Full service creative music licensing agency Big Sync Music has expanded the business into Australia and New Zealand.
The largest global buyer of its kind, Big Sync sources music and offers tech-enabled music services to agencies and brands.
It has worked with Johnnie Walker, Samsung, Amazon, Dove, Knorr, Magnum and AXE as well as content creators from TV and over-the-top (OTT) networks and the film and video gaming industries.
The Australian and New Zealand office will be led by Michael Szumowski who has been appointed as country manager.
Szumowksi joins the Asia Pacific division of Big Sync’s global network and will be driving the company’s creative and business development strategy in the region from Sydney.
He brings more than 20 years of music and advertising industry experience and is an award winning songwriter, producer, musician and composer.
He has worked with both Australian and international artists, resulting in a host of top 10 records across the globe as well as scoring his own music for TV and advertising.
He also has experience in talent and commercial client acquisition, management, and music supervision in Australia as well as overseas working with clients including Uber, Toyota and Mitsubishi.
“I look forward to working with local brands and creative agencies introducing them to Big Sync’s unique and award winning creative approach which has seen the company deliver amazing results for some of the world’s biggest brands,” Szumowksi says.
Unilever has come on board as Big Sync’s “anchor client” in the region but the business will also be working with others in need of music solutions.
“We also work with creative agencies across the board,” Szumowksi told AdNews.
“[We’re working with] invariably anyone who is looking for a musical solution, whether that’s a bespoke composition, whether it’s finding a well-known track, finding a brand new artist, even right down to finding the right artists to perform at a corporate event that aligns brand sound.”
Szumowksi says the company works with its clients to produce a brand’s audio identity which ensures consistency just as a visual identity would.
“We end up with a blueprint [that] a brand can use across all communication and it just provides a real consistency for anything a brand does musically including brand campaigns, retail campaigns, social media, one-off events [or] anything to provide a more targeted and more cohesive approach in music,” he says.
Despite being a one-person show in Sydney at the moment, Szumowksi says being part of Big Sync’s global network means they can reach out to composers all of the word to help brands find the right sound.
“If it’s K-Pop then we’ll go to our composers in Korea, if it’s Latin American then we’ll look at our composers in South America,” he says.
“It provides global reach that we’re really excited about.”
Big Sync is a wholly owned subsidiary of global music tech company Songtradr which is owned and operated by Australian expat Paul Wiltshire.
Wiltshire, who is based in Los Angeles and has produced music for Avril Lavigne, Backstreet Boys and Delta Goodrem, says opening up in Sydney as well as Paris and Hamburg was a “natural progression”.
“Expanding into Australia and New Zealand with Michael at the helm will enable us to help local brands, agencies and content creators meet their music needs from a cultural, creative and commercial perspective as well as opening up new opportunities for rights owners to reach new audiences,” Wiltshire says.
His business acquired Big Sync a year ago, and together they have developed technologies that allow Big Sync to provide its customers with attribution matching, rights compliance, B2B AI-powered music search, and music rights value estimation.
“Since we established this partnership between the two companies, we were able to provide a lot [more] insight,” Wiltshire says.
“Our technologies provide deep global music consumption insights, such as demographics and geographics, along with comprehensive transactional data and AI-guided music discovery, allowing us to provide our clients with music that is on brand at the right value.
“Put simply, we believe in data-informed creative excellence. Aligning the brand or product target audience attributes with music audience attributes creates a deeper connection with the consumer, moving them through the sales funnel.”
Songtradr launched its global B2B marketplace for music rights licensing in 2016 and is now the largest music licensing platform in the world with over 500,000 artists, songwriters, labels and publishers using the platform.
The platform also distributes music for artists to major platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music and Tik Tok and licenses music across all verticals, ranging from TV, film, advertising and brands, video games and other media.
Big Sync’s Sydney office launches alongside new offices in Paris and Hamburg.
It also has offices in London, New York, Los Angeles, Stockholm and Singapore with a global team of about 70 people.
The company has plans to grow to approximately 100 people globally by July 2020 with approximately 35% of those being in software engineering and data science.
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