A TASTE OF RAINMAKERS II: GUY MOOT AND CARIANNE MARSHALL

In the latest excerpt from our special issue profiling industry ballers, we glimpse the youth and early careers of Warner Chappell's ruling tandem.

Growing up, a young, impatient Moot landed some rather unpleasant jobs. Driving tractors for a year, he was content as long as a cassette player remained within reach. But it was his work as a welder that really sent him over the edge.

“That was the shit-est job I’ve ever done,” he says. “It was so hardcore. When you think you’re having a bad day in the music industry, you don’t know. Good God, I remember working in the cold three floors up, holding iron girders. It was horrible. ‘I have to do something about this,’ I thought. ‘I don’t know if I can go another winter back in Cheltenham on a building site as a welder.’”

Mainly in an effort to get indoors, he applied for a job in a record shop, which is where he started to form his opinions on A&R. It wasn’t just a store. It was the clerk’s job to turn on wanderers and walk-ins to music. If the shop bought 10 records by a new artist, there was obvious incentive to sell them.

“It allowed me to go off,” Moot recalls. “I was the first to start really stocking 12-inch U.S. imports of early electro, early house music. There was Japanese vinyl of New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ with that superior sound quality. It gave me the passion to buy stuff and then tell people about it. I just couldn’t sell stuff I didn’t like.”

Marshall, who was brought into Warner Chappell by Jon Platt in 2018 after serving as a partner at SONGS, began her music industry career at L.A.-based VOX Entertainment, where she did live-music production while also managing and booking local bands. The Pasadena-born, Rancho Palos Verdes-bred native was hired as a Marketing/College Radio Promo rep at Elektra, where she worked from the mid- to late ’90s.

At the turn of the century, the multifaceted Marshall joined the film-and-TV-music team at DreamWorks Music Publishing. In 2003, she made her move over to UMPG, where she’d become Director of Motion Picture and Television Music.

“It’s so funny that I’m a publisher now,” Marshall says. “I was always incredibly interested in finding the song that nobody else would gravitate to. In high school, I didn’t have much access to music. I didn’t have older siblings. I’d tape off the radio. I’d buy cassettes from the grocery store for $7.99. We didn’t have a lot of disposable income. Later, I’d get gift certificates from Sam Goody and I’d buy more.”

She’d go to shows every night—armed with a marked-up copy of the L.A. Weekly, a Franklin Planner and a serious case of FOMO (“fear of missing out”). During an X gig at the Palladium, Marshall ran into Betsy Anthony, who now works at Warner Chappell. X was on Elektra, and Marshall was in the VIP area, even though she probably wasn’t supposed to be there. It was 1999, and she was considering her next move. Anthony asked Marshall if she’d thought about publishing.

Check out the entire profile here.