Business
Cutting Edge Media Music, A Division Of ‘Stranger Things’ And ‘John Wick’ Music Services Firm, Lands $100M In New Financing (Deadline)
Cutting Edge Media Music, a division of a firm that has provided music services for films, TV series and video games including John Wick, Stranger Things and Red Dead Redemption, has secured $100 million in new financing.
Nashville-based Pinnacle Financial Partners, which already had a relationship with Cutting Edge, led a consortium of financial backers.
CEMM, a division of the London-based Cutting Edge Group, is a financing and investment company focused on music for film, television, video games and other areas. Its parent company handles music publishing, record label and music services for films, TV shows, musical theatre productions and video games.
“I look forward to our partnership with Pinnacle to help give the next wave of film and TV composers the opportunity to monetize their catalogues,” Cutting Edge Group CEO Philip Moross said in a press release.Andy Moats, the director of music, sports and entertainment for Pinnacle, said CEMM’s “deep understanding of the film/TV composer universe aligns with our mission to honor and support creative communities.”
Cutting Edge Group’s origins date back to 2008, and the firm has grown by exploring new financial models in the area of music for screens. The traditional setup of soundtrack sales has been turned upside down by streaming and other changes to the landscape. Cutting Edge’s music services credits include more than 1,000 films, TV series, musical theater productions and video games. Among them are Stranger Things, Bridgerton, The King’s Speech, Moonlight, Drive, Star Trek: Discovery, Fury, John Wick, Sicario, Whiplash, Hacksaw Ridge and The Walking Dead; Broadway shows such as Matilda, The Color Purple, Anastasia and My Fair Lady; and video games such as Sunset Overdrive, Assassins Creed Valhalla, Red Dead Redemption and Cyberpunk 2077.
Full article available via Deadline here.
Cutting Edge Secures Another $100M To Buy Film and TV Music Rights (Music Business Worldwide)
UK-born Cutting Edge Media Music (CEMM) has secured $100 million in financing from a group of banks led by Pinnacle Financial Partners.
Pinnacle Financial Partners, based in Nashville, manages nearly $2 billion in entertainment-related accounts with clients including artists, songwriters, international music label and publishing businesses, film and TV studios, and a slew of sports properties and other entities.
Cutting Edge’s capital raise follows last year’s news that it had partnered with London-based investment firm Blantyre Capital to commit $125 million to acquire film and TV music rights. Cutting Edge says that the funds from last year’s round “has been fully deployed”.
The new funds, announced today (February 14), will bolster CEMM’s cash reserves as it invests in music for film, television, video games and more.
“The value of music assets has exploded in the past five years,” added Philip Moross. “I look forward to our partnership with Pinnacle to help give the next wave of film and TV composers the opportunity to monetize their catalogues.”
CEMM is part of the wider Cutting Edge Group, a financing and investment company that also operates other units that provide music publishing, record label and other music services to feature films, TV shows, musical theatre productions and video games.
Led by founder and CEO Philip Moross, the group is known for providing music services to TV shows like Stranger Things, Bridgerton, The King’s Speech, Moonlight, Drive, Star Trek: Discovery, Fury, John Wick, Sicario, Whiplash, Hacksaw Ridge, and The Walking Dead.
Cutting Edge also provides music to broadway shows like Matilda, The Color Purple, Anastasia, and My Fair Lady; and triple-A video games such as: Sunset Overdrive, Assassins Creed Valhalla, Red Dead Redemption and Cyberpunk 2077.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn Of Ragnarok won the first Grammy Award For Best Score Soundtrack For Video Games/Interactive Media at the recent 2023 GRAMMYs.
Commenting on the financing led by Pinnacle, Moross noted that “CEMM has recently deployed over $100 million on music publishing rights owned by composers who write music for film and TV.”
“The value of music assets has exploded in the past five years,” added Moross. “I look forward to our partnership with Pinnacle to help give the next wave of film and TV composers the opportunity to monetize their catalogues.”
Andy Moats, the Director of music, sports and entertainment for Pinnacle Financial Partners, said their investment in Cutting Edge is in support of the latter’s latest venture.
“Their deep understanding of the film/TV composer universe and artist-friendly approach aligns with our mission to honor and support creative communities throughout the world,” Moats added.
“It’s been a privilege to work closely with so many world class composers on this initiative. We continue to be excited about this space and we are eager to make this new round of financing available to the composer community,” said Tim Hegarty, head of merger and acquisitions for Cutting Edge Group.
Cutting Edge’s other business units include music publisher Cutting Edge Music Publishing, film, TV & video game soundtracks division Lakeshore Records, musical theatre soundtracks unit Broadway Records, licensing platform Music.Film and custom music house White Stork.
The company also owns wellness label Myndstream, home to artists who have collectively amassed billions of streams across Spotify, Apply, Pandora and Amazon, Cutting Edge says.
In 2018, Cutting Edge-led investor group Film Score Records sold movie soundtrack and score label Varèse Sarabande to Concord Music. The deal saw Cutting Edge becoming a client of Concord Music, which started providing global distribution, marketing, and label services to Cutting Edge.
Full article available via Music Business Worldwide here.
Has This Musician Found the Cure For Insomnia? (The Times)
The synth pioneer Chuck Wild wrote for Michael Jackson and Max Headroom. Then he became a sleep music superstar.
