SVG College Sports Summit Q&A: APM Music’s Matthew Gutknecht

Next week, SVG travels to Atlanta for the sixth-annual College Sports Summit. And, after a successful debut last year, the popular Storytellers’ Theatre returns to the agenda. This track, which will take place in the Courtland Room at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, features talented content creators sharing their favorite projects and describing how they make them happen. 

One innovator taking part in Storytellers’ Theatre will be APM Music, a creative house and production-music library, which offers the most comprehensive collection of music for sports-entertainment broadcasters. APM’s selection of more than 400,000 tracks includes every genre by legendary, award-winning composers and producers as well as today’s indie trendsetters. You will find the Monday Night Football theme, NFL Music Library, and MLB Music Library among the 40+ libraries available for licensing. APM provides a wide range of special services, including curated playlists, music-search service, and custom music through their Resonate Music Group.

SVG caught up with APM Music’s Matthew Gutknecht, account director, Cable Team, to discuss what the company has to offer for college sports video, its plans for Storytellers’ Theatre, and more. Gutknecht has been involved in all aspects of the music business from production to concert management and has been a part of the APM family since 2007. As a musician, collector, and avid concert attendee, he has an intuitive ear to fill his clients’ music and business needs.

Be sure to attend Gutknecht’s presentation on Thursday May 29 at 11:15 a.m. in the Courtland Room!

APM Music’s Matthew Gutknecht

Why are you involved with the SVG College Sports Summit?
Our clients’ insight and suggestions are always appreciated, and, when they told us we needed to be involved with the SVG College Sports Summit a few years ago, we really wanted to check it out.

As we began to grow our Sports Entertainment business and saw how rapidly this landscape, specifically collegiate athletics, was changing and developing, it became evident how important it is to be there as a resource for our clients while also helping potential clients with music-licensing questions.

What are you most looking forward to at this year’s Summit?
I’m most looking forward to catching up with all of our clients in Atlanta. It’s a great group.

The panels are always great, too, and, this year, I’ll be hosting a quick presentation and Q&A in the Courtland Room on Thursday May 29. I am hoping to address some of the copyright issues affecting the sports-entertainment industry and share a few new things we have coming soon.

What would you like the college-sports community to know about APM Music?
First of all, I have to say that the college sports community is an amazing group to work with, and it’s nice to know about the great word of mouth that we’re already receiving.

We’re very proud to be so well-represented in this community, and it’s really great to see the work with our clients go from the conceptual and creative to the tangible with our music in motion. I think the wonderful productions that our music is already being incorporated into really speaks volumes. My hope is that others in the sports community will see this as well and continue to spread the word. It’s always exciting to get the opportunity to help take a project to the next level.

APM Music truly has a lot to offer our sports clients with more new music than anyone else. We have a broad catalog of over 400,000 tracks online, and we hold the licensing rights for songs like “Heavy Action,” which most everyone knows as the Monday Night Football theme. We also offer the MLB Music Library, the NFL Music Library, and a number of other sports-specific catalogs, along with a ton of indie music from some great up-and-coming artists.

Through our award-winning boutique custom-music division, Resonate Music Group, we had the pleasure of working on several recent versions of the Monday Night Football theme. We had the chance to put together something completely unique and special for that theme open.

I’d encourage anyone interested in learning more about us and what our clients are doing with our music to visit our newly launched Website (http://sports.apmmusic.com) that is dedicated to sports-specific content.

What are some of the biggest challenges facing this industry, and how does APM address those challenges?
As a library that has been around for more than 30 years, we have definitely seen our share of changes, but we’ve been able to maintain a continuously growing catalog of high-quality music that’s all available online these days.

We find that our broad library, along with the ability to seamlessly provide all the proper licensing rights, is extremely helpful and essential to our clients, who are now tasked with producing a higher volume of quality content that is distributed to many more partners and social-media outlets than ever before.

With such busy production environments that will only get busier in the future, we are happy we can save everyone time by having them lean on us for as much of the music responsibility as possible. We enjoy helping our clients have the confidence of great music in their productions that can be used in any outlet from the beginning to the end and wherever they choose to take it.

SVG’s Storytellers’ Theatre in the Courtland Room features some of the most innovative technology manufacturers sharing some of their favorite projects and showing just how they made them happen. What are your plans for your presentation?
We wanted to be a part of Storytellers’ Theatre this year to present a few tips and tricks for music licensing.

With social media and all of the new broadcast outlets that are available these days, it is becoming more important to understand how to best find and use music effectively in various outlets that are relatively new to the production world.

I’d encourage anyone with music-sourcing and -licensing questions to stop by and say hi.