We chat with Sony/ATV Music Publishing UK's Guy Moot.


What do you consider the greatest areas of opportunity—and the biggest challenges—facing publishers now?
Streaming is both the greatest opportunity and biggest challenge facing publishers in 2016. Streaming is very much about hit songs and we are in a very strong place with our songwriters having written many of the year’s biggest hits around the world. We’re not only working closely with record companies, as we always have, to achieve this success, but we now have the opportunity to promote our music directly to streaming services ourselves.

How are you working with your writers to develop new revenue streams?
It’s about proactively pitching our new releases and catalog to streaming services to get our music on their playlists and to maximize the revenue of our writers. We’re also putting more and more of our people in writing sessions to give them the best possible chance to create that song which will become a global hit. We’re looking at songwriting as a global entity rather than approaching it territory by territory, and the success of this approach is evident by the number of worldwide hits we are having.

What do you consider your most significant successes from the past year, and what are you lining up for 2017?
We’re proud to have been associated with songwriters and artists like Drake, Ed Sheeran, Sia, Calvin Harris and Sean Paul, who have been behind some of the biggest hits of the year. In the U.K. we have been on a run since mid-March where we have published or co-published the No. 1 song every week for 36 consecutive weeks, which is an incredible achievement.

It has been a difficult year across the industry for breaking talent, but I’m pleased to say that in recent months we have signed Jorja Smith, SteffLon Don and Sigrid, who we’re excited about for the next year, and internationally have signed with the U.S. company Olivia O’Brien and Gnash, who have scored a global hit with “I Hate U, I Love U.”