Sony Music Premium Content Unit Ramps Up Documentary Film Production – Deadline – Deadline

The Bee Gees, The Go-Go’s, David Bowie, the Grateful Dead, Louis Armstrong, the Velvet Underground, and Tina Turner have something more in common than just musical greatness. They’ll all been the subject of recent documentaries, part of an explosion in popularity of the nonfiction genre.

Record companies used to be relatively passive partners in documentary making – licensing songs here and there. But with streaming platforms, theatrical distributors, and cable networks avid for music-driven docs and series, labels are stepping up to deliver nonfiction content themselves. Sony Music’s Premium Content Division has become a leader in the space.

“We have an incredible opportunity to pair up some of the best music artists in the world with some of the best filmmakers in the world and create new art between them,” notes Krista Wegener, EVP Premium Content Development, Sales and Distribution. “That’s a really exciting proposition and something that we’re doing a lot of.”

The Premium Content Division’s slate of music docs includes an upcoming film on Celine Dion, directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Irene Taylor (Leave No Trace). The project, announced in 2021, “will commemorate the Canadian songstress’ incredible life story and career accomplishments,” Dion’s website says, “including iconic album releases, award accolades, world tours and Las Vegas residencies.”

Acclaimed director Dawn Porter (John Lewis: Good Trouble) is at work on a documentary about the late R&B artist Luther Vandross, produced by Oscar winners Jamie Foxx and Colin Firth. “He’s one of the greatest singers in the history of music,” Foxx commented as he helped announce the film. 

The Vandross project is being produced in cooperation with his estate. The estate of June Carter Cash, meanwhile, is very much on board for an upcoming documentary about the country music legend. That film, part of a multi-year agreement with Jason Owens’ Sandbox Productions, will feature “never before heard interviews with Cash family members and archival footage,” according to Sony Music, and “will trace June Carter’s roots and showcase her incredible journey to country music superstardom.”

That “never-before-heard element” is key. Revealing undiscovered aspects of an artist’s life and career are critical to a successful music doc, says Tom Mackay, president of Sony Music’s Premium Content Division.

“If we do our jobs right and we tell the story the right way,” he observes, “we want fans to sit there and go, ‘Wow… I thought I knew everything… and you guys unlocked something that I never even contemplated or had no idea about.’ And that’s a really, really cool feeling.”

The Premium Content Division also produces some scripted content (among those projects is an upcoming animated series about soccer star Lionel Messi), but the primary focus has been unscripted. Two films from the Premium Content Division premiered in June at Tribeca: Carlos, the documentary directed by Emmy winner Rudy Valdez about guitarist Carlos Santana, and Let the Canary Sing, Alison Ellwood’s biographical documentary about singer-songwriter Cyndi Lauper. Ellwood has previously directed documentaries on The Go-Go’s, The Eagles, and the Laurel Canyon music scene.

“When I was first approached, I said, ‘A documentary? I’m not dead yet!’” Lauper joked as she introduced the film at Tribeca, standing next to Ellwood. “But if anybody was going to tell my story – the good, the bad and the ugly, and all the missteps and the good steps, the triumphs, and the not-so-triumphs – it would be Alison Ellwood. She’s a wonderful filmmaker.”

In her intro, Lauper noted her longtime association with Sony Music, telling the Tribeca audience, “I’ve been with them forever.”

To that point, Mackay says “the overall and overreaching goal” of the Premium Content unit is “to always continue to improve what is our best-in-class service and capabilities for the artists that are signed to us. It’s always about, at the end of the day, expanding and strengthening our relationship with the artists, with their music, with their catalog and their repertoire.”

An obvious upside for labels is the potential for a music documentary to boost an artist’s sales.

“As a perfect example, we were involved just recently in a John Farnham documentary being released in Australia,” Mackay says, referring to John Farnham: Finding the Voice, a film directed by Poppy Stockell about the British-Australian singer. “It’s now gone on to become one of the best performing music documentaries in Australia of all time. What they did there was they then put a soundtrack out, and then obviously we could gauge the success of that soundtrack, and then you could see what was going on with the catalog as well.”

A compelling documentary can also pull new listeners into an artist’s orbit.

“We want these films to really play and to speak to the hardcore fan, but we also want somebody who’s never listened to an album, maybe only knows a couple songs from the radio, to sit down and go, ‘I’m gonna give this a shot’ and get completely drawn in,” Mackay says. “Hopefully, we go on to convert someone who was not a fan into someone who is a fan… That’s a real aspirational goal for us.”

Pink, who is signed to Sony-owned RCA, served as an executive producer of the 2021 documentary about her Beautiful Trauma tour, P!nk: All I Know So Far, now streaming on Prime Video. But typically, Mackay and Wegener say, artists don’t take on producing functions for documentaries from the Premium Content Division.

“It’s case by case,” Wegener says. “If you look across our slate it’s rare that an artist would have a producer credit, but it’s a conversation with the filmmaker and with the artist… Our kind of core philosophy is that the experience of making the film needs to be really positive for the artist… And I think, frankly, the filmmakers want that, ultimately the distributors want that. Everybody wants to produce something that an artist is happy with.”

Polygram Entertainment, the film and television division of Universal Music Group, is behind the 2023 documentary Love to Love You, Donna Summer, now streaming on HBO and Max. It co-produced Mystify, a 2019 documentary about INXS front man Michael Hutchence. It’s co-producing Oscar winner Morgan Neville’s upcoming documentary about Paul McCartney’s first 10 years of music after he left the Beatles (working title: Man on the Run), and Universal Music Group also was behind 2016 Best Documentary Oscar winner Amy, the Asif Kapadia-directed film about Amy Winehouse.

Whether it’s UMG, Sony Music’s Premium Content Division, or other players in the music documentary arena, are they in danger of running out of major recording artists to explore on film? Mackay and Wegener aren’t ready to panic.

“One of the unique strategic advantages that makes us a bit of a unicorn in the landscape is that we have this incredible history as an overall music company. You have two companies, Columbia and RCA, that are both over a hundred years old and all of the storytelling and the music from these companies that comes from being at the forefront of music for that long period of time,” Mackay says. “So, I think that in my lifetime and in Krista’s lifetime we’re okay for storytelling.”

And there’s always the prospect of fresh faces emerging on the music scene, who could become worthy of documentary treatment.

“What’s exciting too — being a music company that’s constantly releasing new music, breaking new artists — things are evolving and changing every day, and new opportunities present themselves that didn’t exist a year ago,” Wegener comments. “The stories are almost unlimited when you think about it from that perspective.”