“Your order is currently under evaluation by our antifraud specialists. We perform this verification to prevent unauthorized use of your PayPal account and personal details. In order to validate your payment and complete your order, please provide us with the following documents during the next two business days:

Please make sure that the documentation you provide is valid and legible. The name and address on your documentation must correspond with the information registered in your order. Your documentation should not be older than 6 months. Send only documents received by mail from the Utility companies. Send all the information and documents required as soon as possible to complete the review process.”

This company actually expects its customers to send of copies of the same kinds of documents that one can use to apply for a credit card or loan, open a bank account, etc in order to “validate” a $9.95 payment through Paypal, a service that already has built-in buyer and seller protection provisions?

Hmm… what if I don’t get my utility bill in the mail because I have online billing? And my driver’s license or passport cannot be older than 6 months? In California, our driver licenses are issued for 5 year terms, and passports are issued for much longer periods – so much for that.

My first reaction was that this might be a sophisticated phishing scam to get people to give up identity documents, but amazingly, it’s not a scam – I checked it out and the payment processor is legit. But it serves as a great example of how policies that come across as unreasonable paranoid or inappropriate in the context of what’s being sold can alienate customers and damage a company’s reputation quickly.

Let’s see what lessons can be learned here:

* If you’re worried about theft of your intellectual property, don’t treat your customers like criminals. Some companies that are concerned about e-commerce theft including Amazon and others have a simple solution: for those transactions they’re concerned about, call the seller on the phone and verify his or her information.

* When you’re designing security or anti-theft policy, make the policy proportionate to the risk. By demanding customers jump through ridiculously elaborate “hoops” that are way out of line for the type of purchase you’re trying to get them to conduct, you will probably just drive them away.

* When you partner with another company, make sure you know all the details about how that company is treating your customers. In this case, it was the payment processor, not the software vendor that was making the outrageous claims. But it’s the reputation of the software vendor that will be damaged by this kind of paranoid, unrealistic demands being placed on customers. I’m not a customer of the payment processor, I’m a customer of the software vendor, yet the payment processor is sabotaging the vendor’s customer relationship badly.

* Take reasonable precautions to guard against theft, but don’t come across as paranoid or unreasonable to the people you want to do business with. Can you imagine if a dry cleaner asked its customers to sign a 3-page binding agreement with all kinds of tough-sounding legal language and demands simply to drop off a few shirts for cleaning? Or a mall parking garage forcing everybody who came in to park their car to sign a contract in the office simply to park their car in the garage for an hour while shopping? In both of these situations there are basic legal protections already in place for both the customer and the provider of services that don’t require demanding the customer to undertake unreasonable actions simply for the “privilege” of purchasing a good or service.

A useful thing to do from time to time is to take a look at your entire sales cycle and focus on how your company appears to prospective and current customers at every stage of the cycle, from initial contact through product or service delivery. Study each and every possible interaction a customer can have with you or any third parties that handle any aspect(s) of the cycle for you, and try to identify and resolve situations that could result in customers being treated unreasonably.

In the past, many composers outside the US believed that to be successful, they needed to move to Los Angeles and compete with LA composers for the attention of filmmakers. More and more this is not the case, with composers in different countries finding more and more local independent film opportunities where the films are being picked up by top Hollywood distributors, providing more exposure, visibility and prestige for the composers involved. While many composers still look to LA as the “top of the mountain” of film scoring, composers are increasingly able to live elsewhere and work with LA filmmakers via Internet, thanks to a new generation of Internet-savvy filmmakers who look globally for the talent and music they need.

Licensing: Worldwide Dealmaking Today

Since licensing music doesn’t involve face-to-face contact in most cases, the world of music licensing has already taken on a significant international component. Composers and songwriters worldwide pitch their music to libraries, production companies and music supervisors on a daily basis via the Internet, and with some luck and a lot of talent, an international composer can find some significant success working with US production companies and libraries. Likewise, US composers may want to spend more time and resources considering the increasing regional and international marketplace for licensed music and score composers for international films.

