Apollo Music Store made trio of legendary signings
Iconic tracks from Little Richard, Willie Nelson, and Natalie Cole can now be licensed instantaneously as the legendary trio has signed onto Apollo Music Store (AMS), the pre-cleared music store for advertising professionals and brands. Most notably, AMS has secured the licensing rights to Little Richard’s ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’, which ranked #94 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and has never been used in a commercial.
Between them, Nelson and Cole have accumulated 20 Grammy Awards and 9 Country Music Association Awards (CMAs), while Little Richard is one of the original inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an honor he shares alongside a host of music legends, including Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles and James Brown.
Koo Abuali, SVP Catalog Acquisition, comments on securing such high profile artists to AMS’s offering of top-shelf music:
It’s a long process, but I’m a tenacious woman! Joking aside, a lot of us in the company come from the music world and we have a very deep understanding of partnering a track with a brand. We also follow a particular set of principles that make our artists comfortable with the licensing model, such as not allowing our users to license our music for firearms and political campaigns – this is pretty much universally frowned upon by the artists we work with. Our aim is to always find the exact sweet spot where the interests of brands and the music people can meet.
Meticulously curated by a team of ad industry insiders and music supervisors, Apollo Music Store’s catalogue of hand-picked tracks has been developed specifically for the needs of advertising creators and producers. All music rights for tracks on the web platform have been negotiated in advance and the catalogue consists solely of pre-cleared music than can be instantly licensed for commercial use.
Abuali added:
In the last five years, I’d say that over 95 percent of briefs that we’ve received from agencies required preclearance. It might sound counter intuitive but the reality is that we shouldn’t propose music if we’re not sure that artists and labels want to license it. If our clients become attached to music that they can’t use then everybody’s job becomes more difficult, and it’s these unfortunate situations that producers are trying to avoid when they’re asking for pre-clearance. Working this way is a lot of work for music labels and publishers, and me, but in the end it translates into so many more opportunities for the artists.
AMS is the only licensing company to pre-clear all the necessary rights to A-List artists, including country legend Nelson, R&B icon Cole, and rock-and-roll pioneer Richard, that allows advertisers and brands to license tracks without the need to request any additional authorizations.
Philippe-Aubert Messier, CEO of Apollo Music Store:
We’re pretty psyched about this. The songs are just ridiculously nice and we’re confident our clients will come to us with great spots to showcase them (…) We’re working on bringing on board a number very high profile indie artists right now. The library is always evolving, so expect more exciting announcements later this year.
Apollo Music Store is an online music platform that caters to the music needs of advertising agencies and brands around the world. It offers music from some of the best artists in the world, that is cleared in advance to be used on brand content.