 Welcome to the Musicals League. And welcome to our second panel event that we posted. Last year we hosted hashtag rights week, which was about the intellectual property and artist rights. And during one of those panels, the conversation about musicals came up and we decided the next thing has to be hashtag musicals. So here we are, so welcome. Tonight is promotion and protection of musical theater and you can find the rest of the panel topics on the back of your program when you're seeing me walk in. I just want to point out that all of them are hosted here except the panel that's on Thursday. But unfortunately, that if you have not gotten a confirmation for the reservation, we are full right now, but if you want to email me at amonysatsamuelfrench.com, I will put you on the wait list. And you can also tune in via HalStream. I said that like you just said that earlier. Like stream by HalRound. So shout out to HalRound. They're live from right now, so hi everybody. Hi. We are also live tweeting. This lovely lady in the front, Courtney, is live tweeting. Right now. Right now. And, right, exactly. Well, which please at this point, put your phone on silent, but we do encourage you to join the conversation by following Mr. Samuel French and hashtag musicals week. So we encourage silent tweeting, but not silent live texting and Facebook checking and all of those things. So just tweeting only, please. I'll be in the back watching. Oh, I also want to talk about Thursday, and we're so excited. It's our first Samuel French produced concert at 54 Below. Yay. That has been for the Dramatist Skilled Fund. And yeah, it's an awesome project. We are featuring some of our favorite composing lyricists from our catalog. Two of them you will see up here tonight. And we also have Charles Strauss will be there, Emily Skeggs from Fun Home, Amanda Green is hosting for us, J. Armstrong's performing, and Armstrong Johnson. Amazing, amazing people. Check out the lineup at 54 Below.com. And if you look in the back, too, there's a discount code that says French 25 for 25% off. But because you guys are good friends with us and your family now, you're here at Simfrench, we want to present you a 35% discount, which French with French 35 as the discount code. So go on 54 Below, buy your tickets. Am I missing anything else? No, I don't. I think we've got everything. So I'm going to pass on to our moderator, the one, the only composer lyricist, Sam Wilmot. It was one. I'm proud of him. He won the 2015 Cleveland Award for the most concing lyricist. So we are so proud of him. And he also wrote Yo Vikings. And you will see him on Thursday at 54 Below. So be there. Sam, good-bye. Good-bye. Thank you. Thank you. And hi, everyone. Welcome to our discussion today. And hello to the people on the internet. Thanks, Sam French, so much for putting this together. Thanks to HowlRound. This is really thrilling. We have a very exciting group of people sitting up here before you. And so by way of introduction, we have Sean Patrick Flappen over here. And I'm going to check my notes just to make sure I'm doing everything right. He's the senior vice president of theater and catalog development at Warner Chapel Music. He has produced 20 cast albums, nine of which are Grammy nominated. In his spare time, he is a music director, arranger, orchestrator, copyist, father of two. And he's on the drama-skilled music committee and the anti-piracy committee. What scintillating fact did I leave out about you? Come back to you. OK. Scintillating fact that I inevitably believe that about each person, by each person. Next up, the wonderful George Stitt, composer and lyricist of such shows as The Upcoming Snow Child at our main stage. Tempest Rock, which we're writing with Hunter Foster. Wee-mini Hearned. Are you ready? Wee-mini Hearned. And also The Danger Year, Babe Red Sun, Samantha Space Ace Detective. She's on the board of the Lillia Awards, which celebrates women in theater. And he's also on both the music and the anti-piracy committees of the drama-skilled. What did I do about that? Well, a scintillating fact is that Sean and I went to grad school together. And he's the first person I met in New York City when I moved here. So that would know each other both times. Ooh. That covered most of the cover. Yeah, that covered most of the cover. Ooh, wow. Cool. Next up, we have the one of Bruce Lazarus, Bruce Lazarus, who is the executive director of Sam French. And not only that, he was the director of business and legal affairs at Disney during the reign of the Lion King and Beauty and Least and Aida. He has Tony-nominated and mortel-winning producer and kayaker. And what else? What else? If you don't tell anybody, I appeared on the gong show. What? Oh. Oh. That's insane. Do you want to know one more fact? Yes, I did not win. I did not get calm, either. Oh, yeah. Nice. Good, good, good. And that's tweeted. And that's been half-leased. The one in here is Brian Scott Oliver, the composer of the latest behind Jasper in Deadland, 35 millimeter licensed by Samuel French. Darling, Ms. Sharp, Wee Foxes, Rope. You're just going through the whole thing. The whole thing. I'm just listing my favorites. Thank you. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, what else? What's your scintillating fact? Well, since we're talking about television and Donald Trump is probably going to be our next president, I was randomly on The Apprentice as a music. They have like a Broadway episode. Like, again, I use quotes because the whole thing wasn't quotes. Like, it's a pretty entire experience. And yeah, it was like we did music there. And it was like in watching people who knew nothing about Broadway, like try to like put on a Broadway show. It was like the funniest thing that's ever happened. And then watching them fight about their knowledge of Broadway. And like someone's like musical education. She says, I have music. And so like that was like her musical education. Just like, I'm sorry. I have music. You have music? I have music. But we all have music. Yeah, what's a fun fact about you? Fun fact about me. When I was in third grade, I vengefully went to school dressed as a mermaid because I was angry that my third grade teacher didn't let me do mermaids for my science project about undersecretary subjects. I just went as a mermaid. Which is basically what my show of your liking says about. So tonight's conversation is about promotion, protection of musical theater. I think the best thing that we could do is define both of these terms. To start off talking about what we're doing here in general and why this is of consequence before we start to realize that maybe what seems fairly dichotomous is in fact a little bit more fused than we think it is. So the big first question, let's start with the, I don't want to say name, but let's start with the tough step first, which is protection, right? What are we protecting? Well, we're protecting, I'll share your friends, we protect our authors intellectual property rights. Yeah, and intellectual property rights meaning? Well, the rights to their creative efforts that they've fixed in a format, they've written a play, they've written a libretto, they've written music, and the right to perform that and the right to have it perform the way they wrote it. Yeah, and the right to get paid for it. And the right to get paid for it, right? And to choose who gets to perform it. Yeah, to just jump off that, especially since you answered this question, there was sort of a well-publicized situation that happened last year with a Sam French client. Do you want to speak about that? Well, there are several, but we are very careful and methodical about enforcing our client's rights. I think you're referring to the hands-on-hard-body issue. We had a production of hands-on-hard-body that we licensed to the theater under the stars in Texas. It was the first production in Texas and the show was about Texas. And the artistic director of the theater, who was directing that production, decided that he could improve on it by changing around the order of the songs and some of the dialogues spoken by different characters. And then it had sort of the nerve, I guess, to invite Amanda Green, the composer, to see opening night and when she was aghast, he said, it's better, right? She actually think it was better. In fact... I'm so happy you're aghast, babe. You're not like that. In fact, we ended up shutting them down, so it was beyond repair. Yeah, that's interesting. I think that we all definitely have experiences with trying to combat this kind of stuff in our daily lives and I think that's sort of