Chuck Wild is, in a way, just what you would expect from a man whose job is to put people to sleep. The 76-year-old sleep music star shows up at the airport near his Los Angeles-area home in a beige jumper, beige shorts, beige socks and beige shoes. “How was the flight?” he asks in a raspy voice with a wide smile, looking very much the part of the kindly grandfather.
But Wild, as the stage name implies, has lived a life that could not be further removed from what he does now, pumping out auditory Ambien for the sleep-deprived. To wit, when we climb into his very sensible Honda and head towards his two-bedroom bungalow on a quiet dead-end street, he asks that his city remain nameless. He’s had stalkers, you see.
These were not superfans of Liquid Mind, the name of his one-man band that has produced titles such as Breathe in Me, Serenity or A Gentle Rain in My Soul. Rather, the unwanted attention stemmed from his many years working with Michael Jackson. Wild recounts, in his best rendition of the high-pitched Jackson voice, what the king of pop told him after hiring him back in the 1990s: “He said, ‘Chuck, I want you to make sounds the human ear has never heard before.’ ”
But that is a whole other chapter in the extraordinary life story of Wild, lord of the slumber. These days, sleep is sexy. Meditation apps such as Calm and Headspace have built gigantic businesses by “appifying” sleep aids and meditation. Wild, a prolific keyboardist, producer and composer, has been at it longer than virtually anyone, going back to the late 1980s.
His tracks often top ten minutes and are not so much songs as long-held chords that bleed one into the next — a skill he honed playing the church organ as a child in Kansas City. His “zero beat” music may be the closest human approximation to whale song or, as Steve Perry, the former lead singer of Journey, once put it, “No vocals, no drums, just ethereal synths.” Perry listened to Liquid Mind almost exclusively during a period of personal struggle in which he had fallen “out of love with music”.
Wild, a former rocker, has quietly turned himself, over decades, into one of the world’s most commercially successful sleep musicians. He has released 18 studio albums. His music is played in hospices and hospitals, and is studied by sleep experts around the world. Liquid Mind ranks perennially at the top, or near it, of the Billboard New Age charts. On the American music streaming service Pandora, his tracks have racked up 1.5 billion listens. “My music is sedative,” Wild says proudly. “It helps people — and it helps me.”
But it is only now that Wild’s moment may have truly arrived. A growing body of clinical studies has linked lack of sleep to a cascade of health problems, from increased risk of heart disease and diabetes to higher rates of industrial and traffic accidents. The National Institutes of Health, America’s top medical authority, reckons that more than a fifth of Americans — almost 70 million people — have sleep disorders, describing it as a “serious public health concern”. Germany’s public health system last month became the first in the world to approve a digital sleep improvement programme, under which “treatments” such as downloads of relaxing music and lifestyle coaching are reimbursed in the same way that pills are.
In short, the science of sleep is finally catching up with the fecund mind of Wild — and the composer finds himself at the centre of an ambitious attempt to transform his music into medicine. Philip Moross, the 61-year-old British entrepreneur behind Cutting Edge Media Music, a television and film music label that has produced the scores for hits such as The King’s Speech and Stranger Things, snapped up Real Music, the record label to which Liquid Mind is signed, in 2019. His plan: to put Wild’s music through a battery of scientific trials to prove that it is, in fact, as good or better than a sleeping pill.Moross’s son, Freddie, 28, runs Myndstream, the Cutting Edge wellness label under which Liquid Mind sits. “When you look at music that’s being relied upon in healthcare situations, it’s not regulated,” he says. “There’s no FDA [Food and Drug Administration] stamp saying this is music that should appear in surgeries. We want to try to accomplish this. What better place to start than with Chuck?”
Wild’s conversion to the art of the soporific did not come by choice. It was, instead, the product of an acute personal crisis. Liquid Mind was his salvation. “I almost killed myself,” Wild says matter-of-factly. He was not suicidal. He just almost worked himself to death.
For a time Wild lived the rock’n’roll dream. He was the keyboardist for Missing Persons, a rock band heavy on mascara, big hair and tight trousers; the lead singer, Dale Bozzio, was famed for her coconut-shell bras. They were regulars at the fabled LA music club Whisky a Go Go and played to crowds of tens of thousands. “We warmed up for David Bowie at the Us festival,” Wild says. “It was incredible.”
Wild rubbed shoulders with legends including the Allman Brothers and Quincy Jones, scored an Emmy-winning television show, wrote music for the Pointer Sisters and, of course, collaborated with the biggest pop star in history. For a boy from Missouri who showed up in LA “with $300 in my pocket”, it was the stuff of fairytales. But like any tale of Hollywood fame, it could not last. “All my music was fast. Everything I did was fast,” he recalls. “I couldn’t do anything that was slow.”
In 1988 Wild was hired to score the final season of Max Headroom, a quintessentially 1980s television show created by Channel 4 and sold into America. For a brief moment the programme, centred on the “computer-generated” character Max, captured the zeitgeist and Wild was working 20-hour days. He guzzled industrial-strength coffee and for months captured only fleeting moments of sleep. One day he found himself struggling to breathe. “I thought I was having a heart attack,” he recalls.
