Peter Fish: A Top Composer’s Transition to Content Producer

April 29th, 2012 by Trenton

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HELL’S KITCHEN, MANHATTAN: The creative beehive at 545 West 45th Street just got a little livelier.

Kindred souls converge at 545 on the West Side. (all photos in article by David Weiss)

For anyone involved in the entertainment industry, it’s only a matter of time before your dealings take you to this multi-floor magnet between 10th and 11th Avenues. Home to everything from Masterdisk to Union Local 306 (Motion Picture Projectionists, Operators, Video Technicians & Allied Crafts), there’s something about this wonderfully symmetrical address that appeals to simultaneous practitioners of business and the arts.

Hence the logical arrival of Peter Fish, the extremely prolific New York City composer, at a sun-splashed suite in the quietly buzzing industrial loft building. One of the East Coast’s busiest score creators over the last three decades, Fish’s awards and credits are far too numerous to list, but here’s a start: 6-time Emmy winner, 3-time ASCAP “Most Performed Themes” winner, “Face the Nation,” “Rosie O’Donnell Show”, “Extra,” “CBS Early Show,” “Oprah,” NY-1, “Sesame Street,” “All My Children,” Bodysnatchers, and Dangerous Games. Plus, he’s produced the likes of Carly Simon, Tony Bennett, and Judy Collins.

An enviable portfolio, right? But the straight-talking Fish will be the first to tell you that a glamorous client list alone is not enough in today’s climate, even for a first-call composer of his stature. To move forward, you’ve got to spread out – and that’s exactly what he’s doing.

New Environment

Fish is understandably happy in the new space for his company, Sound Stories. Blessed with 13-foot ceilings and plenty of natural light, it has a decidedly different feel from his previous location within Broadway Video in Times Square. Besides significantly reducing his overhead, Fish is experiencing myriad other advantages from his solo surroundings.

“This move represents control over your environment,” explains Fish. “It’s about designing something in your image, so that when you walk in the door, you feel a great deal of peace. You come in and say, ‘I really like it here – everything is here because I want it to be here. The color of the tables, the wood in the floor – there’s a wholeness of design which just relaxes you. It sounds like bullshit. But it’s not bullshit.”

On the gear tip, Fish also found that the move was conducive to rethinking old habits. In this welcome mental shakeup, for example, he realized that the $1,000+ LED HDTV at his old address was non-essential for scoring to picture (“Now I’ve got a $300 plasma screen, but it’s all I need — I’m an audio guy”); and that there was a free iPhone app, Sound Meter Pro, that he could use to balance out the level between his Auratone speakers – a perfectly adequate replacement for a dedicated facility tech with an armload of frequency analyzers.

All the better to enable the fast workflow Fish has nailed down on his trusty Synclavier, one of only a tiny handful of these hardware sequencer wonders in the city. But as proficient a musician as he is, composing is really only a part of the picture for Fish now, as he transitions from being the guy who takes the calls to becoming the one who makes them.

Not Content with Just Composing

For Fish, the move represents a deliberate reinvention to a business model where he creates new TV programming from the ground up, instead of just providing the sonic backdrop.

Peter Fish is in tune with his surroundings.

“I’ll always be a composer first and foremost, but I’ve also always wanted to be a content owner in addition to being a content provider,” he explains. “Sound Stories is very consciously becoming a TV production company. We already have one show that is green-lit for PBS – we are producing that with others as well, but we have an ownership stake. That’s one of the reasons we left Broadway Video, is so that we could have this additional room that is not studio space, to run a more diverse business out of.”

Working in tandem with Sound Stories’ Director of New Business Development, Tracey Anarella, Fish’s new initiative is gathering steam: Besides the green-lit PBS show, two more are close behind. And as it turns out, one of his neighbors at 545 is plugged-in music manager Bernadette Brennan of Nightlife Productions, who was instrumental in Fish taking on an artist management client of his own – the Mexican rock band Los Soviets – with more on the way.

Aware of the Perils

Fish has been working side-by-side with TV producers since the 1980’s, which has afforded him plenty of insight about what he’s getting into. “The caveat about TV production,” he says, “is that it’s not unlike making a record or a movie. You could try your hardest for a very long time and get nothing – get failure.

“In the world of TV and post, the composer’s job – to a large degree – is: write music, get check. Are there creative royalty arrangements and funny deals? Yes. But usually someone comes in the door and says, ‘I have X dollars, can you produce Y?’ And you do it or you don’t.

“But in the world of content production, you can invest months or years into making it, and at the end of the day still not have anything to show for it. That’s why it’s good to have both – a short-term business to bring in some cash, as well as longer-term to bring along bigger-picture possibilities.”