part of what we want to cover here is how pervasive these issues are. Yeah, I wanted to ask, for you guys in particular, have you experienced times when people are sort of infriging on your IP? Before I answer that question, I just wanted to jump on to that point and say that I grew up in a small town in West Tennessee where everybody did that. I mean, you get the musicals and you just sort of edit them the way you wanted to do them. I feel like it was part of our cultural... It was just an understanding that you make them work before you're approved. And I think I was in New York before I realized that that wasn't legal. I don't know if I'm the only one who has that experience, but growing up as a kid in theater, there'd be things, you cut scenes, you could have dances, you'd not do song, the song's written for a boy, but you give it to a girl, all these sorts of things. And so hearing about something on this large of a scale is shocking. And yet there's a part of me that says, we haven't educated our people to understand that that's wrong. And part of what we are doing on the Anticompiracy Committee of the Drama School is breaking down the issue and one of them is education, that we have found with sheet music in particular, that if you go to the colleges and say to them, hey guys, here's why you can't steal sheet music. Here's what the law is, here's what the cultural norm is, here's what the consequences are, and we're asking you as writers not to do it. A lot of college students go, oh, okay, then I won't do it. But in many cases, no one is saying that to them. So I think part of the first issue is understanding that we're battling a cultural standard that is not what we want it to be. Well, let me ask a follow-up question of, did you go for it? Oh, no, I was gonna rewind in a similar way. Excuse me, I think there's a perception, particularly in the last 20 years or so, as the internet has become the way we all communicate most of the time, that copyright is some sort of antiquated thing that hasn't kept up with the times. And to some extent, it's true that the law hasn't been revised in quite some time, and we're now talking about that. But I think it's also important to remember that this goes back to the Constitution. It's in Article I, Section 8, in the powers of Congress, in between things like establishing a post office and an AP and the power to point money, that the founding fathers thought it was worthwhile to put that in there. And granted, for the most part, the original concept was less about protecting written works, although a lot of them were writers and intellectuals, was mainly about patent law and protecting inventions. But it was also important to put that in there. It's a fundamental right that if you create something and fix it in a tangible form, that you should be able to profit from it from a certain amount of time. And then after a while, it would fall into the public domain and everyone could build on that. But the other sort of common misperception is that it's about stealing ideas or preventing other people from having ideas. And in fact, it's just, it's not about ideas, it's about that fixed interpretation of the idea. And anyone else is free to do their own version of a particular generic plot or situation or court progression or what have it. But the people who come up with these things should have the right to make a living from it. Without it, nobody up here would have a job. And this company wouldn't exist and my company wouldn't exist and a number of other things. So without that. A lot of you would have stolen anything. A lot of you wouldn't have anything. There's no incentive to create a defect if you can't profit from it. So yeah, I just wanted to sort of go back to that idea. And then, because I think that's forgotten, I think when you think of whether it's in a community context like that and I have someone similar situation when I was a kid or something egregious like what you were talking about, there really is something that's part of the culture that needs to remember that this was sort of the founding principle of the country. I just read this recently where it said, nobody would think, people would never walk into a store and think they could just take a CD and steal it. But they feel totally free to go on the internet and download the same thing for free from a road website without paying for it. I think everything shifted when there was no consequence. If you steal a CD, then the security paper is going to go off the door. If you steal a CD, they're not going to come bang on your door in a rest, and the idea- Steal a digital album. Yeah, right, a digital album, right. And so it tests our morality, which is really a question of like, can you police people's morality? Can you ask people to do the right thing just because they should? One of the things that licensing companies have found over the last 10 or 15 years is that people rat each other out. If a theater or a school or whatever does something and some place down the road will sometimes talk about, hey, if we do the right thing all the time, how come they're getting away with this? We have our sources. By the way, just while we're on this subject, this is a white paper that we put together last year with the Dramatist Guild. It's called Owning Their Words, and it's exactly about what we're talking about. It's understanding the playwright, protecting their work, and how you can help. It's available in the back and hard copy. It's also available at sandwillsfrench.com. You can just steal it now. It's totally free. It's totally free. But actually, is there a copyright notice on it? I don't actually know. Is there a copyright notice on it? I don't think so. I don't think we... Well, you know what, it's copyrighted. The moment it's fixed, the notice is only about whether you're going to prevail in court, not even prevail, but whether you can collect statutory damages. But this is copyrighted by merely being fixed on the paper. In fact, just it's an interesting thing. I think that's what we're talking about. The copyright law under the newest law, the 76 Act, no longer requires a registration. As soon as it's fixed in some form, written down, spoken into a tape recorder, to videotape, it's in some fixed form, it is copyrighted and you own it. How you prove when you did it and all of that or other things, which is why it's good to register it, and also registering it allows you to get statutory protection for it to collect statutory damages. But just fixing it, copyrights it. So if somebody said, hey, I wrote that song and you stole it, you would have to be able to prove I wrote it on this day and here's the file that's time-stand or whatever it is. I'll just email it to you yourself. If I can jump in just a little bit, and three of us have taught at Pace University and worked with a lot of college students and kind of know what their cross to bear is with weeks of assignments where they don't even necessarily want to work on a song. But I know that our seniors right now have been assigned, each of them is assigned like nine roles and they have to find two to four songs per role. So that assignment, if they were going on newmuscular.com or you know, most of these are our set of shows, they're gonna, that's a $140 assignment, that's a $200 assignment, if they're to go get the $10 thing. So if they're watching this, they understand what we're saying and clearly I'm on our side. But they're gonna see this and go, uh-huh, that's nice, but what do you want me to do about it? And so I think for me, the next step is I mean Spotify's an interesting thing because Spotify sort of has made a solution for this issue of how easy it is to steal music and suddenly like the artists we're all getting paid for our cast albums that are put on there, we're getting paid, you know, like. Have you done a check for some of that? No, not at all. But my point is that like in theory, in theory we are being compensated in some form for it. So the interesting thing to me is that, you know, I remember I assisted Xena Goldrich and Marcy Heisler years and years ago and I remember Marcy Heisler saying to me like, our work is boutique because we're new musical theater writers and we don't necessarily yet have a show on Broadway where there is a vocal selection that these kids can get anywhere, our work is boutique. So therefore we can charge eight, nine, 10 or some of us are charging $15 for one single song. And I think everyone understands and no one would dispute that like we deserve to be paid for that work, but I think the question is how is it, and I'm just asking