a slight issue with the audio in my mic for whatever reason that wasn't detected until afterwards but you hear her audio clean and clear which is more important in this particular case. So enjoy. John C.air let's start here. How did you first get into the music industry? Yeah so I started off with ASCAP in the New York office. I was actually receptionist for their membership department and so I would say about three years in I felt like I mastered it like I knew how to answer phones and I was good and so I was like you know I really wanted to work under the urban department at ASCAP and so I just put my bid in with my senior manager at the time and one day she just came out of her office and she's just started asking all these random questions like hey do you know how to drive? I'm like yeah I know how to drive and so finally she just pulled me in her office and she said the reason why I'm asking you all these questions is because we have this position open in Atlanta. We really think you would be a great fit for it and we want to send you there to work under our rhythm and soul department out there and she was like what do you think? I'm like yeah I moved to Atlanta so and so that's really what happened is so I moved out here to Atlanta and then I just started off with their urban department out here working as a membership representative and then about two to three years into that I got promoted to associate director and ended on that title and then transitioned to tunecore in 2016. Got it. Now you know you have ASCAP being my a lot of these important organizations within music can you define what ASCAP is for a lot of the artists out there? Yeah so ASCAP is a performance rights organization and so basically they collect your public performance royalties so royalties that are earned when your song is publicly performed so whether it's on radio television via recorded concerts or on program music services that's what they specialize in. Okay so I saw somewhere that you know you did discovering of artists while you were there. What was that like were you in A&R? Like I don't understand how that works within ASCAP I didn't understand I didn't know they had discovering artists. So it's not titled as A&R like it's not a specific A&R role but you have A&R functions so you kind of function in that capacity so definitely for me as associate director I was responsible for discovering gospel talent new songwriters publishers etc and getting them signed up with ASCAP so yeah. Was there anybody really interesting that you remember and artists the favorite of yours? KCJ is one person that comes to mind amazing gospel recording artists we also had other talent that was registered with us such as Mary Mary who else ooh slipping my mind Mary Mary oh my gosh Andre Crouch who unfortunately passed away so they have some major major talent with ASCAP gospel talent and other talent across the board as well. Okay before I get into the tunecore portion of things and what you're doing right now before you were even at ASCAP did you know you wanted to be in the music industry? Oh yeah I did so I grew up in the Bronx so where it all started hip hop all started right so growing up I used to listen to funk master flex on hot 97 I was a huge flex fan still and I used to record his sets and I just always like had a box full of like tapes of recordings of his sets and I ended up falling in love with hip hop because of that I remember I was at Ry Beach Playland my family one year one summer and I heard this hip hop song and I didn't know what it was but I just fell in love with it so that kind of led me into listening to funk master flex because I wanted to try to catch this song and record it and listen to it on the way to school and stuff and so I found out that it was mob deep shook ones and so that made me fall in love with hip hop fall in love with funk flex deejaying radio music and that's you know kind of got my wheels turning to work in music. Okay did you go to college for it specifically? No funny enough I went to college for creative writing so I thought I was going to be a writer which I do dabbling but I realized that music was really the passion so I love writing but I love music just as much. Got it all right well it's okay you know a lot of people don't use their degrees right. Yeah no I use it I use it I use it from time to time. A little bit more than I do right. I'm a computer management systems just. Oh yeah so you're not using that. Not really. Okay but um so all right well when I'm thinking about tune quarter thing that you do I've seen quite a few things that you've done around town I've been to quite a few of the events I love them. Thank you. I brought my sister to one but when we think about tune quarter most people just understand that they're doing distribution right. There are so many other facets of the company but especially when it comes to what you do. Can you describe your role here on the ground in Atlanta? Yeah so manager of entertainment relations for tunecore here in Atlanta and so my job is to educate the music community here on tunecore what our services are things of that nature. We also host career development programming in the market so for instance we have a series called artist consultations which is designed to connect our artists with industry professionals to learn more about the music business how to navigate it and be successful. We also host jamcore which is designed to give our artists a platform to perform and network and we host other events as well and not just here in Atlanta we also host events in Austin and Brooklyn New Orleans and Nashville. So I know that you guys probably already sell out of this fast enough with the artist consultations but just to explain how valuable the artist consultations are to everybody like if you go these are true people within the music industry they have quite a bit of success varying levels but these people are literally just helping you out with your questions you're in a round table it's a pretty intimate setting it's not like being in a panel and you're in a big crowd like a music conference it's like maybe seven people or we have five guest speakers at a time five guest speakers you'll be at a table with them almost like speed dating maybe five minutes or something like that but you're only at the table maybe four or five other people and you're talking to this person individually so it's pretty intimate and everybody's usually pretty open to connect and give you your contact information I've met quite a few people that way just stopping by because I like to just meet people and see who's the type