Qwire, the SaaS company aiming to transform music for picture, has added two highly experienced media executives and thinkers to its Board of Directors, Joy Marcus and Howard Appelbaum.

Joy Marcus is a Venture Partner at Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) where she focuses on digital media and commerce. She has served as a VP of International Business Development at MTV, SVP at Time Warner, GM for North America at Daily Motion, and EVP, GM of Digital Video at Condé Nast. Joy teaches entrepreneurship at Princeton University, beginning in 2014 as a James Wei Visiting Professor. In 2014, Joy received a Women of Power and Influence Award from the National Organization for Women (NOW).

“Qwire is set to be an industry leader in transforming music-for-media to the benefit of all parties — production studios, writers/composers, music publishers, and Performance Rights Organizations,” says Marcus. “I am very excited to be part of this adventure as a member of Qwire’s Board."

Since 2011, Howard Appelbaum has been President of Nielsen Entertainment, where he led Nielsen’s portfolio of entertainment information, data, and insight products serving the Music, Games, Book, Home Entertainment and Sports industries. Prior to his current role, Howard worked at Billboard first as Vice President of Marketing and ultimately serving as President. Before that, Howard held roles as VP of Licensing, VP of Events and COO of Nielsen Business Media as well as President of Brand and Business Development for Prometheus Global Media where he supported Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, Adweek and a portfolio of trade shows.

"It is exciting to join the board of Qwire,” agrees Appelbaum. “The team is top-notch and they are creating solutions to real problems for music licensing and royalty reporting that streamline processes resulting in important efficiencies and faster, more accurate accounting."

Founded by film and TV composers, Qwire’s software products increase productivity for music for picture teams, freeing them to do more of the creative work they love. “We are extremely excited to add Joy and Howard to our Qwire Board,” says CEO Scott Freiman. “Both Joy and Howard add many years of experience in business, strategy, music, and media that will be a great help to us as Qwire builds its business.”

After a funding round earlier this year, Qwire is currently building its next product, qwireCue, to automate the cue sheet and reporting process. This new product will complement Qwire’s first product, qwireClear, Qwire’s advanced management tool for music clearance and licensing.

The soundtracks to the shows and films we love have a secret. They were born out of stacks of paper overwhelming desks, dotted with Post-Its and White Out. They sprang from personal spreadsheets that only one person can find or navigate; from data entered numerous times into multiple spreadsheets, keyed into multiple software applications, and stored in multiple paper files. They involved negotiations with little to no historical information to reference -- and mistakes that can cost in the six figures and delays that meant payment headaches for writers, publishers, and music labels.

These experiences are a regular part of licensing music for picture and reporting usages for the purposes of properly paying out royalties, a $4 billion-a-year industry with more than 2 million musical works licensed annually. They are challenges music supervisors, composers, PROs, music clearance and licensing teams, and film and broadcast execs grapple with every day.

Qwire, a SaaS firm founded by production music veterans, has set out to clear the desks and clean up the mess. By knitting together and centralizing scattered data and creating a unified workflow, Qwire’s software products are building on how music supervisors, music editors, composers, and administrators already work while transforming this work into a streamlined, efficient ecosystem with benefits for all sides.

“Everyone involved wants and needs to focus on the creative part of their work, not paperwork,” says Scott Freiman, co-founder and CEO of Qwire. “But when you are coping with tasks that are 50% or more manual processes and with data that’s coming from fragmented sources along the way, it’s hard and very time consuming to get the right licenses, pay rights holders quickly and accurately, or even figure out a basic budget across departments. We’ve estimated that cue sheets alone cost studios and PROs millions of dollars collectively in extra labor costs.”

Qwire was founded by Emmy-nominated composer Jon Ehrlich (House, Parenthood), composer Leigh Roberts (Power Rangers), and musician and tech exec Freiman (the man behind “Deconstructing the Beatles”). Freiman also happens to be a veteran software entrepreneur who took the tangled web of communication between auto dealers and lenders and turned it into a $100 million-dollar public company. His passion for distilling paper systems into sleek technology, combined with Ehrlich and Roberts' deep knowledge of the business, has led to a family of products designed to serve all sides of the complex music-for-picture equation.