this question, like is it a case of pricing? Like how, for young people, I'm specifically referring to young people, like how did we all decide, who decided that the average price of a piece of sheet music of a new musical theater, let's say, is nine or $10 if we can agree on that for a second? What's anywhere from, I'd say, $395 to $15 for a piece of, depending on where you buy it and just publish it, you know, at the point. I just, I'm gonna speak to you. There is, there is, and those of you who are a little bit more educated in the legalities of this can correct me, but there is a fair use clause that covers education. I think it's important to say that that if you are, that if you were in a class, I think I can say, you're allowed to photocopied that music for the purposes of your class and for the purposes of education. If you're really being strict about the law, then as a teacher, you can hand out the photocopies of sheet music. You're expected to take it back up at the end of class. If a student then takes that piece of music out into the world and uses it for auditions or in a concert or something like that, then they're expected to buy it out. But if you're using it for the purposes of education, it falls under fair use. Am I right when I say that? Everybody's cruel. Well, fair use is a defense. It's not a, it's not, it's not proactive. I mean, it's not proactive, I can't think of the word. If someone sues you, you can say it's fair use. But yes, there's something that says teachers can use it for educational purposes. The question, and I'll show you something, is how far does that go? Because we just had a similar situation where a school in Oakland did the whiz, didn't license it, didn't they write on these, and their claim was we did it in a school. And therefore it's for educational purposes and it's covered by fair use. And we went all the way, they sold tickets and we took it all the way up to the school board and the school board, the Oakland County School Board's attorneys said, they just did what we said it's fair use. But it's a stomach. But the school, I mean, the bottom line, that is the school profiting. You know, in the educational situation, no one is profiting except for the minds of the young people. But the moment that you charge tickets for it, that's a completely separate thing. I think you can make that case if they had these old tickets and they only did it for their, within the school. For donation, I mean, make a donation base. But again, we're trying to create a legal. I think the fair use doctrine in this area is about a class release. I agree with you. Yeah, this makes sense. I think it's an interesting point you raised specifically because in this world, you have the proponents for anti-copyright, or who are, I shouldn't say anti-copyright, but who are. Information is a big thing. Yes. Tends to be the two M's of that spectrum that you just outlined. Academics who spend their entire lives living in a situation where perhaps they're not compensated right, they're within the private sector, but at the same time, they have access to tremendous amounts of information. Your students probably don't go buy machine music for $150. They photocopy it out of the library. And I imagine PACE being a school that has a lot of performing arts stuff. They have that stuff in the library. So it tends to be those academics who feel like, well, I'm just building on someone else's ideas. And it's one thing to have it be some sort of academic commentary or classroom or something like that. But when that expands into the wider world and say, well, all this should be free, well, how do you think those books got in your library? Somebody was selling them. On the other hand, you have certain technology companies, and I'm not picking on any particular one, but their feeling seems to be that even though their entire business is the delivery of copyrighted material, whether it be music or movies or what have you, that they should pay as little as possible for that material that they're delivering and keep the profits. So it becomes very challenging in that way. At the same time, you can have things like, Spotify does at least pay. They do have discount subscriptions for college students. And so, and that does trickle down. Obviously it's not the same as people are making on the download or certainly on a $15 piece or whatever, but it is these two sort of groups, both of which have large lobbying components who are going to be influencing this discussion we have about what copyright law is going to be in the next 20 years. Well, I mean, the thing that you bring up is that it's between knowledge and entertainment. And I'm glad that Virgil you clarified it, like when this is for education and when it's for a student to practice a role, to learn how to better themselves as a performer, right? That's different than when you perform at 54 Below and you're presenting someone's song and money is changing hands and the quality of the venue, the quality of the evening, the quality of the experience is predicated on the quality of the material, the entertainment value of the material. And in that sense, I mean, it's totally an excuse. And in that scenario, most of the time, the songwriter is not making much of any money from that event, unless it's their own con. I'm not picking on 54 Below. Not at all. But any venue, if you're doing a cab, it's one thing if you're doing a cabaret concert of your own work and it's just your work, you may get paid something for it. But if it's one song out of 20, you're probably not other than whatever trickles down through the Performed Rights Society. So in that case, the transaction that's happening is not necessarily benefiting the songwriter. I mean, the exposure that you're getting may be valuable on one hand, Brad. But at some point it's not, especially when you're at the place where they're stealing your sheet music and trading it and you can post on something and say, hey, I'm looking for this song by this person and someone immediately is there to respond. At that point, that exposure is probably not necessarily as used. Right. Yes, but it's the opposite. You're right. But in other words, the presumption that, oh, you should just make your money somewhere else by touring, no one in this business is fiance. Right. So, you know. I'm a two-eyed fiance. I'm a fiance anymore. So I'll just move away from the pure financials of it for a second, because we also touched on this intellectual property issue, which I think is also pure now. What would you say to an organization that said, look, I really want to do ShowX, but we don't have this, we don't have enough women, or we don't have enough of this race, or we don't have enough, or we don't have enough sopranos, and therefore we're going to recraft it. And the issue is either don't you want us to do this show? Don't you want us to do this show? We're just going to make it work for us. Well, that depends on the author. Some authors will say, great, do it any way you like. I don't care what you do with it. Do with it. And others will say, I'm sorry, this must be performed by people at this race, or it must be performed the way I wrote it, or don't do it. It's, you know, there are thousands of shows out there. There are plenty of shows. I'll help you find another show. I'll do my show, because I don't want it done that way. Or with the author. Or with the author. And that's the author's paracetam. This poses an interesting question, because like, you know, and you can speak to this in terms of what you licensed. A show like Chicago, as an example, is there something in the licensable materials which stipulates the ethnicity of any of these characters? I suspect it probably doesn't. But I would imagine in a show like Hairspray or Ragtime, race plays a really, really, really pivotal part. And I would be interested to know, is it just assumed that the licensing groups, especially like high schools, are going to be aware that Cole House and Sarah ought to be black? Or is it actually in the licensable materials? Like, these are the stipulations of that. That's not a Samuel Frank show, so I can't speak to that one in particular. But just for example, we represent the August Wilson century cycle, and all of those characters are African-American, and they must be played by African-Americans, and they cannot be played by people in blackface. And does it say that in the libretto? It does. Obviously it does say that. And where it really gets a little more interesting, or at least I hadn't really thought about it for a long time, was, you know, people play Asian characters