of person to help educate other people because they're usually helpful to you right so I want to thank you for putting those on those are just amazing I can't believe they exist honestly the first time I started going to them and if you're in Atlanta I don't know how you follow up and find out about those so yeah it totally is we do have a mailing list for the Atlanta market so if you're looking to get added to that just connecting with me is as simple as and and a most effective way to do it so happy to add anyone that wants to get at it and we can keep you posted on those things okay um do you have some kind of system because it's going to open up the flag game so let's do my social media because my email is on my profile so no I'm excited listen I want to connect with as many people as possible so yeah um so my social media is just J. Weineker and I'm gonna spell that because my last name is crazy so J R I E N E C K E R so and that's Twitter Instagram and Facebook okay and we'll make sure we put all that at the bottom of the screen for everybody um so awesome okay with that being said when it comes to tunecore what's one of the most outside of this distribution what's one of the most valuable offerings that you guys have that you feel like we wish more artists knew about absolutely so there's two major services that we definitely want to highlight our publishing administration service and then artist services so going back to publishing administration basically what that entails is that number one we help artists to register their compositions with their respective PRO so whether they're with ASCAP, BMI, CSAC will register their compositions so they no longer have to do that um we'll also collect their publisher share from their PRO and we will collect other royalties that their PRO does not collect so sometimes folks will say well hey you know I'm signed up with the PRO already is that enough and the answer is really no because you're only collecting public performance royalties from your PRO but there's other royalties as well that you're entitled to so you want to make sure that you're covered on both fronts can you break down the difference between performance royalties and mechanical royalties yes so performance royalties again they're earned when your song is publicly performed mechanical royalties are earned when either your music has been purchased physically downloaded digitally or streamed on music platforms and so that's what a publisher administrator will collect such as us we say publicly perform are you saying when i'm american idol let's say they perform my song and i get royalties for that so the mediums would be radio television that also includes internet radio recorded concerts and recorded concerts and on program music services so like music choice that's on cable television that will count as a program music service so those are the mediums and then also i wanted to go back to something i don't want to leave anything out so also with publishing administration i wanted to note that we also have sync licensing as part of that service whereby we pitch compositions form from our artists for placement in film tv video games and more so that's also included there is a one-time fee for that service and artists can register unlimited compositions so that's publishing administration and then also i mentioned artist services which simply put is a suite of tools that artists can use to really grow and manage their career got it so we do a lot exactly i know when i first went to you guys website and really did a deep dive i mean this is over a year ago now i just hadn't realized how much you guys did but i mean you know you start with one thing as a company you have to add on additional services to grow and that's what we demand a company so i get it um well when it comes to these programs like publishing or like the sync licensing and things like that now i hear about this as an artist i want to get some sync deals right and i know that the checks the sync deals could come better than sometimes just waiting for a lot of streams but when i apply my music might not necessarily be that great of quality so do you guys have any sort of process do people get accepted or denied from some of these programs that you guys offer great question so it's important to note that we don't discriminate in terms of music genre or styles so it's definitely open to any artist who wants to register for that service so on the back end is it more so you guys hold it in a data in a sort of database and you're more of a mediator you allow this access to let's say music supervisors and things like that and it's just more so it gets picked then you guys facilitate that so it's twofold so the compositions um of our publishing administration clients it does go into a music database for music supervisors to access but also our sync team is directly working with music supervisors to place music which is not always a case with every type of like uh sync licensing agency you know what i mean sometimes it's just database driven so that's definitely something that's a plus with our service okay interesting so you have actual advocates of some sort forms of music absolutely i know that takes a lot of work off the music supervisors yeah i've had some like festivals and just events when i have artists apply and having to sift through music is even if you love music it's very tedious when you're picking it not for leisure but you're picking you know you're picking it for a goal it's it could take completely different contexts okay uh well tunecore right you guys have served a lot of artists is there any particular artist story that you're aware of that's used tunecore that for whatever reason pulls that your heart strings and you just love it you you love to share that particular story in terms of the tour so there's two artists that actually come to mind chance to rapper and silento so chance to rapper distributed his grammy award-winning album coloring book through tunecore which was the first streaming only album to win a grammy so that was pretty awesome and then silento he had his uh hit single watch me whip nene distributed to tunecore and that led to award nominations and wins for him so those are two really cool stories yeah it's interesting that you guys do have the platform that i mean you could be at any level and everybody has access to basically the same services generally speaking how do you manage that as a company are there any ways that particular artists of certain caliber might get just additional services and management help no so it's not about us being like elitists or