Peter Gabriel’s digital music rights company CueSongs concludes BMG deal, all the majors now on board

Digital music licensing hub CueSongs has announced that it has concluded agreements with BMG Rights Management, meaning it now has deals in place with all the major music publishers for online licensing – EMI Music Publishing, SonyATV, Universal Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, in addition to the bigger independents such as Imagem, Music Sales and Peer Music.

Former Genesis songsmith Peter Gabriel helped launch CueSongs in January this year, with a view towards helping independent film-makers, online producers and event organizers tap the back catalogues of many of the major artists to use as soundtracks. And this latest agreement will open up its offering to cover artists such as Groove Armada and Ulrich Schnauss.

“With these agreements in place, we are able to offer clients a comprehensive choice of music from both established and exciting new artists for their digital productions,” says Ed Averdieck, CueSongs CEO.

“Video production is going through the roof in this country as companies create promotional videos for their websites, for YouTube, and as part of viral campaigns,” he continues. “However, too often the music usage in videos is either unlicensed or of rather poor quality. Now, for the first time video producers no longer have to compromise on the music they use, and we are convinced this will give them a competitive edge by enabling them to make more impactful videos.”

To coincide with this announcement, CueSongs is also rolling out a new music-matching service called ‘Search, Match, License’, in cahoots with three production companies for the launch – Can Communicate Productions, M&C Saatchi & I Love Dust. In a nutshell, if a track you’re looking for isn’t available through CueSongs, you can hit ‘Match’ to automatically find a suitable alternative. You can also filter tracks to identify ones that are faster, slower or have a different ‘mood’.

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CueSongs, was launched in beta in January this year, and was co-founded by Ed Averdieck, formerly head of Nokia Music and OD2, and Peter Gabriel.

This isn’t Gabriel’s first flirtation with the digital music business – more than a decade ago he co-founded UK online music distributor On Demand Distribution (OD2), which was later sold to US company Loudeye for around $40m.

Gabriel also backed the launch of music-streaming service We7 in 2007, which was acquired by Tesco earlier this year for $16m. So, Gabriel has something of a Midas touch around him with his involvement in the digital music realm, meaning CueSongs is certainly one to watch.