that are not Asian. And so it's really yellowface, or that's what they call it. I don't actually like that, but that's not appropriate either. Now, there are some authors who might say it's fine. But again, that's their problem. Absolutely right. Yeah, I just thought it was worth articulating also. And there are productions in foreign countries too, where they're in particular countries where it's predominantly Japanese, for instance, and so then they have different traditions about doing shows with different places as well. So you have to adapt to those situations. But I mean, or not, or not, or not. Yeah, and I think central to this is to remember that it's also the writer or the writer's representation that ultimately is able to make this decision based on how they want their piece to be reflected in. And I think it's fair to say that a lot of writers are down to have that conversation in the first place and want to, I received just recently a request for to do an academic, or the academic performance of a show of mine for no dollars. And I said, go for it, because that sounds like I know how much you will benefit from it versus how much I will benefit from it. And this makes sense. But if the same production were somewhere in a much bigger venue, then it would be a different conversation. Or if they had a mast. Or if they had a mast, it would be entirely different. It's like, if this comes down to something that's a little bit more nebulous and karmic than anything else. And just so you know, all of these things tend to be in our license. Whether they can, you know, the fact that they cannot make changes to the script or interpolate the music or change the race of the characters or cut characters or all of that. And you'd be surprised how many people when confronted with it go, oh, I didn't read it. Didn't know it was in the contract. Which is, brings up another point which we tried to deal with last year. I wanted to have the, it occurred to us that the managing director of a theater who signs the contract is not the director of the play. And the director of the play may never have seen that contract. And so we wanted to have the director have to sign that they read the license. The SDC, the Society of Directors and Choreographers objected to that as a potential collective bargaining issue. So it didn't go very far. But really, it's interesting to note that the director doesn't necessarily read it. We at the Anti-Piracy Committee have a new document that we have created that asks, at auditions, asks the casting directors and then on the first day of rehearsal asks the stage directors to sign a document that basically is a pledge saying that they won't photocopy the music and they won't share it beyond the needs of this rehearsal. And it has been approved by Equity and the SDC. But they're not about SDC, equity, though. Right, equity approved it. And so what we're trying to do is make it part of the new standard that on the first day of, that first of all, in casting, you know, you have to hand out your material for people to learn it for auditions and callbacks and sort of that. And then that gets proliferated and those sides get photocopied and thrown on the internet. And suddenly this first draft of a song that you still haven't rewritten makes its way out into the world. People show up singing it on auditions and you're like, how did you get this music? And it's because of the audition process, in some cases. And so what we're doing is asking for a pledge from casting directors and the auditioners and that sort of thing saying that they won't do that. And then also for the first day of rehearsal. So we're trying to make that part of the package. We've also been met with some resistance so far, but mostly it's people just saying, what is this? I'm not used to saying this in my day one packet. And then also our representative saying, it's been approved, it's all legit. So that's new. Well, this is a question that I have and I've only just recently graduated because I think we have the same people doing our website and like they dealt with the watermark. Like I was like, I want my music coded when someone purchases it. And the same way they got on music knows this has been purchased for whatever. It's so easy now. And the same way that it's easy to steal music, it's also just as easy to throw the PDF. You know, no matter what version of the reading you're doing, no matter who, no matter if it's Kelsey, literally any situation you can suddenly code all of the information where the watermark goes straight across it. That's not gonna be obtrusive. Everyone can still read the whole thing which says anywhere from this is for auditions on this day by this casting agency or this is the second reading that is happening on this day. And then suddenly there's some accountability because you know when that sheet music gets out of your hands, you know that it's only these nine people or these 20 people. And that may seem like a large amount but it also, it does have some accountability in terms of where did the sheet music get out and it sits there forever. And I think that is another really simple way to make sure that our music doesn't get too far out of our hands. Well, this is also a very natural segue to this other half of the conversation which is about promotion. Which is to say like, lest we have any confusion that writers sit in the room and they materialize at the time. You're just angry. Don't do it. I don't know about you guys but I would say 90% of my working time is spent like vomiting out material to try to get people to do it. Right. You know, and in a variety of different capacities and a variety of different media. So I'm curious to talk also about, for you guys, A, how you promote your material and for you guys, how you receive promoted material and or how you promote your own set of materials once they have sort of been through your champions? I opened it. I opened it. You looked like you were taking a giant breath. I don't know where to start. You can start. I will start. Please jump in. In terms of promoting materials, I mean, you know, at this stage, I will say, and I think this is the stage where a lot of us are at. It has to be through concerts. It has to be through small venues. And you know, the worst thing about it is that suddenly we get labeled as like concert writers and that's, and none of us are doing it. None of us are writing songs just so they can be in concerts. I mean, I, for me, like I've written, I can count on one on two hands, the number of like standalone cabaret songs I've ever written. Like I just don't do that. I write shows for musicals. I'm a dramatist. That is what I do. But sometimes when I want to have a seven piece band, the most cost effective way is to do it in a concert setting. The sound is going to be great. It's going to be a lovely looking venue. You're going to get a lovely performer performing it. It makes a whole lot of sense. And then, you know, that goes on the YouTube. And you know, and then at that point, you know, it's all the shims that I've sold, it's interesting. I just, after Jasper and Dylan, we, I had eight, you know, made a vocal selections of it. And there were two songs that don't have YouTubes. And those have exactly zero purchases. All the other ones that have YouTubes are selling very, very well. And so I'm like, okay, note to self, if I ever want these two things to be sold, I have to find some reason to have these two things recorded or performed ASAP. Well, this is also interesting that Jasper and Dylan being, you know, that songs on YouTube would correlate to sheet music sales. But generally, how, two points to this question, how important are sheet music sales in your professional lives, in terms of the, like the great tool, revenue stream of what you have? And second of all, did having, doing Jasper in concert or did doing the concert versions of your work, does that seem to lead to production? Or does that just mostly lead to sheet music sales? I don't mean this to be a leading question. This is a real question. In terms of like, how much does sheet music, no matter how my career has moved, sheet music has never been more than 10% of my income. You know, and initially the other 90% was from like other things, like survival jobs that I was doing, we're now just writing and like commissions and like just the writing thing. But sheet music has never been more than 10%. And it's nice, I mean it's a nice little bump, but like, it's important. That's why for me it's like I, and when we talk about like what we're doing in our spare time, you know, I'm spending the