Indie Publishing Companies Boosted By Financial Backers

In recent years, investors from industries outside the music business have increasingly become the financial backers for independent record labels on Music Row. That trend has also extended to indie publishing companies, several of which now work with investors.

For the publishers, such investors provide an infusion of cash that can help them open, expand, or simply keep the operation running until the pitches, holds and cuts can translate into big hits. For the investors, it’s an open door into the glamour and excitement of the music business and, very likely, a good investment as well.

Smokin’ Grapes Music Publishing president Scott Hacker (photo L) is one such investor. After making his money in the mortgage and real estate business in Bakersfield, Calif., he’s now moved his family to Nashville and is working on the publishing side full-time along with his partner Billy Yates, a veteran Nashville songwriter and performer.

Hacker also purchased and renovated the McFadden building on 18th Ave. and moved Smokin’ Grapes in there after the company outgrew its rented space on the Row. His tenant in the building is another publisher, HoriPro Entertainment.

While Green Hills Music Group is solely owned and run by veteran Music Row publisher Woody Bomar (photo R), he too has partnered with two financial backers on three of the six writers on his roster, Bob Regan, Steve Williams and Georgia Middleman. The investors are attorney Graham Baker, who specializes in health care law in his successful Brentwood, Tenn.-based practice, and health care executive Greg Sassman.

For Hacker, a lifelong love of country music drew him into the business. “As a kid I would always look at the lyrics to see who the songwriters were. I was fascinated by writing,” he says. “That’s what prompted me to do this. Hearing the stories and histories of so many artists and songs, I always wanted to be a part of it.”

He remembers idolizing Don Schlitz and Paul Overstreet, and now finds as one of the perks to his job that such writers as Overstreet and Byron Hill “are in my office all the time.”

Smokin’ Grapes’ writer roster now includes David Kroll, Billy Ryan, Wil Nance, brother/sister duo the Broussards and Yates, and the company recently landed its first major cut with Nance’s “If Heartaches Were Horses” on the upcoming George Strait album, Troubadour.

Before deciding to invest in the industry, Hacker says he flew back and forth from Bakersfield to Nashville numerous times and always remembers getting excited when he’d see the Nashville skyline. By comparison, he says, the mortgage business is “so boring and such a grind.”

At Smokin’ Grapes, Hacker still handles the “boring” stuff. “I’m basically the paper guy,” he says, listing such duties as registering songs, demo billing, and accounts payable and receivable. Yates handles the creative end, including the day-to-day interaction with songwriters and artists. But unlike in the mortgage business, Hacker will often have the opportunity to hear writers sing something they’ve just written, and that’s usually the best part of his day.

For Baker, too, it was the love of the music that drew him in. “I grew up in Nashville and it’s hard not to be around music,” he says. “I played in bands in high school and college.” Years later he re-formed the rock band he’d been in with Bomar in college, and they played together for another decade or so.

Baker says a lot of people he went to high school with ended up in the music business and, while it took him a few decades to get there too, “I’m so happy to be involved now… It’s uplifting to know that you are a very small part of the creative process.”

For Yates, what drew him to Hacker was “his excitement for the music and his dedication to making things happen. He is much more than an investor, he is a partner,” Yates says.

Smokin’ Grapes is not Hacker’s first foray into the music business. While running his mortgage firm in Bakersfield he also opened and ran an independent record label, West Coast Independent Records, for three years where he worked country artist Victor Sanz to the market. Hacker and Yates first met when Yates produced a record for Sanz.

When Bomar opened Green Hills 13 months ago, he was looking exclusively for investors he knew and trusted. “I’ve been very selective about who I want to be in business with,” he says.

“I had no interest in just having my attorney go out and look for big money people,” Bomar continues. “I only wanted to be in business with people I know and who know me and were expressing confidence in me. I wanted it to be people I feel good about being accountable to, people I’d enjoy being in business with.”

Bomar has been educating his investors about the business, beginning with asking them to read the Donald Passman book All You Need To Know About The Music Business, or at least the chapter on songwriting and music publishing “so they have an understanding of what it is we do,” he says.

He expects his investors to “be realists” about the music business, and, in turn, “I’m totally realistic with them. I let them know they shouldn’t invest one penny they can’t afford to lose, because we could have a big hit tomorrow, or it could be a long time before we make a penny.”

Asked what has surprised him so far about the music publishing business, Hacker points to the glacial pace at which things move compared to the real estate business. “From demo to pitch to cut it can be mind numbingly slow.” He’s been more pleasantly surprised by how supportive other publishers have been. “In real estate you don’t get that,” he says. “It’s cutthroat.”

For Baker, the biggest surprise has been learning about “the magnitude of how piracy hurts the creative process, and especially the people involved in the creative process. I hadn’t given it that much though until I read the [Passman] book and started to see what was going on.

“Now that I’ve invested in the creative process,” he adds, “I want my investment to be secure.”