Date/Time
Date(s) -

01/11/2022

Location
Zoom

Moderator:

Mara Kuge | President, Superior Music Publishing & CCC President 2021-22

Panelists:

Angela Sheik | Executive Manager, Guild of Music Supervisors & Recording Artist

Greg Mateo | President, Label & Publishing, BeatStars

Jennifer Smith | Board Member, Guild of Music Supervisors & Rat Dance Party Music Supervision

Sydney Vann | A&R, Splice

Questions? Email is at questions@theccc.org

BIOGRAPHIES

Mara Kuge | President, Superior Music Publishing & CCC President 2021-22

Mara Schwartz Kuge is the President of the Board of the California Copyright Conference. She is President and Founder of Superior Music Corporation, a full-service music publishing and supervision company.

Kuge has spent close to two decades in music publishing, including heading the Film and TV Music departments at Bug Music (now BMG) and 10^th Street Entertainment (now Better Noise). She has extensive experience in both synch and A&R, having placed hundreds of songs in various media and signing major artists to publishing deals, including the National, Grizzly Bear, Siobhan Fahey (Bananarama), Scott Weiland (Stone Temple Pilots), and Sleater-Kinney. Superior Music Publishing, a Los Angeles-based joint venture between Kuge and Modern Works Music Publishing, recently celebrated their seventh anniversary.

Kuge’s two most recent music supervision projects, The Stand at Paxton County and For Madmen Only: The Stories of Del Close, have both received distribution, and she is currently supervising Jabberjaw! The Documentary, about the legendary Los Angeles nightclub. She is a member of the Guild of Music Supervisors and a professional member of NARAS.

Angela Sheik | Executive Manager, Guild of Music Supervisors & Recording Artist

Angela Sheik is an L.A.-based music producer and performing artist creating downtempo, trip hop, swagger pop, dark pop, indie/alt singer songwriter, and 1940s-’50s influenced jazz pop. She’s an educator, organizer, advocate for women in the music industry, former middle/high school orchestra and band teacher, mentor to girls interested in audio, and industry beginners interested in music supervision and the world of sync, and the Los Angeles chapter co-leader of Female Frequency (an advocacy group for women interested in improving their music production and recording skills). A riveting solo performer who has toured the U.S. and Europe, won a national award from BOSS pedals for her work with digital loop stations, and opened for artists such as Meshell Ndegeocello, Neon Trees, Joseph Arthur, Julia Holter, Midge Ure (Ultravox), and others. Her music is rep’d by Crucial Music, Heavy Hitters, twoOHsix Music, Universal Production Music, and various libraries and licensing companies. Her compositions can be heard in numerous films, documentaries, TV series, and commercials. She served as Executive Manager of the Guild of Music Supervisors since 2019 under former president Thomas Golubić and current president Joel C. High, with resulting insights into the intersection of music supervisors and their surrounding communities.

Greg Mateo | President, Label & Publishing, BeatStars

Greg Mateo began his career at the time when digital distribution was a new technological innovation, over 16 years ago.  He assisted artists and labels navigate the complicated digital space, from the metadata side to the marketing side to the publishing side. Joining BeatStars in 2020, he aided in the launch of BeatStars Publishing, which helps provide important guidance around copyrights and publishing, as well as ensuring the community’s rights are being protected entirely.  In just a short time, the global roster has achieved phenomenal results ranging from major success on Billboard charts to Gold and Platinum plaques.

Jennifer Smith | Board Member, Guild of Music Supervisors & Rat Dance Party Music Supervision

Jennifer Smith is a Los Angeles-based music supervisor who has worked in the film, TV, media industry for over a decade. She started her career as part of the music teams for major network shows such as “Dancing with the Stars (ABC),” “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” (WB), and “America’s Best Dance Crew” (MTV). Her love of music and the exploding media landscape guided her to join the Kobalt Music synchronization team to creatively pitch and clear music with networks, studios, music supervisors, production companies, and new media companies. Her time at Kobalt gave her extensive and broad experience in the synchronization world, dealing with all stakeholders in the creative and business process including record labels, songwriters, producers, musicians, managers, and marketing teams. After seven years at Kobalt, Jennifer went back to her first love of content and storytelling and joined the music team on ABC’s “American Idol.” After that show’s first season on ABC, she was inspired in 2018 to launch her own music supervision company—Rat Dance Party. Rat Dance Party specializes in film, TV (scripted and non-scripted), and new media (especially podcasts). With Rat Dance Party, Jennifer has worked on projects produced by Showtime, Netflix, Viacom, Shorts TV, Amazon, Pluto TV, NBC, Voltage Pictures, and many more. She recently worked on Season 2 of “Why Women Kill” (CBS), MTV Cribs (Paramount+), Netflix’s “Deadly Illusions” and is currently working on the documentaries “Proud in a Pandemic,” “Behind the Music,” and many other upcoming projects. Recently elected to the Board of the Guild of Music Supervisors (GMS), Jennifer is also a member of the Television Academy, Women in Film, Women in Media, Women in Music, and the Recording Academy.

Sydney Vann | A&R Manager, Splice

Sydney Vann describes herself as an ENFP—someone with extraverted, intuitive, feeling, and prospecting personality traits—a campaigner. She embraces entrepreneurial endeavors and developing marketing and social media strategies for creative start-ups and small businesses by focusing on digital content distribution, marketing and storytelling. She does this through her deep knowledge of emerging consumer technologies, urban youth entertainment culture, social media and music industry news.

Splice is a high quality, royalty-free sample library sourced from top artists, labels, and sound designers. They offer everything from tech tutorials, how to’s on podcasting, and beat making to sound design. As A&R manager at Splice, Vann manages artist relationships and program management, working directly daily with artists and their representatives. She’s out in the field often where she can actively source and build relationships with new artists, managers, lawyers, independent labels, tastemakers, and gatekeepers. The field work helps her identify the artists, and then negotiate and close major hip hop and R&B deals that will be additions to the Splice roster in terms of attracting new audience/user acquisition.

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