Doubtless, Fish has seen plenty of those failures unfold first-hand. But he’s also been sufficiently inspired by his successful colleagues, who have demonstrated that patience and persistence can win the day. As an example, Fish points to a conversation he had with producer Dave Pederson, who was a collaborator of the successful NYC documentarian Morgan Spurlock from early on.

“Before Super Size Me came out and they actually made some money, they were sleeping on couches and floors on Avenue B,” Fish relates. “Dave said to me, ‘Here’s what I learned from that: The people who don’t make it in the entertainment industry are the ones who quit it.’ Quitting is easy, staying is hard. You need a certain level of self-confidence in your goal, that sooner or later your day will come.”

On the practical side of things, Fish is willing to make this long-haul effort because he knows that owning the right intellectual property can be highly lucrative. There – we said it. “Content ownership is always the key,” says Fish. “In music it’s in publishing, and maintaining all your various rights and copyrights to the best degree you can. TV’s no different. With TV content, you can license it just like you would a song – to a given network; to the US and Canada; then six more times to Belgium, France, and Zimbabwe. Then you can repackage it as a DVD, and as Web content. So owning your own content is really essential to the economics of producing for television.”

Sound Stories' Tracy Anarella, Director of New Business Development

But do decades of massaging the Synclavier really qualify him for the expanded role he’s embracing? Fish thinks so, but not strictly for the obvious reasons. “If you compose enough shows for TV, you know how TV works,” he acknowledges. “But it’s my experience as a business owner that really equips me for it. I know how deals get made and structured – as well as how they get NOT made, and why things go wrong.”

Economic Challenges for Composers

Speaking of things going wrong, Fish sees plenty to worry about in the field of making original music for picture.

“From my point of view as a composer, it isn’t good,” observes Fish. “It’s not to say it isn’t workable, but it isn’t good. The fragmentation of the marketplace boils down to math: There’s no more money to produce TV then there ever was, but the pie is divided into so many shows, networks, etc… that no one has any money.

“And also one of the major foes of composers are music libraries,” he continues. “When composers compose for libraries for very, very little money in the hopes that they’ll get a sync license, then the producers don’t expect to pay for composers. So the entire bar of the industry has gotten ridiculously lowered by those two trends —  the number of available shows splitting the pie up, and the fact that the libraries rushed into the void to fill this low-cost need.

“There’s a third issue, as well, which is that the point of entry – economically and educationally speaking — for someone to call themselves a composer has lowered so dramatically. Anyone with $5,000 and one finger to trigger sounds can consider themselves a composer, and produce some very good stuff without the slightest clue as to what they’re doing.  I don’t hold it against them, but it also enables them to lower the bar for remuneration that they need to do their job.”

Lastly, Fish notes the ongoing financial confusion being created for musical rights holders as content migrates from TV to online and mobile media. “No one knows how to pay for that,” he points out, “so that money will keep going away. The royalty payments for Web and various other aftermarket applications are ludicrous – so all of the avenues that people who composed for a living enjoyed until recently are drying up.”

Worth the Effort

For professionals in the music and entertainment field, completely shedding your skin may sound like a painful and laborious process. But for those who want to survive and then thrive – even for in-demand composers like Fish – there may be no getting around it.

“Creatively, I could just sit and write music until the day I die – I don’t even need to get it heard,” says Fish. “Someday I’ll be able to do that. But that won’t happen if I just expect money to keep rolling in from doing what I’ve been doing for the last 30 years. That’s why reinvention is so important now if you’re a composer. My dad was a plumber, and he said to me, ‘Do you ever go to a pawn shop and see a wrench? No, you see guitars.’ Which is very true.

Sonic feng shui.

“As practical people, composers have to renew themselves. Luck can play a part, but luck is the by-product of skill and design. Having said that, you’ve got to be aware that opportunity doesn’t always come calling just because you want it to. You have to find the opportunity in the cracks.”

On that note, Peter Fish and Sound Stories are keeping their eyes wide open for the next concept to assemble. He may not be sure exactly what he’s looking for, but he’s pretty sure he’ll know it when he sees it.

“I don’t have an innate desire to produce incredibly high-brow stuff, even though the PBS thing is that,” he says. “Nor do I have the desire to produce low-brow stuff. But I do have the desire to produce the ‘blue ocean’: that spot in the marketplace that no one else is covering.

“So I’m looking for ideas to turn into properties where people say, ‘I didn’t think of that.’ Filing voids is what I’m interested in doing. Because if you can fill a void, there should be someone who agrees, ‘Oh yeah! There’s a market for that.’”

— David Weiss

Synclavier in the city.

High mileage, high output.

Another view of the studio.

Ready to go in the VO booth.

Harmonious angles.