A friend threw him in his Porsche and sped to the nearest doctor. It was not a heart attack, the doctor told him, but a panic attack. “I’ll never forget this in my whole life,” Wild recalls. “In one hand, the doctor held up meditation instructions. In the other, it was a medication prescription. He said, ‘The two of these — it’s only one letter different. And they’re both as effective for treating anxiety. Your choice.’ ”
Wild took both, but neither helped immediately. Something in him had broken.
As a gay man in the 1980s, Wild had watched friend after friend die from Aids. “I stopped counting at 65,” he says, welling up. “We would go there and sit at these funerals, the group of gays. At some, the parents would look at us and tell us we needed to leave. None of us cried. I didn’t cry for four years.”
That first panic attack was like a dam breaking. He would have several a day, rendering him a barely functional hermit. “I was insane,” he says. “When you are having a panic attack, you’re not very rational. Everything was jerky movements. It was, like, ‘I gotta eat really quick, I got to do this really quick.’ ”
As he slowly emerged from the fog, via meditation and therapy, his psychologist gave him an ultimatum: no more therapy until he took a single day for himself.
So Wild booked one night in a motel on the coast, ventured out to a rock and watched the waves break. He was 42 years old and had been in Los Angeles for nearly a decade, but had never gone to the beach until that moment. “All of a sudden I was feeling very relaxed and I thought, ‘What’s going on?’ I was sitting there and I said to myself, ‘I wonder if it’s the sound of the ocean? Maybe the sound of the liquid is relaxing my mind.’ ” he says. “Liquid Mind was born out of pain. It was born out of sleep deprivation. It was lemonade from lemons.” That was in 1988.
Walk into Wild’s one-storey, two-bedroom home and “cocoon” comes to mind. It is the middle of the day but all the blinds are closed. Soundproofing covers the doors. The windows are quadruple-paned — so as not to bother the neighbours. It is quiet and clean. The fridge is sparsely stocked: an unmistakable sign of Wild’s bachelorhood. This is not entirely by choice, he says. “At a certain point, I just decided to stop trying. All my boyfriends died.”
His living room is functionally the “studio”. It includes a grand piano piled high with papers and computers, two banks of keyboards, a central sound-engineering console and at least four sets of speakers, each with distinct characteristics. Wild still works a gruelling schedule — up to 12 hours a day. A single album can take a year to produce, not least because he and his co-producer Jonathan, a university student, can only work on the actual music for a few hours at a time before one of them conks out.
Wild plays all the instruments and then painstakingly mixes them together so the chords blend seamlessly. “In music therapy you want to avoid what they call an ‘arousal response’. You don’t want to do anything that attracts attention,” he says. Why all the speakers? “Every speaker gives you a different message. Most engineers learn one set of speakers and they do brilliant work. I do this because I know that people listen to my music on ghetto blasters, on headsets, on telephones. I want it to sound equally good everywhere.”
There are plenty of studies that have shown music to be beneficial: for babies, for insomniacs, for students, for older adults. Indeed the practice of music therapy, for sleep and other therapeutic purposes, has been around for decades. If you count Tibetan monks, who famously use chanting to slow their heartbeats, it has been around for centuries. But now that sleep is “a thing”, both among public health officials and in popular culture, there is renewed urgency to find solutions. Sleep has been transformed into a metric to be tracked — by your phone, your smartwatch or fitness tracker.
At Myndstream, Moross has partnered with SleepScore Labs, a maker of sleep analysis devices, to carry out a longitudinal study of people with sleep disorders. Their patterns will be monitored for three weeks without intervention and then they will be exposed to Wild’s music. The study will also test alternative sleep music to see whether Wild’s outperforms.
This is critical. The dawn of so-called “generative” artificial intelligence has led to an explosion in computer-generated tracks. Scroll through Spotify or Apple Music and they are chock-full of sleep songs pumped out by nameless computer programs. Tracks often clock in at just longer than 30 seconds — the minimum length to trigger a payout by the platforms. “The question when we bought this catalogue,” Moross says, “was whether AI would overtake ambient music. We took a pretty heavy bet that actually, you will never replace human creation.”
Wild’s music education started aged four, when he was diagnosed with Perthes disease, a hip condition that, in 1953, was treated by a year of bed rest followed by another year in a leg brace. Wild’s parents hired a caretaker who also happened to be a pianist. Every day she would carry him to the piano and teach him how to play.
He eventually got back on his feet, but stuck with the lessons through his teenage years. At church, he convinced the organist to let him sit with her during services and eventually to play. By the time he went to university, the Vietnam draft was plucking healthy young men from the population in their thousands and sending them off to fight in the jungle. Wild’s father, a former US army colonel, told him to join the ROTC, a university programme that offered part-time training and allowed cadets to enter military service at a higher rank. Wild spent four years in the navy, where he served as an admiral’s aide. It was in the military that he first felt an acute sense of danger due to his sexuality. “I knew I was gay at the time, and being gay in the navy is a big no-no,” he says. “I had seen all these people get court-martialled and dishonourably discharged for being gay.”
When he returned to Kansas City, he fulfilled a promise to work at his father’s insurance company but also started playing in cover bands at night. After a couple of years he went on the road and then into the music business full time. And then, eventually, to total burnout.
