Randall Poster and Josh Deutsch met in the mid-seventies, when they were in seventh grade.
“A girl I knew from sleepaway camp—maybe she was my first girlfriend—introduced us,” Poster said recently. “Probably at a bar mitzvah.”
“Not my bar mitzvah,” Deutsch said.
“Not mine, either,” Poster said.
“Although we were at each other’s bar mitzvahs.”
At the time, Deutsch, who lived in New Jersey, was attending Riverdale Country School, in the Bronx, and Poster, who lived in Riverdale, was a student at Horace Mann, next door. They were both into music. They bought and spun and talked about records, pored over the Village Voice, and, as they got older, accompanied each other to concerts and clubs. Poster said, “I remember getting into Studio 54 in eleventh grade and thinking, ‘I want to be a grownup.’ ”
A grantable wish. After college (Brown, for both), each wound up in the music business—Deutsch as an A. & R. executive at big labels and as the founder of his own record company, and Poster as a sought-after music supervisor in television and film, who works with Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, and Todd Haynes, among others.
Last fall, amid upheavals in, well, every business, they decided to pair up again, merging their companies under the name Premier Music Group, with an eye to getting songs into ad campaigns and podcasts as well as movies and TV shows. “Picking up the intensity of that old conversation we’ve been having about music all these years has been one of the few rewards of this strange period,” Deutsch said.
On a recent evening, the two were in their new offices, on the fourth floor of the National Arts Club, a lavish town house overlooking Gramercy Park. Some of these rooms, they said, had for decades been a couple’s pied-à-terre. The office that was to be Poster’s, with louvred skylights and a loft space—“I think I will call it my studio,” he said—was cluttered with boxes of records. A door in the hallway bore a plaque that read “Pastel Society of America.”
“We’re the only ones here,” Deutsch said.
“The Pastel Society is apparently not in session,” Poster said.
Deutsch was dressed in black—sweater, pants, sneakers. Poster wore purple cords, a gray V-neck, and Stan Smiths. They didn’t so much finish each other’s sentences as occasionally utter different ones at the same time. It had been an oddly busy period, with a lot of work to do but almost none in the company of others. Poster had been the music supervisor on many of the pandemic’s streaming hits—“The Queen’s Gambit,” “Tiger King,” “Pretend It’s a City”—as well as the films “One Night in Miami” and “Summer of Soul.”
“They come out to a certain acclaim, but there’s no interaction with the people who made it, no celebration,” Poster said. “It’s kind of a neutered experience.”
“The ad side of the business is up over sixty per cent,” Deutsch said. “Advertisers who couldn’t shoot new material have wanted new audio to freshen up the messaging. There was a scramble to respond to the first phase of Covid with an ‘I’ll be there for you’ message.” He added, “Artists who have now been deprived of their touring revenue are much more open to licensing their work—some who used to be a big No.”
Poster started doing music for TV ads about fifteen years ago. Film directors he’d worked with were beginning to do more commercials. “I knew nothing about advertising,” he said. “The only person in advertising I knew was Darrin Stephens, in ‘Bewitched.’ ” He went on, “In music licensing, there’s no blue book. There’s always a human dimension. Maybe a band hasn’t licensed a song because one of the guys in the band hates the other guy so much he doesn’t want him to make any money.”
Many candidates sprang to mind, but Poster wouldn’t name names. He stressed that the choice of a song is ultimately the director’s. “The common misconception is that I pick the music,” he said. “We help clients make considered decisions.” He added, “Everybody I know believes that they’re good drivers and that they have good taste in music.”
Deutsch said, “The joke internally is that everyone is a music supervisor.”
“Sometimes a movie or a show hasn’t earned the piece of music the director wants to use,” Poster said. “It can’t carry the weight of that tune. Hopefully people want to work with me because I will tell them that.” He recalled that, when he was working on the HBO series “Vinyl,” the producers wanted to end an episode with a song. Poster, who wouldn’t say which song it was, didn’t think it worked, in part because he’d already used it, in a film, to great effect. “It was eating me up. So finally I had to go to Marty”—Scorsese, an executive producer—“and say, ‘I have to tell you that the use of this song in this episode is keeping me up at night.’ And Marty said, ‘O.K., we’ll change it.’ ”
As Deutsch and Poster see it, licensing for advertising and other media has in many ways replaced a role that radio used to play. “The idea is to push an artist or a song toward discovery, or rediscovery,” Poster said.
“You have sixty thousand new tracks uploaded on Spotify every day,” Deutsch said. “If you’re a new artist, how do you get heard?” “Branded opportunities,” they say, as one once might have said “plastics.” Licensing is also a shrewd way to boost the awareness and the value of established catalogues, many of which (Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Stevie Nicks) have recently fetched high premiums, owing in part to the growth in streaming services.
“There’s never been a better time to own the masters,” Deutsch said. “I’ve never seen multiples like this. It’s become a reliable source of revenue, like an annuity. It’s why you’re seeing a lot of institutional money in music rights.”
Poster added, “This is where I say, ‘What he said.’ ” ♦