Qwire has a set of interlocking products designed to cover the entire lifecycle of music post-production.

qwireClear: The only software product that unites all budget and rights information related to music licensing for picture, including the entire range of letters and notices, into a single platform, from quote to license.

qwireTracks: A database of licensing information available to all Qwire clients that centralizes music rights information for recordings and publishing, to prevent repetitive research and speed up quotes.

qwireCue: The latest product from Qwire, qwireCue helps teams get data into cue sheets as content is created, as opposed to long after the fact. Featuring video integration, support for audio recognition, and an easy-to-use, modern user interface, qwireCue will allow cue sheets to be completed and submitted with much less time and effort, enabling quicker and more accurate submissions to Performance Rights Organizations.

Before Qwire, music-for-picture processes were (and often still are) mired in paperwork. The collection and documentation of cue metadata (cues are the musical moments in films, TV shows, etc. that are subject to royalty payments) had always been a manual, forensic process of tracking down information, long after the fact, about content from creators who have already moved onto other projects, by under-resourced workers with little to no incentive to collect and record information accurately. Composers would get frequent pleas to provide data in retrospect, information that can take time and effort to reconstruct. Teams would be negotiating with music libraries, labels, or composers without access to valuable, pertinent data that current or past colleagues had already collected and done the legwork on.

All of these interactions lived on scattered papers, in random files on individual computers. The software applications designed to facilitate these processes were heavily siloed, limiting historical analysis, real-time budget reporting, or even communication between departments. Everyone involved, people devoted to supporting creative work, suffered from the disarray.

Ehrlich and Roberts decided to tackle the mess--which Ehrlich likes to compare to an overstuffed garage--when Ehrlich was hit by a tsunami of work on multiple TV shows and needed to maximize his output. The two composers created an application to share and manage their work and were shocked at the results. Before long, they had an application that could also help music supervisors and editors -- with all parties able to share and benefit from each other’s information.

“Once we got it to a place I could use it, I could manage those shows that I thought would overwhelm me and I was actually happy doing more work. I wasn’t constantly being interrupted with details that were critical but routine. I could manage it all from my laptop from a plane. It was life changing,” Ehrlich recounts. “Clearance and music supervisors have the same problems. They are also juggling multiple projects and a ton of paperwork that interrupts their flow and ability to stay in creative mode.”

The two composers connected with Freiman, who grasped their vision and helped turn their software into a suite of robust applications with studio-level security. Though Qwire was started by composers, the company’s first software products are designed to help with music clearance (qwireClear) and cue sheet reporting (qwireCue). (The company plans to launch related applications in the not-too-distant future.)

These products have attracted interest from major studios and from PROs, who are all interested in ways to reduce the pain of music clearance and royalty payments. “Along the way, we’ve thought of Qwire as working toward integration, not disruption. We’re adding value, taking what’s there and improving efficiency,” explains Freiman. “You can’t find better ways to pay royalties or streamline music licensing without cleaning it up first. The processes involved have been in place for decades. But we think more efficiency will lead to a great deal of innovation over time -- and we hope Qwire will lead the way.”

“Our overall vision is a big part of what sets us far apart from the tangle of siloed solutions that are just band aid fixes,” says Ehrlich.

Qwire, creator of SaaS software to streamline royalty reporting and licensing for music-for-picture, has received over $2 million in additional funding from current and new investors. This will expand the New York and Los Angeles-based company’s sales efforts and accelerate development and enhancement of its cue sheet reporting tools.

“This new investment demonstrates investors’ confidence in Qwire and in our software’s ability to transform music post production and royalty reporting,” said founder and CEO Scott Freiman. “This funding will allow us to take the company to the next level, as we continue to license qwireClear to major film/TV studios, and we bring our next-generation cue sheet management and reporting software – qwireCue – to market.”

Jerry Labowitz, former Director of Equities Research for the Americas for Merrill Lynch, agreed: "Qwire is seeing interest from a large and growing range of companies in the music-for-media business. I was happy to participate in the growth of this innovative company and their transformative software tools.”

About Qwire:
Qwire creates collaborative, cloud-based software that addresses significant problems with music licensing and royalty reporting common to companies working with music-for-picture, including some of the largest media companies in the world —  film/TV studios, trailer houses, video game development companies, advertising agencies, and professional sports networks — as well as rights holders (e.g. music labels and music publishers) and Performance Rights Organizations.

For more information, visit www.qwire.com.