rest of the time writing and hustling and doing all of that. And do you answer your other question? I would say, yeah, I would say that the concert work has, I can say that it has directly related to next steps in production. Sometimes yes, sometimes we'll have a libretto, some will have a libretto, but in the time that they receive the libretto, to the time they make a decision about whether or not they want to do it, I probably have an opportunity for them to actually see the work in concert or something like that. It's not essential, but I would also say it's really helpful, especially for the producers who lack maybe the vision you hope that they would have, just reading something off the page and just listening to a demo. Do you feel like that is true for you guys too from a provisional end to things that you find things in concerts and then you want to elevate it to the next level? From a licensing standpoint, I think sometimes we'll hear something or hear about something that will pique our curiosity and we will follow it, but in all honesty, until it has some sort of higher level production off Broadway, Broadway, a large regional theater, it's difficult to license it, no matter how good it is, because there's just no heater around it and the amount of marketing energy it takes to create awareness of it just doesn't happen. So the best thing you can do is to get a really good production. I can speak to you, I'll let you go in a minute. I'll let you speak. I did spend, thank you, I did spend the first few years in New York writing standalone songs and all kinds, I wrote choral music and art songs and not shows, I mean, I was always sort of writing a show but I found that more immediate gratification and writing a song, finishing the sheet is excelling it, having somebody perform it, ultimately making a YouTube video. And what I learned is that there is no income stream and it is that you have to write the show if you're going in this end of the business. I mean, certainly there are art song composers and there are choral music composers and that sort of thing, but if you're in this line of business, you have to finish the show. My experience has been that all of that ground work, making albums, doing concerts, getting things on YouTube leads to the way people perceive you in the world and the way people treat you as a professional and oh, I've heard of you, I know you're a writer, I've heard good things about you, I've heard that one song that you did, I've got one thing showed up in my class, I coached it and they started to know you. In the absence of that, I don't know how you, I don't know how you get your work out there. So it is a very large wheel of self-promotion that ultimately, I have gotten commissions specifically and probably my agent out of all of that public performing work, I can't imagine where I would meet had I not done it, but I have never gotten that production of a show. I think you have to have the show to sell too, right out to the point. I do now. No, you, what's the big idea, but it's, yeah, you have to have that thing that you're gonna sell because all that other activity, as both of you said, if you're just doing, even if you dedicate yourself to just writing amazing standalone songs and getting them performed in nice places by great singers with videos and all that, it's not gonna sell it. It puts your name in the world, but they have to, then they say, okay, what's the show? In my main job, we come at the career a little bit earlier than they do in licensing. And so I do sign people, mostly who have had major productions at their work, but I also occasionally sign people who are earlier in their career who have either a show or a show plus some work in another genre, an old contemporary pop or folk or that sort of thing. Because there has to be, in the music publishing world, there has to be an income stream in order for me to justify the work that I'm gonna spend with the writer. Even if, whether that's early developmental work or helping them get a show to the finish line or once they've got the show that's about to be produced to figure out how we're going to get the music out there in other ways, recordings, shoot music, concerts, film and TV, advertising, video games, what happened. So it's rare that somebody comes to me with, here's a few songs I've written, make me a pop star, that's not gonna happen. Particularly for people who are mostly writing theater, because theater writers who think they're pop writers are not pop writers. It was an education for me as well when I started working at Warner. Because I haven't listened to it, especially in New York, people don't listen to the radio. Now I do, because I live in Westchester and I have a car and I run around, and I work in a place surrounded by A&R people who do what I do, but in other genres. And so, the theater definition of pop music is not pop music. There are two very different things with very different skill sets. One is certainly not better than the other, and I tend to like theater music more, but it's fine. So I think they have to have something that I can sell, just like later on in the chain, they have to have something that briskets them. Can I just add one thing to that? In selling a show that we represent, it is very helpful to have a cast out of demos. Because that's what the ultimate licensee, the theater out, the no walking or whatever, they need to hear it. Just getting it off the page is very difficult. Just providing them the sheet music, they're not gonna, we're not gonna get enough yes decisions basically. So, when we're picking up a musical, it's very important to us that there's a cast out. One thing I just want to add about the YouTube thing, and it's very easy for all of us, and I'm as guilty as this, I mean, I actually don't watch YouTube videos of my own work, like when someone from a college is like, I sang your song, here's a video, like I'll watch the beginning to make sure it happened, and then I'll watch the end to make sure they finish it and they got through it. It's a little bit like nanny cam, like you're watching the nanny like to play with your baby, and you're like, no, she doesn't like that kind of food, like don't touch my baby. But, yes, that's right, my dog, dog of the year. But what I want to say, the thing is that YouTube does have a tremendous amount of power, and we're not even done seeing its power. And the main point to that is that us musical theorizers have been doing this for five, 15, 20 years, right, whatever that number is. YouTube was, you know, I felt like, got really popular in 2007, 2008, please tell me if my year is wrong, in any case. You know, it's been almost a decade that YouTube's sort of been around, and what's interesting is those 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 year olds who like, started to see our work when they were like, lonely school theater gigs, like we all were when we were kids doing community theater and all that stuff, and YouTube is suddenly at their fingertips in the middle of Nebraska, and they're watching, and they feel like they're a part of our community, because they can see all of our names, they know exactly who we are, they feel as close to us as anyone else in the entire country. They can write to us on Twitter, they can write to us on Twitter. Absolutely, and they feel connected to us, and I think the biggest point is that in time many of them do move to New York, and they're already fans of ours, that have been for years, and we're like, I didn't even know that you knew that we existed, and then they become the assistant to the lip manager at this place or that place, and you don't even like that, and then eventually they're gonna become the managing directors, and they'll have known about us for 15 or 20 years, and I do think that that is, that there is power there, it's not, I mean, what you guys were saying, totally, you're not gonna get production from the concert or from the YouTube video, but there is this other sort of grassrootsy kind of power associated with YouTube now, that is a power that I think wasn't there 30 years ago, you had to be in New York, you had to be seeing people at piano bars, and that's no longer the case. Well the visual is very powerful, because I grew up listening to past albums, and imagining what the shows were like, and seeing some, either in school or two years, so that sort of thing. Waiting for the Tonys, come on. Right, so it isn't that we were that kid, thank you from Tom and Glenn's song, but it's having that, whether it's a bootleg of something or a real video, someone doing a song on a