Barry Cole
Music Supervisor, Rights Strategist & Creative Asset Advisor. A career lived inside New York’s music culture, not adjacent to it.
Barry has experienced music from every seat in the room: supervisor, publisher, executive, DJ, performer, educator, curator and participant in New York cultural life. That breadth informs how he approaches story, complex rights and catalog stewardship.
For three decades, Barry has supervised music for film, television and documentary, with credits including Brown Sugar, Rustin and Field Generals. He is a Grammy-nominated music supervisor and was music supervisor and co-producer/transmedia producer of the Sundance Audience Award-winning documentary Alive Inside: A Story of Music & Memory. Alongside the credits sits an equally long record of stewardship and education: publishing and catalog work including Blue Mountain Music, and nearly fifteen consecutive years teaching music rights to independent producers through IFP’s Summer Producers Program, before IFP became The Gotham.
Barry appeared on the cover of Groove Collective’s debut album and DJed with the band weekly for nearly a decade. His DJ work included Giant Step; he performed with the Nublu Orchestra; and his commercially released turntable and scratching credits include “Tell Me” featuring Norah Jones from the first Wax Poetic album.
Selected venues and events from Barry’s DJ career tell the rest of the story: The Cooler, New Music Cafe, Sybarite, AKA, Save the Robots, The Supper Club, Milk Bar, Botanical, Knitting Factory, Tao, The Frying Pan, CBGB, Cipriani. Decades of nights across New York’s music, nightlife, cultural and event spaces, as a working part of the city’s music community.
Today that accumulated knowledge is applied to current problems: helping productions, rights holders and organizations understand, protect and increase the value of music and creative assets.
Hear the thinking.
Barry speaks on music supervision, rights and the creative economy.