PANEL - The State of Sync: Presented by Sync Summit

Synchronization continues to be an important source of income and competition has never been more fierce to secure placements. Join us for this discussion with sync music executives on the current condition of the film, tv, advertising, and game sync markets. COVID-19 shifted production schedules and we now find ourselves in the midst of a Writers Guild of America Strike causing many music supervisors to shift their music searches, resulting in music publishers, labels, and sync companies to shift the music they pitched. This panel will discuss the current needs of the sync market, production cycles, potential trends, the music pitch process, licensing rights and terms you need to know, and most importantly how to make money in this highly competitive area of the industry.

Featured Speakers:

Amelia McCloskley, CEO & Founder of AM Licensing

AM Licensing is a full-service music supervision company offering Music Supervision, Clearance, and Sync Licensing options to the media industry.

Nominated for ''Music Supervisor Of The Year'' by AIM Music, AM Licensing has gone from strength to strength with our head office in the UK, our recent office expansion into Toronto, Canada now enables us to not only offer UK based artists and composers into Canadian productions, but also full 360 post-production services which include music supervision & licensing services alongside our Canadian partner Images In Sound.

Previous placements include UK TV Series ''Love Island'', Netflix series 'Luis Miguel', 'Monarca', Mexican film 'La Venganza de Mascarita' , US film 'Endless'  and Spanish Netflix series, 'Elite' Season 3 with a few more placements in the works.

Supervision projects include ''Fish Out Of Water'' with Francesca Scorsese which recently premiered at Cannes Film Festival, Laced Silk (Germany), Polycees (NZ), Letters To Father (Brazil) and an upcoming TV series along with a US film in the works.

Leland Drake, Senior Music Producer at Grey/Townhouse

Leland Drake is a senior music producer at Grey/Townhouse, New York. Prior to moving into the agency world in 2018, Leland started his career in product management at indie label faction, Beggars Group. Leland has supervised and produced music on advertising campaigns for brands including Applebee’s, Pantene, Pfizer, McCormick, Modelo and more. His work has been recognized at Cannes and the AMP Awards.

Jim Leavitt, Senior Director of Music Partnerships & Talent Relationship Rocksmith+ at Ubisoft

Jim Leavitt has a diverse background in music marketing and sync licensing.  He offers experienced perspective from every angle of the music business. 

He has worked at record labels, including Arista, Imago, ZE Records, and 2/13/61, as a product manager, marketing consultant and creative director.  He also worked in music publishing at ARC Music Group (home to Chess Records, Vee Jay Records and Brunswick Records publishing and Greensleeves Music/STB Music Publishing), and as an indie music supervisor. 

In a culmination of these experiences in the music industry, Jim ran the sync and licensing team at The Orchard for 8 and a half years and then brought all this experience to Ubisoft as the Senior Director of Music Partnerships and Talent Relationship for the music educational platform Rocksmith+.

Moderator: Mark Frieser, CEO at Sync Summit

Mark is an executive and entrepreneur who’s the founder of three companies in the music and tech spaces.  The First, Sync Summit (https://syncsummit.com), founded in 2013, is an educational company that through its events, educational courses, listening sessions and thriving online community helps people creating and licensing music for media to connect, create, collaborate, learn and network with and from leading executives   and thought leaders in television, advertising, brands, games, film and interactive media.  His second company, Disconic (https://disconic.com) is a sync agency that represents music from major labels and individual artists from across the world, including over 509% of the Japanese market and significant clients in Korea, Latin America, Europe and North America. His new company, Metavate.ai is developing a new solution to ensure better accuracy and updating of metadata across digital media.