concert, being able to see someone do that is very powerful. I've programmed entire concerts just because I'm one of the YouTube videos. I knew that I wasn't gonna make any of my songs, yeah. I've booked a venue, hired singers, rehearsed them, hired a band, written orchestrations, done the entire concert, made zero dollars, because I knew that there was gonna be video content that would then become more valuable to me than any of us. Made zero dollars, you're probably not, you're raising the floor. It probably cost me money, yeah. So I have an interesting situation, which I would love all of you to comment on. So there are certain composers, lyricists, that are Samuel French clients that say it's on YouTube, I want you to take it down, I'm not being paid for it, I want that. Of a production, of a, of a, well, of a song. With a song from a full-length stage production? Yes, yes, say yes, or even a, and if you do take it down, the YouTube account is suspended for six months. We get calls from parents going, you took down all my family videos, you know, and I can't get it back for six months. And if it actually happens, I think three times, they wipe out the account they're about. So this particular person I spoke to said, well, good, they should know that when they're stealing people's material, there's a penalty for it. On the other hand, I have a composer lyricist who says, I want to do my work, they want to see my, great, whatever they do is fine. I'm curious to see what they do with it. It's great, isn't it? So there's both ends of the spectrum, and we are a bit caught in the middle. We can't make a global decision to take down all the videos. But some people will say, no, no, what are you doing? Why, you know, you're doing it in my name in a way, and it's not nice. And other people will say, what do you mean you're not taking it down? You're supposed to be protecting my work. Carton caught in the middle there a little bit. Which to me begs a bigger question, which is, if you really looked at how much money you make from sheet music, and I know some people make a considerable amount of money from sheet music. You know, if you're making, if your share after it's published or whatever is a few dollars a sheet, and you sell a thousand sheets so you've made $3,000. But if out of those 3,000 things that were stolen, someone, it drifts into some lit manager's office or somebody did it in college or somebody loved it and says, hey, I wanna do this show. That one license is worth 10, 20, 30, $50,000 potentially, and maybe it leads to more licenses. Is it a trade off? Is it worth letting them take it in order to get the license? Now, we're in the business of protecting people's property. So, we go after it and we have it taken down and we do our best to make sure that people aren't stealing it. But I wonder sometimes if it's in the best interests of the client and the best financial interests. You're really asking two different questions, though. One is saying, do you mind if someone takes a video of your song? And the second is, do you wanna give away your sheet music for free or let people steal it in order to get performances? Well, I'm not asking them to do that. Well, I guess I'm asking the question is, is it maybe a good promotional tactic to let people have your sheet music because the money's not in the sheet music. The money's in the production. Well, there certainly are, there's the modeling where you had, there are models and I can't remember her name, but the artist who gives away all of her music. Anyway, there are certainly models in the pop world of people who think of sheet music as a loss leader or as those performances as a loss leader against a greater end. I think even if you could come around to believing that that was the case, it's hard to quantify it in a way that sets the bar there for everything else. I have a choral piece that is published and I found a YouTube video where somebody had made like here's the alto part, here's the soprano part, here's the piano part, here's what it sounds like when they're all together, which I thought, oh, that's so nice that he did that. And then I realized he was selling them for $0.99. You can download them for your choir and then they're just made. And then I Google further into who he was and he does this for choral music. That's what he does, his business is benefiting from what all of our work. And so I have another friend who's a choral music director, a composer. And I wrote him and I said, do you know how this guy, whether he's got your music up here too, what do you do? And he said, oh yeah, we know about that guy. We don't take him down because we figure he actually generates business for us, that because those videos exist, people find our songs and they come to us. So I have the same ethical question. Like, do I ask him to take down my music because he's charging for it? What I really should do is make him license it. I should just make him license it. Right, you sell $0.99, you can license that for me and here's the piece. But are we gonna go after every single person individually that's doing that? Is that what your job is because you're representing? Like, are we, who's going after every person that's infringing on my copyright? But also, where do you draw the line? If you say, okay, well we're not making much from our sheet music. So, and the goal is to get grant rise licenses because that's more lucrative. Okay, well then, no, we're not making enough from our recordings, from our cast albums. Really, the goal is to get someone to do the show. So if we've done this cast album, should we just get that away? Because that's gonna make them do the, I mean, how far do you go in giving away a lot of chain in order to get the one thing at the end that's more lucrative than the other things and the aggregate, but still, you can of course choose to give away whatever you choose to give away. And whether you're gonna be able to whack them all or everybody steals it, you're not. I think that there's an assumption for me, like when we talk about the price of the sheet music I'm like, it's $9 to $10 or whatever. For me, I just have this assumption that they're not only paying for the sheet music but they're also, this is for me, that they're also paying for at least one public performance. Again, because sometimes someone will say how I want to perform this at my university how much would that cost me? And it's basically the cost of the sheet music as well. The one song? The one song, one performance at some event, like they tell me what the ticket price is. I'm like, this is like an $8 license. Do you know what I mean? So for me, and when I think about, one time I did the math, when I looked at all the sheet music that is purchased and then I looked on YouTube to see all of the, in one year, all of the performances that were done, I was kind of like, this pretty much evens out. This like kind of adds up a little bit when you think about it. We wouldn't charge them for the performance of the song anyway. That would be covered by the school that's asked after being live on. Right, right, right, right, right. So, I mean, if it were a show, that's a story. Right, yeah. There's a presumption that if they buy the sheet music they can go on and on. Right. Let me just jump in real fast because we're running short on time and I want to make sure that we have a chance to talk to you guys and see if I have any questions from the panel slash this is out to the internet also, which we do on Twitter with the hashtag musicals week. Do we have any sort of questions from you guys? Things that we want to address, yeah. I have questions. When it comes to like cabaret performance, which is pretty big in the city, there's a ton of cabaret rooms. I don't think most of them pay any kind of rates. Maybe 54 below, I don't know. No, they do. I mean, there's a license then, ASCAP or BMI license that they pay in order to be in business. And so, I'm a member of ASCAP and so if I know that somebody's performing my piece in a cabaret, I add it to, I would keep a running list throughout the year where my music is performed. And I usually, before the deadline, do a YouTube search and see if I can find any that I don't know about, which I always do. I ask my, on Twitter, I usually say to you, hey, have you performed my song publicly or so? Just let me know because I can get money for it. But because that venue has paid its ASCAP or BMI or CSEC license, then ultimately I can apply to get a piece of the trickle-down economics back from it. Yeah. And just so you know, ASCAP has agents that go out to every restaurant and