It was Michael Jackson who helped launch his new life. After his beachfront revelation, Wild had started to work on his “slow music” and, at first, it was a labour of love. “By 1992 I was giving away hundreds of cassettes,” he says. “I just thought, ‘This music is helping me.’ I used to listen to it 24 hours a day at home.” No one, however, was paying for Liquid Mind music back then.
He taught music to get by, but didn’t make anywhere near enough to start his own label. An industry friend told him he’d need $150,000 to get “Chuck Wild Records” off the ground.
Then, in 1994, Wild got a call from a producer friend who said he was working with “the Glove”, as Jackson was known. “He called up and said, ‘Michael wants you to make some of those great sounds like you did on Max Headroom.’ ” So he got to work. Wild hired a team of three people and sent them out across southern California, tape recorders in hand, to record hours and hours of ambient sounds.
Wild would then engineer the results into unique clips, drive to whichever studio Jackson might be recording at and play him his manufactured audio. It was painstaking work, for which he was paid handsomely. A few of his sounds made it into Jackson’s 1995 album HIStory, but he couldn’t be sure how many. “I never listened to the album,” he says. “I have this thing about not listening to my own music — except in the early days, when I felt it was saving my life.”
Over four years Jackson paid Wild roughly $150,000 — the Liquid Mind nest egg. Wild recalls: “I said, ‘Michael, you know it’s your money that financed Liquid Mind?’ And he put his hand up to his chest and said, ‘That makes me feel good.’ ”
Today, at 76, Wild remains a man in a hurry. He estimates he still works 12 hours a day, but it is different now. “Although my routine is a lot of hours, I’m also doing work I love. It’s not stressful to me,” he says. “The [album] titles represent my life journey.” These titles reflect the soothing nature of the content, helping listeners to tap into a world of soporific calm. The initial Liquid Mind release, Ambience Minimus in 1994, was followed by albums including Dream, Deep Sleep and Relaxing Rain & Ocean Mixes.
After spending the best part of the day with Wild, he insists on driving me back to the airport. He doesn’t put on any music, and certainly not his — but not because of his aversion to listening to his own work. “Please make sure this is part of whatever you print,” he says. “You never, ever listen to Liquid Mind when you’re driving. It makes people sleepy. It’s music as medicine, you know. It needs to be FDA-regulated. I wish they would.”
They just might.
Full article available here via the Sunday Times.
A New Model for Film Music (New York Times)
“The King’s Speech” collected an impressive 12 Oscar nominations. It might have stopped short of a dozen without help from a British entrepreneur who has planted his business at the tricky intersection of film and music.
In an unconventional deal that may promise a revival in film music, the Cutting Edge Group, based in London, and its chief executive, Philip Moross, effectively bought the musical portion of “The King’s Speech” months ago.
The investment then let the film’s producers hire Alexandre Desplat, the award-winning French composer whose score was among its nominations, and recruit the London Symphony Orchestra to record works of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms that would otherwise have been performed by a small ensemble.
“What we wanted to do was get the music that would do the images justice,” Iain Canning, a producer of “The King’s Speech,” said in an interview by phone last week of the decision to give up rights to the music in return for having enough money to get the music right. He added of Cutting Edge: “They inflate your music budget.”
Traditionally, movie producers pay companies like Cutting Edge, which also manages catalogs of music rights and represents music supervisors and composers (though not Mr. Desplat), for help in assembling the scores and songs in their films.
The role played by a company like Cutting Edge varies widely from film to film. Though creative control remains with the director and producers, the company will generally provide or recruit a music supervisor, who suggests what songs to include and helps clear the rights, and a composer who writes the score. It may also provide recording studio services, operate its own record label, administer publishing rights and distribute the music in other forms after a film is released.
But music budgets have been dwindling for at least a decade, as piracy, cheap downloads and collapsing CD sales made it virtually impossible for film producers to recoup from hit soundtracks the money they spend on music.
In the heyday of the soundtrack business, the music for “The Bodyguard,” a Warner Brothers film that in 1992 starred Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston, sold almost 12 million albums in the United States, according to a recent report by Nielsen SoundScan. (The soundtrack included the megahit “I Will Always Love You.”) In a diminished era, the “Twilight” soundtrack was considered a smash when it hit two million.
As for scoring, a handful of composers have continued to flourish, among them Hans Zimmer, who received an Academy Award nomination this year for his “Inception” score, and Michael Giacchino, who last year won an Oscar for scoring “Up.”
Privately, however, composers grouse about a world in which competition is intense, fees are shrinking and often tone-deaf directors, producers and studio executives throw resources at special effects and movie stars while shorting the music.
But Mr. Moross and his partners decided to alter the equation in 2008 by raising an initial $15 million fund, backed by the investment giant Aberdeen Asset Management, to let them pay producers in advance for music rights from films on which Cutting Edge would provide or broker services.
“We’ve got about a two-year head start,” Mr. Moross said of a model that he believes will become common as others begin to recognize that film music is a reliable, if not always huge, source of income.
In an interview last week, Mr. Moross described a system under which Cutting Edge paid producers a relatively modest amount for rights, usually $50,000 to $200,000. That, in turn, adds to the money already available for music budgets, which may in total be $300,000 to $500,000 on a film that costs, for example, $20 million to produce.
In effect, the producer has taken a hedge, by giving up potential future profit from the music in return for ready cash.