you know that vip treatment type of thing so that's not what we're that's not what we pride ourselves on so if any artist at any level is interested in using our services it's available to them for use got it okay and i want to run back because you are somebody who happened to work at ASCAP what's the difference between ASCAP and CSAC and BMI so to be fair i'm not going to get into the difference because here's the thing let's talk about the similarity so they're all performance rights organizations so that's what they have in common but to be fair i don't want to go into you know what would kind of be the difference between the two because i've never worked at BMI never worked at CSAC so i can only speak to ASCAP okay but they're but again to be honest it's something else that i've i personally feel is similar between the three of them they all have amazing pros to joining so what i always recommend is that artists do their due diligence to research each performance rights organization and by the way there is a separate one as well in the u.s which is global music rights so there are four performance rights organizations so i definitely suggest to artists to look into all four of them to understand the ins and outs and just choosing the best performance rights organization for you okay that makes sense that's fair right that's fair enough i understand i get it um well how about this then um the fact that tunecourt does these events like jamcourt and artist consultations my question is why because from my standpoint i think it's an amazing thing that they do it but it's also with the observation that i've always said other technical music companies like pro tools right people who have dolls and just some other ones they don't seem to be as involved just to my knowledge in the community i feel like those companies should have music festivals and things like that that are culturally relevant so maybe they do small events i don't know i don't have this knowledge but from what i can see you guys have some of these things that are really community outreach driven what made you guys decide to do the so at our core tunecourt exists to serve our artists and so we provide access to artists at tunecourt with tunecourt at the local level to really provide the education and support that they need to build their careers okay because i mean i'll add that it's not like you guys say hey you came to this event you have to be a tunecourt member or anything like that there's no pressure we just you know more than anything we want to provide the education you know on what we do and you make the best you know most informed decision for you now doesn't mean require artists to use any specific gender of distribution service but what do you see as the primary value of distribution just generally speaking that i have a slightly deep dive question into that afterwards can you i'm not very much yeah all right so i'm just what's the value of artists using those distribution using distribution services when you have things like soundclouds out there all right you have youtube spotify is starting to allow people to upload directly where do you see you guys are going to still remain relevant in the music distribution that's got it so the most amazing thing about our distribution model is that artists keep a hundred percent of their revenue and a hundred percent of a hundred percent of their rights and so that's something that you know artists that are signed up with us it tends to be you know customer favorite there so that's definitely something that's important to note and then also artists can distribute their music to over 150 digital music stores worldwide now are you familiar with empire yes so can you explain the difference of that type of distribution model versus you guys so to be fair again don't work for empire so i can't really i don't want to mislead anyone in that information they definitely do offer distribution but what i can say is that again you know we offer you know a hundred percent sales revenue to our artists so we don't take out any commission on sales whatsoever i mean less from a technical standpoint but more from general services because just from my knowledge like you guys are a technical platform right but it seems some of the other distribution platforms people offer distribution they have some label like aspects you know i'm asking more from that general aspect if you know what i mean does that make sense yeah it does and so of course you know we're not a label so besides digital distribution again we provide publishing administration and artist services um kind of going into artist services which kind of um again like i said it helps artists to grow and manage their careers and i think that's kind of what you're asking about um just some key highlights under that umbrella would be our youtube sound recording revenue service whereby we collect revenue owe to artists for their music being used across the platform we also have our facebook and instagram monetization so we track on those major social platforms as well so those are a couple of things that we be offered under that umbrella okay and already a value of time and i really appreciate it so one last thing i would love um just from you personally what value do you really see if you can just really explain to artists the value of what you guys offer just from the licensing the distribution so that aspect and why it's so important for artists to professionalize their back in yeah so we just want to you know drive home the importance of choosing the right distributor and again you know tunecore is really amazing because you're keeping more money in your pocket in addition we have other services as well that is going to help you to really build your career in this industry and um it just gives you the most bang for your buck personally i'd say you know so it's amazing it's amazing services awesome well i appreciate you once again john sear i will as i said before put all of her social information at the bottom of the video um as you guys have seen i've done before we'd love to have any comments that you guys have in the compensation below um ask her questions possibly i don't know if she will be able to or have the time i will have the time i have the time to answer all questions we will get those questions answered i'll even send them over to her or she might be able to get into the comments however that process is you'll find out when that time comes other than you like this video go ahead hit the like button if you like it you might as well share it if you're not subscribed you know what to do it does subscribe