Score Recording: More Orchestras, More Recording Opportunities

While the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) union considers whether to offer buyouts for film and television score recordings as the rest of the world does, an increasing number of international orchestras are competing for score recording projects, for both face-to-face live scoring and scoring live via Internet using Source Connect ProTools plug-ins to provide a “live” studio experience. The increased number of orchestras present composers with more options, both financially and musically, for using live instruments in their score recordings. We’re also seeing increased competition within the US for score recording, with Seattle keeping very busy (some months working 20+ scoring days a month) and new competitors like Louisiana, and soon Arizona creating new opportunities for composers. The AFM faces a very tough decision: offer a buyout to better compete with the growing number of domestic and international scoring orchestras, or preserve residual payments to protect US musicians’ hard-fought benefits, gained over decades of negotiations. There’s no easy answer to that question, and AFM President Tom Lee has the unenviable task of trying to carve out a solution that addresses both international competitive aspects and the livelihoods and existing contract benefits enjoyed by AFM recording musicians.

While there are those in our industry that will bemoan the fact that more composers, songwriters and musicians are competing for a finite amount of work, I cannot support that attitude. Things are evolving quickly in all aspects of our culture, technology and business, and the music industry is no exception. The record industry complained and ignored the worldwide “free music” Napster phenomenon until it was too late, and now what’s left of the record industry spends much of its time and money playing catch-up, trying to salvage what’s left of its business with questionable schemes including lawsuits against individual music users and adding recording industry fees to college tuition bills to compensate for file sharing.

Composers, songwriters and musicians focusing on the film and television market cannot afford not to be aware of the worldwide aspects of the industry, and the worldwide competition. While worldwide competition may make things tougher and more competitive, smart musicians will realize that the same expanded world environment also presents new opportunities for work and career success, whether it’s accessing a foreign indie film market for composing or licensing gigs, or musicians playing on an international composer’s tracks via recording by Internet.

The real danger is not global competition, it’s ignoring global competition and not factoring it into your overall career plan.

Yes, we’re only talking about Mac software here as I’m a devoted fan of the Macintosh. Years ago I worked as a computer consultant and financial software designer, and spent a lot of time with Windows. Suffice to say, I won’t be going back any time soon. For me, the Macintosh operating system is simply better and the user experience can’t be beat. The operating system feels like a finely engineered piece of machinery where every corner, every moving part has been precisely designed from top quality components.

Macintosh software I use regularly and highly recommend:

Web Browsing
Firefox and Safari – two great browsing applications. I prefer Firefox for most of what I do, as it’s more customizable and third-party support is better.

Word Processing
Pages, part of iWork 09 from Apple. Far more streamlined than Microsoft Word 2008, and not as sluggish as Word can be, especially with larger documents.

Spreadsheets
Numbers, part of iWork 09 from Apple. A different user interface than the widely-used Excel, but the same kind of streamlined, solid performance as Pages.

Presentation
Keynote, part of iWork 09 from Apple, is far superior to Powerpoint, and can create some eye-popping presentations even using the built-in templates.

Email
Mail.app, part of Mac OSX. As I’m away from the office frequently, I use an iPhone to handle email and net tasks when I’m not at the office. To avoid the need to manually sync email from my Mac to the iPhone, I use a Microsoft Exchange based mail server service called ExchangeMyMail.com – with an Exchange account, I can see the same email boxes, calendar events, and contacts on my iPhone that I do on my Mac, and everything automatically syncs. For years I used Microsoft Entourage, because it supported Exchange, but recently switched to Mail.app when I upgraded my Mac to OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard, which includes integrated Exchange support built right into the operating system. Mail.app is faster, works better with Exchange, and doesn’t store all my emails in one giant database file the way Entourage does.

Contacts
Apple’s Address Book, part os Mac OSX. Works with Exchange, any change shows up on my iPhone automatically, and integrated across the OSX operating system to other programs.

Personal Information Manager
I use a great program called Yojimbo to organize everything from serial numbers for software to account numbers, notes about any topic, various access information, and literally everything I used to put on yellow post-it notes. Very handy program, allows sensitive information to be encrypted, easy to use.

Task Management
Things is an award-winning Mac program that works nicely with its iPhone version to provide an easy to use, full featured to-do list.

Graphics Editing
Pixelmator does everything I need and more, without the bulk and extra features of Photoshop.

PC Emulation
On those occasions where I have to test web pages using Windows, I use VMware Fusion running Windows XP. Works better and faster than Parallels.

Instant Messaging
I use Adium, a free program for the Mac that allows you to communicate with anyone with an AOL, .Mac, Yahoo, or MSN instant message account. Although it doesn’t support video, it’s fantastic as a single program to handle all IM tasks.

