Music Catalog Counsel.
Counsel for buying, managing, and selling music catalog assets. Legal analysis tied to royalty operations, rights data, and cash flow.
Counsel across the catalog lifecycle.
Where AI products meet music and media rights.
Transactional counsel on AI products built on music, media archives, voice, likeness, and other protected content. Work includes M&A and asset transfers involving AI software and data, license structuring, product and platform terms, and risk allocation around training data, outputs, publicity rights, privacy, OSS, and third-party model and service dependencies.
- Structuring, drafting, and negotiating AI provisions in M&A, asset purchases, and license transactions involving music, media archives, and personality rights
- Diligence on training data, OSS, privacy, third-party model and platform dependencies, and operational independence
- Voice, likeness, and publicity-rights analysis for AI products and branded conversational assistants
- Product terms, consent flows, use restrictions, and platform integration for consumer-facing AI products
- Acquisition, separation, and post-closing transition mechanics for AI software, model artifacts, and data assets
- AI exposure review in catalog acquisitions and media-library transactions, including indemnity scoping and RWI interaction
Contract analysis tied to royalty operations. I've built deal models, corrected registrations, recovered underpayments, and mapped termination exposure across the catalog lifecycle. The focus is simple: whether the rights, the registrations, and the contract actually match the revenue.
A lawyer who came up through the industry.
Before law, five years running the business side of theater companies: Princeton Summer Theater, The New Group, and Mark Morris Dance Group. Double-entry books, budgets, touring logistics, non-profit governance.
Out of law school, straight into the music business. First as Business Manager at Rob Shore & Associates, handling business management for recording artists and touring acts. Then to mtheory (now Virgin Music Label & Artist Services) as Royalty Director for six years, running royalty operations at the point streaming transformed the back end of the music business. I built mtheory's royalty reporting infrastructure from the ground up, first in Excel (until 2014 statements hit the spreadsheet's million-row limit), then across successive software systems as the industry's tooling scrambled to catch up with the new data volumes. The work covered statement ingestion and reconciliation across PROs, publishers, labels, SoundExchange, the MLC, and international CMOs; producing and distributing hundreds of outbound royalty statements per reporting cycle; supporting catalog valuations and diligence for investor-grade music assets; and managing audits covering catalogs generating $10M+ in annual revenue.
The practice is built on the premise that rights deals go wrong when the contract stops agreeing with the cash flow. I read both.
- 2021–The Law Office of Theodore Hall PLLC · Attorney
- 2014–2020mtheory / Virgin MLAS · Royalty Director (Label Services)
- 2011–2014Rob Shore & Associates · Business Manager
- 2005–2010The New Group · Mark Morris Dance Group · Business Operations
- J.D.Seton Hall · Princeton B.A.
New matters and inquiries.
Inquiries welcome across buy-side diligence, sell-side positioning, and ongoing royalty administration. Initial conversations are by appointment and confidential.
Book a meeting →Please do not send confidential information through this website or by email until an attorney-client relationship has been established in writing.
New York, NY 10025