every bar and every bowling alley demanding payment and demanding that they get a license. So, how they figure it out, I don't know anymore. It's just not gonna be realized. Well, it's actually, and actually, I can sort of speak to this a little bit. So, I'm a member of ASCAP, the program is called ASCAP Plus. Also a member of ASCAP and the program itself is basically like, once you start doing it, they give you a set amount of money, whatever, based on like, you make that, you show them the list, like you show them the receipts, like this is what programs are listing. And then as long as you keep showing that more and more people are doing it every year, usually the amount gets a little bit higher. And in order to figure it out, they basically just go, how much did I give you last year? All right, we're gonna bump you 15, 20% usually. I mean, assuming that your career seems to also be doing that. So it's actually a really great program and a lot of young writers kind of be, you know, especially when the starting fee can be 100, 200, even $500. That's a lot of money for a 22 year old musical theater writer to making if they have, get their work done. You know, ASCAP and DMI used to also, I mean, still pay for radio play. And they used to collect logs from the radio stations. What songs did you play every day? And they would, I don't think they, I know that they do that, but they mostly do it through fingerprints and technology. So they know what songs being played on the radio. Do they track you too? There's a set set one. Yeah, at some extent. Yeah, I'm not exactly sure of the mechanism for it. Is YouTube as a small performance rate? Some, it depends, the publishers. The larger publishers that direct deals with YouTube. Some of the others go through the PR hours. There's a question I have about YouTube. Have you guys seen any money from YouTube? Like what if something goes crazy nuts viral, you know, like somebody seems like they've been doing views? Well, I can speak to, Jonathan McGill has a song called Quiet. And I think it's been viewed, a performance by Natalie Weiss is like, I mean, last I checked it was like, in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands. And I know it's like a huge seller, nameschoolthee.com. So, I mean, the amount of money he's made on just that one song, and we all have like our heads, but like because of those YouTube performance, there's definitely a direct correlation in terms of how popular that song is. And how much money you get back. It's a check from YouTube. Oh, no, no, right. You don't get anything directly from YouTube. But you can. You should. You can. You can monetize it. You have to register, you know, like. It's right. Depends on which ads you're interested in. But even without the ads. Without the ads, you should get something. With the ads, you get more. Interesting. Yeah. And it depends on what type of ad runs around. And obviously if it's more popular, the video gets the more of the ad algorithm. But the ad is being paid to the person who posted it. You as a publisher are collecting the performance, right? Yeah, currently I'm not going to dispute that. If you put a song, a good bit of song for your concert, you got, you know, I don't know, Azalea Banks or Miley Cyrus is singing one of Ryan Scholar's songs and it gets 10 million views on YouTube. You put ads on it. Obviously you're making, you know, $20, $40, $50,000 that year in ad sales. Right. Like you're the uploader, you get that ad money. Right. The uploader. Where does that money go? In other words, like, is it just that uploader's money? Well, because I think, well, one thing I think that from YouTube's perspective is that when you upload a video, you have, like you click a box or something that says something to the effect of like, this is right for you. Well, that's why your clients are saying take it down. Because somebody can make money off of it. That's not me. New problem. New problem. Ask this Twitter question. Yes, we've got a question from Twitter. He said that in today's world it's such a DIY one-man show business thing. How do you balance writing your music, doing that song and networking? What advice do you have to people that are having to do that? You talked a little bit about this earlier, but, you know, short, pre-notific answer. I'm wondering if Sam shouldn't answer that since he's the king of social media. I don't know about that. The question is more... In terms of promoting your, how do you balance both like your time and energy in terms of creating your work but also making sure it's being promoted and networking it, just... I think that's an ongoing art for your whole life. I think that's always a struggle. You know, certainly, I definitely looked at it. The first time I wrote a show was in college, because in college I had a very sex schedule and had free time that I didn't know I was going to lose once I became a real person. And then upon, when that happened, then the next show that I wrote was because of a deadline that I had. So everything cleared out and I met the deadline. And subsequent to that, it's challenging because you end up with survival jobs that you have to take, especially when people aren't paying you money that you're just, you know, that impacts the amount of time that you have. There are some really, really incredible organizations that exist solely to give writers the space and the time to focus on their craft for a certain amount of time. The O'Neill Theater Center, Goodspeed has an incredible one running Deer Abba, Ryan and I were earlier this year. These are writers retreats. Ryan, writers retreats. There's this amazing programs where they allow you to go for a certain amount of time and just focus on your material. For people who are really writing all the time, those are invaluable. I take you away from the coffee dates and from the meetings and the concerts and whatever else and allow you to focus on your craft. But that's really, but then the rest of it's a balancing act. And to make this jump, where Ryan is talking about now primarily a lot of his career is based on his writing project and his commissions, which is fantastic and the goal that we all share. But making that jump between, okay, I'm not gonna take music direction job right. I'm not gonna take these arrangement jobs. I'm not gonna take the money that is coming to me right now. This part of what I think is also really important to understand about piracy is, and writers in the writer life in general, is that we don't get paid for writing. We get paid for having written. And so. We're selling a product. We're selling a product that you've already invested all of this time and emotional energy into. And I think you had mentioned before that you're, that you do a draft in six months and to that I say Godspeed. Because my drafts are like, I don't know, how long does it take you to make that? Much longer than six months. Much longer than six months. And that's the amount of time that we're putting focused energy into what we're writing. So that is all uncompensated time that we are doing in the hope that someday somebody will want to turn that into a thing. It's different when you start getting a commission. You know, the commissions give you upfront money and there can be not-for-profit commissions or commercial commissions. And so that does change the game a little bit, but I think you have to have been doing it long enough to be a person that gets a commission. You know. I think it's important though to note that that never changes. It just depends on what, depends on how your, that balance of time never changes. I had a meeting earlier today with one of my most successful clients and his entire team is agent, his manager, his publicist, his financial planner, and he's doing very well, but he's also spending just as much time trying to figure out how to promote his work in a bigger way than most of us are and still have time to write. And it's, in his case, it's not so much about I need to do this to eat and then this, but it's that you always have to be doing that. And I've had older writers tell me it's always ever been thus that no matter how successful you are, you always have to be pushing yourself out there. I think once upon a time I liked Beauty and the Beast on Facebook because it's true, I do like Beauty and the Beast. And it's amazing to me when on my news feed it comes out like, like Beauty and the Beast has the most, like, like, like, you know, remember when Belle said this? I'm like, yeah, I do. And it's amazing to me that even Beauty and the Beast, which I think is first of all, like, not active