Cutting Edge then hunts for revenue not just from fees or commissions on music services, but by selling soundtracks (“The King’s Speech” is licensed to Decca Records), peddling sheet music, collecting royalties that are paid every time a movie ticket is sold in various countries around the world, licensing the music to advertisers, and, in a payoff that stretches over years, gathering fees that come due when a film plays on television.
(Pictured: Philip Moross, CEO Cutting Edge)
The company is building a library of managed rights, which includes, among others, the songs of Jim Croce. Its composers include Dario Marianelli (an Oscar winner for “Atonement”) and Patrick Doyle (“Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”).
Over the last year, Mr. Moross says, Cutting Edge provided services to about 100 films, including “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1,” from Warner Brothers, and “Thor,” which is due in May from Marvel Entertainment and Paramount.
To date, it has invested in 124 movies, he said. Those include “Whiteout” and “The Losers,” which were made under an arrangement with Dark Castle Entertainment and its chief, Joel Silver. Both films performed poorly at the box office, but television performance fees pile up, even on the misses.
“Value in recorded music is being overlooked,” said Nigel Sinclair, the co-chairman of Exclusive Media Group, a film financier that also has a standing deal with Cutting Edge and worked with the company on the vampire fantasy “Let Me In.”
Mr. Sinclair said of Cutting Edge: “They’ve figured it out.” Though to hear Mr. Moross tell it, the figuring did not come easily.
Mr. Moross is a son of an investor, M. D. Moross, and a stage actress, Edna Jacobson. He grew up in South Africa, studied molecular biology in London, trained to be an auditor with Arthur Andersen, and began building up capital of his own by buying and selling homes as real estate boomed.
He soon began developing residential real estate, then built a celebrity licensing business that was tied to an elaborate arrangement under which he swapped client endorsements to retailers in return for catalogue space for clothing that was manufactured by a company of his own in India. Jason Statham, now an action star, was a client.
Mr. Moross also became a producer of “Trollywood,” a 2004 documentary about homeless people in Los Angeles, and their dependence on shopping carts, known as “trollies” to the British.
Along the way, he became convinced, in his words, that “celebrity expires,” while music rights tend to endure. He and associates did elaborate research into the arcana of film music, coming up with a model that dictates what they will spend in advance on rights.
Those amounts, though relatively small, are increasingly attractive to struggling producers.
“If you can find people who help you keep the lights on long enough to succeed, that makes a big difference,” said Marty Bowen, whose Temple Hill Entertainment hit it big with the “Twilight” films, and used Cutting Edge on the low-budget Will Ferrell comedy “Everything Must Go.”
For Cutting Edge, said Mr. Moross, growth now means raising a second round of capital, and finding what seems plentiful: producers who need it. That also means focusing more heavily on Hollywood, with bigger films, bigger budgets and more risk. None of which is lost on Mr. Moross.
“The pavements of the U.S.,” he said dryly, “are littered with the bodies of dead British business people.”
Full article available here via the New York Times.
LIQUID MIND XIV: SIMPLICITY -- Latest Album From Chart-Topping and Critically-Acclaimed Composer Chuck Wild
Beverly Hills, CA — In honor of World Mental Health Day on October 10, the largest ad-supported audio entertainment streaming service in the U.S., Pandora, is teaming up with Los-Angeles-based composer, producer and Emmy®-nominated songwriter, Chuck Wild (Liquid Mind), to help bring awareness to our world’s growing mental health crises and to provide some essential tools to help manage the stress and anxiety resulting from our fast-paced, high intensity lives.
During the pandemic, Wellness became a fast-growing genre on Pandora as listeners began to achieve better mental health, and Liquid Mind® is the top Wellness artist on Pandora. Wild, whose best-selling, downtempo chill-out Liquid Mind® albums on the Myndstream label consistently top Billboard’s New Age Music charts, is releasing his 18th album exclusively on Pandora for one week starting on October 10th.
Album to exclusively premiere on PANDORA in honor of World Mental Health Day on October 10, 2022
Wild will also launch an “Artist Takeover” of Pandora’s Sleep Radio station this week, providing guided meditations and discussing the healing ethos behind Liquid Mind® through a special The Takeover: Liquid Mind station “Mode.” Pandora Modes are a unique feature that lets users customize their Pandora listening experience by choosing from selectable “modes” on their favorite stations to give more control over which songs they hear.
The theme of World Mental Health Day this year is “Mental Health in an Unequal World,” which is fitting since Wild created his music as an antidote to anxiety and stress in the world and to aid his own mental wellness recovery. In fact, Wild created Liquid Mind® as a response to the panic and anxiety he personally experienced during the stressed years of 1987-1990 while composing music for the Emmy-winning TV show Max Headroom® and at the same time living through the trauma of having more than 60 of his friends and associates pass on from HIV/AIDS.
In 2021, New Age Note’s Dyan Garris called Liquid Mind® “the quintessential relaxation experience by the quintessential master of relaxation.”
“Music is a bridge that unites us,” says Wild, “and I’m proud to launch my 18th Liquid Mind album on Pandora’s global platform. As many people around the world have difficulty accessing professional help for mental and physical wellness, my hope is that the slow calming Liquid Mind wellness music will help provide an atmosphere of calm and tranquility in our challenging times, and will be a benefit to all people, no matter who they are or where they live.”