Video Chat and Video Calls
Skype and iChat, depending on the situation. I spend a good deal of my time traveling, and routing calls to my Macbook Pro via Skype makes staying in touch easy.

Blog and Twitter Posting
Blogo is a great program that allows me to compose blog posts on my Mac and upload quickly and easily to my blog. Also includes multiple-account Twitter support, providing a single place to post to blogs and Twitter.

HTML Web Page Editing
Coda from Panic is great for HTML level web page editing, including a built-in preview window based on Safari and built-in FTP to upload and download files from your site.

FTP (website file transfers)
Transmit from Panic provides rock solid FTP, and its Favorites list works well even when you’re managing a large number of sites.

PDF Archives
I’m a big fan of being as paper-less as possible, and Paperless by Mariner Software is a big help in this regard, although I’m now looking at DevonTHINK as a more fully-featured PDF archive program.

Backup
Apple’s Time Machine (part of OSX) is handy, but I use SuperDuper because the end result of the backup is a disk that is a match for the disk you are backing up, and is bootable. In case of a disk problem, just switch to the backup disk and you’re instantly ready to go.

These are some of the programs I use that I find most helpful. I welcome any comments about Mac programs you find useful!

The writer still gets writers performance royalties from these placements, but far more importantly, the writer retains the copyright to the music. That, to me, is a very important factor that can make retitling a far better option for composers than other deals where the composer is forced to give up copyright for life, hoping that the music library will generate placements.

While traditional library deals where the library purchases copyright offer some amount of up-front payment, the lifetime royalty earnings are usually far more important than whatever up-front money is paid initially to purchase the copyright. If a composer retains copyright, he or she has the ability to place that music in any number of different productions or libraries depending on who is best suited to market that particular type of music.

Composers who give up copyright end up with no legal rights to the music they write, and must “trust” whoever the music is sold to when it comes to accounting for placements, cue sheets, and more. In these deals, the library holds all the cards and the composer often has no ability to audit or check the library’s accounting, leaving the composer with little or no ability to verify if what he’s being paid is even correct, since client contact information is rarely disclosed on composer royalty statements from libraries. And why should it be disclosed anyway? The libraries consider these people and companies to be “their” customers, not the composer’s customers. The last thing any library wants is a composer calling up a client, checking on whether cue sheets have been filed, etc.

As we watch the digital landscape being reshaped and negotiated when it comes to music rights, one thing becomes clear: If you don’t own copyright, you don’t have a “seat at the table” when it comes to participating in how the future of music royalties will evolve. And financially speaking, retaining control over a lifetime of potential royalty and sync earnings makes owning copyright a no-brainer.

Bill Gates became one of the world’s richest men and built Microsoft, all based on a single smart decision he made decades ago to license rather than sell the copyright to his software to IBM for the first PC. Retaining copyright worked for Gates, and it will work for composers.

Looking at the career of being a film and television composer, our industry over the last 15 years has seen a massive influx of people come into the business and market themselves as score composers. The resulting massive oversupply of composers combined with a rapid increase in the number of quality of music libraries dumping thousands of instrumental tracks onto the marketplace for little or no up-front sync fees has created a shrinking market for custom score music where downward pressure on composer fees exists like never before.

Yet whenever I speak at events attended primarily by music college students, the vast majority of attendees seem to have little knowledge about these harsh business issues, instead focusing their efforts on developing the technical and creative skills involved in score composing.

As score composers are pushed out by music libraries and recording musicians lose jobs in favor of low-cost sample libraries, the viability of many jobs in our industry is changing very rapidly. This is something I fear our educational institutions simply don’t want to confront. It’s much easier (especially at admissions time) to focus on technical and creative skills, ignoring the fact that there is a rapidly shrinking marketplace for those skills in the real-world marketplace. This is massively unfair to students and their parents who spend tens of thousands of dollars and years of hard work on college educations, only to find out that full-time job prospects for the students upon graduation are slim to nonexistent. Things were bad enough in this respect before the recent problems with the economy, and now they’re even worse.

As technology rapidly changes the creative environment as well as the business environment that is the music industry, music industry educators need to take a long, hard look at what, exactly, they’re training their students to do and how viable a career they’re really preparing their graduates for. Educators need to be honest with students before enrollment about the economic state of the music industry and just how viable their intended career may be, and educators need to equip their students not just with creative and technological skills, but with the business, negotiating, and marketing skills that they’ll need to carve out a career in today’s tough music industry.