THE LAUNCH: BORCHETTA'S BRAINCHILD GOES WIDE

Scott Borchetta’s Big Machine Label Group and Bell Media have jointly announced that Sony Pictures Television will distribute their new music-TV format The Launch worldwide, excluding Canada. SPT’s production company, Electric Ray, will produce the format in the U.K. SPT will also distribute the Canadian series, which wrapped up its inaugural season on CTV 2/21, for sale outside of Canada.

The inaugural season of The Launch debuted at #1 in its timeslot on CTV and delivered a series of consecutive weekly top ratings. The series’ original songs have already surpassed 4m streams worldwide.

A reimagining of the music-competition series genre, The Launch gives a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to break a new artist and bring a song to life. In each standalone episode, unsigned emerging artists audition for the opportunity to record and perform a new original song, mentored by a panel of music-biz pros. The mentors then decide which version of the song is released on all platforms immediately following the broadcast of the episode, as the winning act zips from unknown to recording artist in just 48 hours, all in the span of a single episode.

“Season 1 of CTV’s The Launch exceeded our wildest expectations,” said Borchetta, who came up with the concept. “We are fired up to announce a worldwide format agreement with Sony Pictures Entertainment. Wow! I’m so grateful to [President] Randy Lennox and all at Bell Media for sharing The Launch vision from the onset. and I’m beyond thrilled to see the format earning the opportunity to travel the world with SPT. The goal from the beginning was to give artists a real-life and real-time opportunity like no other, and we appear to have achieved that goal. A huge thanks to all of our season 1 superstar producers and mentors, our great artists and the millions of fans who tuned in.”

The Launch was co-created by Borchetta in association with Lennox and Bell Media, and Paul Franklin of Eureka (Masterchef, The Biggest Loser), in partnership with John Brunton and Lindsay Cox of Insight Productions.

Among the mentors appearing in the seven-episode Canadian version of The Launch were Shania Twain, Boy George, Fergie, Alessia Cara, Nikki Sixx, Julia Michaels and Jennifer Nettles. Producer/songwriters cast alongside Borchetta included OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder, busbee, Dann Huff, Ian Kirkpatrick and Stephan Moccio (Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball”).