Beginning October 17th, LIQUID MIND XIV: SIMPLICITY will be released on the Myndstream music label and made widely available across all audio streaming platforms and on CD at all participating retailers.
About Myndstream: A music company at the intersection of art and science, creating research-backed compositions designed for health and wellbeing. Aiming to become the most validated and impactful music business in the world, Myndstream draws on its incredible roster of critically acclaimed wellbeing musicians, as well as its extensive expert advisory network, to create the highest quality music-led, wellbeing programs. Drawing on the knowledge of its parent company, the award-winning Cutting Edge Group — the leading independent full-service provider of “music for moments” across the film, television videogames and advertising industries, commercializing the music in such high-profile productions as Bridgerton, Stranger Things, The King’s Speech, Severance and more — Myndstream’s goal is to create engaging soundtracks for all types of mindful environments and activities.
About Pandora: Pandora, a subsidiary of SiriusXM, is the largest ad-supported audio entertainment streaming service in the U.S. Pandora provides consumers a uniquely-personalized music and podcast listening experience with its proprietary Music Genome Project® and Podcast Genome Project® technology. Pandora is also the leading digital audio advertising platform in the U.S. Through its own Pandora service, its AdsWizz platform, and third-party services, such as SoundCloud, the Company connects brands to the largest ad-supported streaming audio marketplace in the country. Pandora is available through its mobile app, the web, and integrations with more than 2,000 connected products.
Media Contact: Kim Marshall – kim@swelltheagency.com
Cutting Edge Media Music Cuts Music Rights Deal With Anton On Starry Thrillers ‘All Fun And Games’ And ‘Mother’s Instinct’ (Deadline)
“We are thrilled to be working with Sebastien [Reybaud], John [Zois] and the Anton team again on two incredible new projects,” said Cutting Edge Group COO, Tara Finegan. “Anton Production is committed to the top notch global production of creative content and we’re proud to be their partners.”
Cutting Edge Media Music has inked a deal with Anton, which will have it invest in the company’s films All Fun and Games and Mother’s Instinct, in exchange for the corresponding rights to the films’ original scores. The deal comes following two successful collaborations with Anton Production on the Searchlight horror-thriller The Night House and the disaster pic Greenland starring Gerard Butler.
All Fun and Games hinges on the premise that there’s a strange element of cruelty embedded in kids’ games—Flashlight Tag, Hangman, Simon Says—and sometimes it’s taken too far. The horror-thriller marking the first joint production for Anton and AGBO follows a group of siblings who find themselves in a game with a demonic twist. Asa Butterfield (Sex Education), Natalia Dyer (Stranger Things), Keith David (Greenleaf), Annabeth Gish (The Fall of the House of Usher) and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth (Pinocchio) star in the pic, which Eren Celeboglu and Ari Costa are directing from their script co-written by J.J. Braider. Production kicked off in Canada in April.
Mother’s Instinct is an early ’60s-set psychological thriller that follows Alice (Jessica Chastain) and Celine (Anne Hathaway), best friends and neighbors living an idyllic, traditional lifestyle with manicured lawns, successful husbands and sons of the same age. Life’s perfect harmony is suddenly shattered after a tragic accident. Guilt, suspicion and paranoia then combine to unravel their sisterly bond and a psychological battle of wills begins as the maternal instinct reveals its darker side. The English-language remake of Olivier Masset-Depasse’s award-winning Belgian film Duelles, marking the feature directorial debut of renowned cinematographer Benoit Delhomme (The Theory of Everything), will also star Josh Charles (We Own This City) and Anders Danielsen Lie (The Worst Person in the World).
Cutting Edge Media Music is a financing and investment company with expertise in music for film, television, games and more. The company also operates as a publisher and record label and has provided a range of music services to over 1000 feature films, TV shows, musical theatre productions and games. Notable projects to which it has contributed these services include Stranger Things, Bridgerton, The King’s Speech, Moonlight, Drive, Star Trek: Discovery, Fury, John Wick, Sicario, Whiplash, Hacksaw Ridge and The Walking Dead; such Broadway shows as Matilda, The Color Purple, Anastasia and My Fair Lady; and such games as Sunset Overdrive, Assassins Creed Valhalla, Red Dead Redemption and Cyberpunk 2077.
Anton is the global content provider that has been behind projects ranging from global kids and family fare such as Paddington and Shaun The Sheep, the animated feature Fireheart, and Around The World in 80 Days to genre franchises such as His Dark Materials, the aforementioned Greenland and its sequel Greenland Migration; McMafia, The Night House and Choose or Die; as well as director-driven titles such as Both Sides of the Blade, Gentleman Jack and The Pursuit of Love.
Full article available here.
Cutting Edge Makes the Febe Growth 100 List
From febe.com:
2022 FEBE GROWTH 100
FEBE: A CLUB BUILT FOR ENTREPRENEURS BY ENTREPRENEURS
FEBE celebrates the greatest entrepreneurs in Britain, and we are delighted to launch our inaugural Growth 100 – an annual list and awards that shines a light on the finest and fastest-growing privately owned businesses in the country, where the founder or founders are still involved. This is the beating heart of our club that inspires, motivates and supports the very best entrepreneurs and their companies.
