The Yopo Music library was born in 1993. I had just set up a radio production company called Sounds Visual making commercials and jingles for local stations across the UK. Money was tight and to be competitive we had to find a way to avoid using the MCPS licensed music libraries when producing our ads. With MCPS licensing you paid a fee each time you used one of their tracks on a commercial. In other words each time you dubbed the music onto a new production, you had to pay another fee.
We could not afford to do that and at the same time be competitive. So not only did we write the ads, voice the ads and produce them, we had to write the backing tracks and jingles too! I wrote music beds for car ads, window ads, recruitment ads, holiday ads and lots more, and it wasn’t long before I had accumulated a neat little library of tracks to use on our commercials. It soon occurred to me that I had enough material to fill a CD…a CD that could be marketed to other producers wanting an alternative to MCPS licensed music.
A little bit of market research on the phone confirmed my suspicion that there were many producers out there who would be interested in a library of quality production music without the expense and hassle of MCPS licensing.
Up to that point the reputation of buyout, royalty free or non-MCPS libraries was pretty poor. The music was often described as copyright free and often only available on cassette.
Yopo music would be different, and with a brand new CD packed with a variety of quality production music, not to mention a growing list of interested production companies, YoPo Music was born.
Not surprisingly there were those in the established music business who frowned on this break away from the MCPS way of doing things, and some were keen to tell me that it couldn’t work. Troubled by this scare mongering I sought legal advice. I had come across a book called ‘Music Business Agreements’, and sought out it’s author, Richard Bagehot. He immediately understood the concept of what I was trying to do, and was incredibly generous in offering to draft the original license agreement for me. True to his word, a few days later the fax machine whirred into action and started rolling out the first license agreement for YoPo Music. We were off.