LOS ANGELES — The Production Music Association (PMA) will present music industry executives Romano Di Bari, Alison Smith, and Dr. Lynne Lummel each with a special Mark Award during the upcoming 2017 Production Music Conference (PMC). Di Bari will be the honorary recipient of the Mark Awards “Hall of Fame” Award, Alison Smith will be the honorary recipient of the Mark Awards “Ambassador Award,” and Dr. Lynne Lummel will be the honorary recipient of the Mark Awards “Visionary Award”.
This year’s PMC will take place October 4th through the 6th at the Loews Hollywood Hotel, with the Mark Awards event taking place during the evening of October 4th. Currently celebrating its 20th Anniversary Year, 2017 also marks the PMA’s Fourth Annual Production Music Conference and third presentation of the Mark Awards. The event presents industry leaders from the production music industry joining forces for an evening awards event, along with two days of panels, sessions, state of the art presentations, and networking.
Romano Di Bari (left)
Honorary recipient of the 2017 Mark Awards Hall of Fame Award
Born in Rome in 1936, Romano Di Bari, at 24 (1960) began his career working for RCA Italiana, at the time the top record company of Italy and among the biggest ones in the world. In 1966, Di Bari accepted the direction of Ariston Records in Milano, and in 1968 he launched his independent business: Canopo Music Publishing in Rome, shortly to become Flippermusic Publishing. To this day, Flippermusic is the leader of Italian and international dealings in production music.
Over the years, the Flippermusic catalogue has spread all over the world and today reaches 39 countries where its repertoire is exploited. Today Flippermusic owns a catalogue of about 20,000 original titles and releases seventy to eighty new albums each year, with over 1,000 new titles. Flippermusic also represents more than 100 foreign libraries with over 400,000 titles in total. The company maintains a continuous flow of original music ideas to match the new requests of production music in domestic and international markets.
Alison Smith (center)
Honorary recipient of the 2017 Mark Awards Ambassador Award
Alison Smith is Executive Vice President of Distribution, Publisher Relations & Administration Services at Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI). In this role, Smith works closely with BMI’s publishers on their royalty distributions and administration needs, while streamlining the flow of information and developing new data streams, bonus structures and payment methodologies across all music delivery platforms. She oversees all of BMI’s domestic and international royalty distribution and administration services to its more than 750,000 members.
As an expert on performing rights administration, Smith has been a featured speaker at events by groups including the Society of Composers & Lyricists, the Association of Independent Music Publishers (New York and Los Angeles), the California Copyright Conference, the Church Music Publishers Association, the Production Music Association, as well as many performing rights organizations around the world.
Dr. Lynne Lummel (right)
Honorary recipient of the 2017 Mark Awards Visionary Award
Dr. Lynne Lummel recently retired from ASCAP after 28 years. Her last assignment was as EVP and Chief Transformation Management Officer, responsible for supporting the execution of ASCAP’s six-year plan and strategic objectives. Prior to that, she was responsible for Distribution and Repertory, overseeing the matching of hundreds of billions of TV, radio, Internet and other musical performances to ASCAP repertoire and the distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars each year. She was honored in Billboard’s 2013 Women in Music edition
Dr. Lummel has been instrumental in bringing video and audio pattern recognition technologies to ASCAP, expanding ASCAP surveys, streamlining operations, improving accuracy and reducing costs. Papers on her work creating self-managing, virtual licensing teams at ASCAP have been published in numerous journals.