The essence of FEBE is entrepreneurs supporting entrepreneurs. We exist to inspire and champion our country’s best ‘dare-to-doers’. We know how important it is to celebrate our country’s founders and their businesses, and the Growth 100 does just that.
There are 4.2m private companies in the UK. Just 1% or 45,000 of these are considered ‘high growth’.But who are the 100 fastest growing?
FEBE is delighted to present the 100 fastest growing, founder-led, privately owned businesses in the UK. All listed companies are profitable and are turning over between £3m-£200m.
From febe.com:
OUR CRITERIA AND RESEARCH PROCESS
The inaugural FEBE Growth 100® is a league table of Britain’s founder-led private companies with the fastest-growing sales. Companies are ranked by compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in sales over their latest two financial years.
Our entry criteria for 2022 are:
* UK-registered, independent, unquoted and ultimate parent companies
* Founders remain involved in the business
* Had sales between £3m and £200m in their latest financial year
* Made an operating profit in their latest financial year
* Did not show a decrease in sales from their penultimate to the latest year
* Had annualised sales of more than £200,000 in the base year, and traded for at least 6 months in that year
* Recruitment firms, payroll services providers and media agencies must show gross profits of at least £3m in their latest financial year
*Excluded companies include: pure property developers, financial trading companies, LLPs and companies with a turnover of £200m or more
Full article available here.
Wellness Subsidiary of Music Company Behind Bridgerton and Stranger Things Soundtracks Launches Highly Curated Music Portal for Wellness Industry -- myndstreamspa.com (Yahoo Finance)
In Partnership with World’s Top Spa Products Supplier, Universal Companies
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., May 2, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — myndstream, the world’s leading wellness music company, has partnered with Universal Companies, the world’s top leading b2b supplier to the spa and wellness industry, to launch a subscription-based music service called myndstreamspa.com for the purpose of offering the highest quality curated spa music at reduced cost, while eliminating the licensing challenges spa owners face.
"We partnered with Universal Companies to introduce this new purpose-built spa music portal," explains myndstream Marketing Director, Freddie Moross, "because our companies share a passion for putting the end-user experience first. We believe that bringing together the work of artists and researchers translates to the most effective and immersive musical audio tool on the market."
myndstreamspa.com, available through Universal Companies’ sales channels, offers the wellness industry a music solution with playlists expertly curated at the intersection of art and science. The company draws on its extensive catalogue of mindfulness music, and engages its roster of current artists to create new works for the spa market with frequencies, tonalities, and tempos that research shows can have a direct effect on relaxation and mood enhancement.
This is in contrast to AI programmed, ad-filled and repetitive streaming music portals. It also eliminates the risk many spas and therapists unwittingly take by using their personal playlists commercially— which can result in fines for copyright violation.
And instead of the expensive monthly subscriptions for competitor business streaming platforms, the award-winning, research-backed wellness music curated by myndstream will be offered initially at a significant discounted price to spas, particularly for early adopters who are willing to provide feedback and help make the service even more effective.
myndstream’s parent company, Cutting Edge Media Music, is the leading independent full-service provider of “music for moments” across the film, television, videogames and advertising industries and is responsible for commercializing the music in such high-profile productions as Bridgerton, Stranger Things, The King’s Speech, Drive, Sicario, and many more. myndstream is following in the footsteps of its parent by elevating the way we experience music, but this time for optimal, immersive audio wellness experiences.
Harnessing the power of music for personal wellbeing, myndstream invites today’s wellness-conscious listener to stream mindfulness wherever you are to reduce stress, experience deep rest, improve focus, and calm anxiety.
Full article available here.
Myndstream Spotlights the Quality of its Soundscapes (Forbes)
Mood music is one of the largest growth segments of the industry. But as evidenced by recent digging into some of the genre’s most-streamed songs on Spotify, not all mood music is created equal.
While compositions associated with sleep, relaxation, meditation and more are spiraling in popularity and playlisting, some of the top earners have turned out not to be compositions at all.
How do you stand out in a realm where 30-second recordings of falling rain are generating more streams than the likes of Lady Gaga some weeks? Myndstream, the label owned by UK-based Cutting Edge Group that’s home to a breadth of music for personal wellbeing, believes the quality of its roster speaks volumes and is making moves to get the word—and the music—out to even larger audiences.
“We’re very much taking a separate approach, where we consider the art and science together,” says Freddie Moross, head of marketing at Myndstream and CEG. “And we record music as we believe mindful music should be—which is for the specific purpose of helping the listener, not just for the bottom line.”
On the back end, it’s been building up its roster of composers steeped in the mindfulness realm as well as immersing in research and activations at the nexus of music and wellness. Moross recently co-founded and serves as CEO of Aybe, a company that will service neurodiverse families with music therapy and other resources.
On the public-facing side, Myndstream is not only elevating its presence on the streaming dial but also building communities across YouTube and other platforms.
“A lot of people see music as music. What we want to do is get people to see music as an incredible mental health product and wellness product. Whatever we can do to bridge that gap is what we’re looking to do at the moment,” Moross says.
Playlisting, of course, is the currency du jour. A full 95 percent of Myndstream’s current income is derived from Amazon Music, Apple Music, Pandora, Spotify and YouTube, where its artists and composers have collectively amassed billions of streams. The inclusion of its soundscapes in Amazon mood playlists alone brought in 45 percent of the company’s income in 2020, according to Moross.