right now, it's not a really active property, but it's also like Beauty and the Beast, like, what else is there to say? Like, it's like God in a castle. We're not sure what you're doing about it. Well, I'm actually, well, that's true. I think we're about to generate conversation just in case there's a problem. You mean that it isn't the property of trying to stay present? Yes, it's trying to keep the property present. Even if it were, Beauty and the Beast has to stay present. You guys, Beauty and the Beast is hustling. It's like hustling, it's hustling, it's hustling. Beauty and the Beast. Why would you do more? Yeah. I wanted to ask you, if you have a limited run for a show, maybe a weekend, you know, four days, what do you think is the most cost-efficient way to actually promote that? Social media. Yeah. Cost-effective? Yeah. I mean, I taught a business of acting class to students, to young actors, and I would say it's the same thing for us, which is that they go like, oh, I want to respect my privacy on Facebook, and I don't want to accept every friend of us. Or like, I want to keep my Twitter private. I'm like, why? I'm like, you have literally a free billboard that all of the people that care about the thing that you are doing are your friends. They're requesting you because they want to know more about what you're doing. And if you really want a private life, like don't be on Facebook. You get what I mean? Well, I have two different pages. Oh, yeah. I have a private page. Right. Or don't be an idea like that one. I have a private Facebook page so there's people I actually know, and then I have a public one that's toward a certain music, and it's, but I don't tend that one very well. Like, I don't keep it up to date as well, so I don't turn my, you know, I'm gonna go home and just Facebook about it. But I agree with you, Twitter. There's a difference, you know, how we use social media, but if you're trying to promote something or sell something, then you have to, you know, make it available for the whole world to see. And then don't put pictures of your kids out there, you know? I mean, absolutely, absolutely. You have another question? Yeah. You talked earlier at the beginning about how, like, in regional theater people would just cut scenes and we sort of thought of how it was done. I think there's a very clear line where like cutting dialogue and changing words is very wrong, but as Broadway shows get harder and harder, like, how do we know where that line is? That a lot of the harmonies are really hard. A lot of the songs are really high. The orchestra parts are monstrous. Like, how should regional theaters know what to matter to them? Is that the, I mean, I feel like the junior versions have sort of not only, not only do they simplify a lot of those questions, but they also, there are tracks that you can get that you can purchase that create a solution to this problem. I mean, it's, and, you know, for me, like the, you know, licensing 35 million group, you guys, like, I thought about that exact same thing. And it's a song cycle, so it can be changed and modified. Oh. Changed and modified. I didn't forget it. Changed and modified. Which is close. Which is, I thought ahead. I was like, changed and modified in so many different ways. And so, like, you know, in the license I requested a page. It was like, here are all of the many things you can do to change this and simplify. And here are also the things you must never do. These, these five things can never happen. But all of these things can't, which they, what about that? So, like, they can change the gender of any song, but they have to handle all of the transpositions. Like, they, that, you know, or, or contacts in French and ask them about that. They can't cut any of the material. They can't cut anything. They also, I like, found every word that I proceed to be remotely bad. And like, I, there's an alternate lyric for it. I don't want them to, I don't want them to decide what my alternate lyric should be if they don't want to use the F word and the F word appears a few times. I think, and then instrumentation, that was another thing. Like, you know, it's scored for six players. And I basically said, you can either do it with six or you can do it with two. But you can't cut the cello, because you don't have a cellos. Because it's orchestrated for, you know, the cello's not there, and you're playing from the piano book that's supposed to be with this, that cello line's gone forever. And, and so, you know, they can do it with piano, piano and drums, or you can do it with six players. So like, things like that are, are for me the stipulation of this show. And every show I would have licensed, I would, I would try to think of all of the situations that could answer all the questions for the, for the Amtral Isis. Why? My response to your question, I'm sorry, is don't you think they said that when West Side Story came out? And don't you think they said that when Sweetie Todd came out? And don't you think they said that when Life at Piazza came out? Like, there are certain shows that are game changers because they, those are, those are shows in particular that I think challenge the musicianship in the way people thought about the music before. And I think it probably is true with shows that thought about dramaturgy differently, or that, you know, acting or structure, storytelling differently. But there's something about, when you're working at this level, we're all in the Broadway community, whether we're like Broadway shows or off Broadway shows, or we're here in New York, we're sitting at Sam French because we're working at a height level because we would like to be creating the shows that are the game changers. And so if the show that, that somebody is doing on Broadway right now requires you to be a better musician or to educate your students at a higher level, then that's what you do. Because 10 years from now, it won't be the new thing, it'll be. I always think that when, when I first moved to New York, I was playing Audition Piano. And there would be like, I just remember with Adam Gettle's music in particular, like the vocal selections would come out and actors would start bringing it into auditions and all of us who were playing piano were like, oh my God, I don't like it. We were studying the cast albums and like making sure we knew how they went. But we learned them because that was our job. Because my job is as an Audition pianist to be able to give you support. Well, so you're, so I don't screw up your auditions, it's my job. And so it challenged my musicality, it made me a better musician. And I would say that that is what I say out to the people in the world is, if the bar has been raised, you try to meet it. Is it okay that the bar's been raised to like meeting a click track sometimes? I think the need for a click track is more about technology and style. If you, I mean, if you, I don't know why that would be the thing that makes it difficult. If you need a click track because it syncs up with some video element or because it's pop music and pop music is very regimentally based in groove or, you know, there are reasons why that might be the case. And I would challenge you as a music director to figure out why, why that's there. But I don't think that the fact that it's harder means that you should be allowed to change it. And I think that with that sort of galvanizing statement but I think that's a great place to... Before you go there, I just want to put out there that Samuel French has put out a line of vocal selection books on our material, some of which would not have gotten a vocal selection book otherwise. Ryan Scott, Oliver's 35 millimeter. Hold that one. And hands on a hard body with music and lyrics by Amanda Green who is a one in chapel client. Hold that. Also available digitally, yes. And Natasha Peer in the great comic of 1812, Dave Malloy, fun home will be out soon. And unhomed sheet music is currently available on our website, both digitally and in print form. So come to SamuelFrench.com or get your sheet music and vocal selection books. Amazing. That's awesome. Thank you guys so much for coming. Thanks to the panel for all of this insight and great evening. Make sure you get the owning your words in the back and sign up on your email list and come back. And also check out Sean wrote a great article today I was posed on the hell round and the SamuelFrench online magazine breaking character. So check those out and we'll see you guys tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you. If you'd like to look at the books, I'll leave them up here. Hi.