“How do you get your music streamed more? The short answer across most platforms is playlists; you need to fight for shelf space,” he opines.
But at a time when people of all ages are increasingly turning to wellness apps and other sources to aid their mental health, Moross believes Myndstream’s credibility will enable it to continue to rise. A case in point is the label’s most salient artist, Liquid Mind, an Emmy-nominated songwriter, keyboardist, composer, producer and recording artist who has strong ties to the music therapy community.
“Our key differentiator is our music isn’t computer-generated. We have 100 or so living, breathing artists who have been doing this music for more than 40 years. We understand what kind of music works well for focus, what kind of music works well for relaxation,” he says.
The YouTube Generation
A key part of Myndstream’s growth plan is expanding its audience beyond the traditional demographic for mood music of women aged 40-plus. It’s a good bet, given that 41 percent of millennials and 46 percent of Gen Z’ers reported feeling stressed or anxious most or all of the time in a recent Deloitte Global survey.
To do so, some of the label’s artists are leveraging a sound it’s calling “slo-fi,” a riff on the popular “lo-fi” genre that takes pop and rock beats and slows them down to create a nuanced, meditative format. Instrumental covers of pop hits from Billie Eilish to Harry Styles to Nirvana featured in Netflix NFLX -3.7% series Bridgerton have been generating big buzz of late.
“We’re in the process of working with our composers on this new genre and style, which we think is going to bridge the gap between the contemporary audience of teenagers and millennials who love the lo-fi beats, but also has one foot in the wellness world,” Moross says.
Myndstream is also planting flags where younger eyes and ears congregate. This winter it bought YouTube aggregator Yellow Brick Cinema, which counts close to 6 million subscribers across its flagship plus 300 ancillary channels. Myndstream has rebranded one of those channels with its own moniker, and is working with the team to upgrade the experience across the site.
“The thing that surprised me is the scale they’ve achieved based on the content they have. It was very much slide show-based stock footage,” Moross says. “I think that team would be the first to say they wanted more budget to be able to re-invest in building quality. We’re licensing high-quality content and looking to potentially acquire a 4K stock footage company and channel. We believe in strong visual components and multi-sesnsory, full immersion in the music. We love that stuff.”
Myndstreaming With…
Other avenues to deliver Myndstream music to the mainstream are in the works. Among them is a series of collaborations with entertainment, sports and lifestyle talent called “Myndstreaming With…” through which the label will curate a custom soundtrack to suit an influencer’s wellness regimen. The idea is the influencers will not only benefit from the music but also become ambassadors for the Myndstream brand.
Announcements about the first two high-profile participants, one an athlete and the other an A-list talent, will follow in the coming months, Moross says.
“We are engaging cultural icons—talent athletes, actors—people who aren’t typically music people but who like music and also really care about their own wellbeing, and we are curating the sound environments for their mental health journey, by creating four-track albums for them,” he says.
“They provide us with some creative inputs. Say one of the things they do to calm down is go surf at a particular beach in their hometown. We will go and capture the sounds of the waves from that beach, get that nostalgic sound bed and then create some music around that based on their references.”
Full article available here.
Cutting Edge Media Music Cuts Slate Partnership Deal With Asbury Park Pictures (Deadline)
Cutting Edge Media Music has inked a slate partnership deal with Asbury Park Pictures, which will see it fund five of the company’s films, in exchange for the corresponding original music publishing rights. Cutting Edge’s latest deal comes on the heels of its successful, multi-year slate partnership deal with Thunder Road, of which Asbury Park is an expansion launched by Basil Iwanyk and Erica Lee.
The first films under CEMM’s new deal with Asbury Park Pictures are Sophia Banks’ action-thriller Black Site, starring Jason Clarke, Michelle Monaghan and Jai Courtney, which will be released via Redbox Entertainment on April 29, and the Nelms Brothers’ action-thriller Red Right Hand, starring Orlando Bloom and Andie McDowell, which is currently in production and will also be distributed by Redbox.
“We at Cutting Edge continue to invest with standout creatives and producers in Hollywood,” said Cutting Edge Group CEO, Philip Moross. “During the last decade we have been in business together, Basil and his team at Thunder Road have consistently been among the best. I am very excited about the next chapter, with Asbury Park.”
“Philip, Tara and the team at CE were with us at the beginning as we built Thunder Road,” added Iwanyk. “Now we look forward to their help and guidance in making Asbury Park the most successful low-budget action label in the world.”
Cutting Edge Media Music is a financing and investment company with expertise in music for film, television, games and more. The company also operates as a publisher and record label and has provided a range of music services to over 1000 feature films, TV shows, musical theatre productions and games. Notable projects to which it has contributed these services include Stranger Things, Bridgerton, The King’s Speech, Moonlight, Drive, Star Trek: Discovery, Fury, John Wick, Sicario, Whiplash, Hacksaw Ridge and The Walking Dead; such Broadway shows as Matilda, The Color Purple, Anastasia and My Fair Lady; and such games as Sunset Overdrive, Assassins Creed Valhalla, Red Dead Redemption and Cyberpunk 2077.
Iwaynk’s Thunder Road Films partnered with Redbox Entertainment to launch Asbury Park Pictures in 2020.
Full article available here.