When Pipersville’s Jonathan Parks founded ALIBI Music from the spare bedroom of his apartment in October 2011, he had a singular goal: providing easily licensable production music to content creators.
ALIBI quickly achieved this, with an initial catalog of about 1,000 pieces of music, and by earning its first international film trailer, national commercial and network promo within its first week of launch. This music was used in the trailer for the 2011 film, “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen,” and a promo for the show, “American Horror Story.”
ALIBI has since produced numerous hit tracks, appearing in commercials, trailers, promos, advertisements, network programming and other forms of media. Its greatest accomplishments, according to Parks, include features in the 2015 Game of War and 2022 Toyota Super Bowl commercials, a track for Adult Swim’s “Yule Log” and a trailer for the 2022 film, “Avatar: The Way of Water.”
Accessibility is the key to ALIBI’s success, with curated catalogs of licensed, easily searchable music being available to creators. “It’s easily licensable if you’re working with us directly for larger projects or if you’re an independent content creator. Creators can license directly from our site. That’s the primary purpose of what we do,” said Parks.
Although ALIBI mainly creates music for production, it also releases its tracks commercially on sites such as Apple Music, Amazon Music and Spotify, giving consumers the ability to listen to ALIBI’s music on mobile devices and add songs to their playlists.
Parks discussed the joy he feels from reading comments on YouTube that claim that ALIBI’s music gives them meaning. “Even though it wasn’t produced for consumers, what we always strive to do with our music is have an emotional connection,” explained Parks.
ALIBI maintains a small group of 14 employees, six of whom are based in Pennsylvania, including Jonathan Parks’ father and the company’s COO, Jeffrey Parks. It emphasizes providing accommodations to its employees, allowing them to work remotely and granting them a mandatory five weeks of vacation. This has led to low turnover and more efficient work.
“With assistance, we’ve developed and implemented things that would take another company 20 people to do. We streamlined it, so one person can do it and still be looking for other things to do to work within the company,” said Parks.
In addition to its staff, ALIBI hosts an international team of 300 full-time composers and musicians, who work with creators ranging from YouTubers to multimedia companies. It pays its composers 50 percent of licensing revenues, ensuring the quality of their work.
Parks’s love for music began at a young age, he took violin lessons at the age of 7 because he was rewarded with stickers for doing so and started playing the guitar at 9 years old. He played in some bands in high school and began doing composition work. Parks graduated from Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., with a degree in music business after originally intending to study audio engineering.
Upon his graduation in 1999, he began working for EMI Records in Los Angeles where he worked with data entry, typing the track titles from the back of CD cases for the entire EMI catalog. He attributed this work with data to inspiring his future career.
“I definitely worked with a lot of great technical people. I didn’t know at that time that data management would basically be my career for the next 20 some years,” said Parks.
Parks’s experience and skill with music, data and business have led to the success of ALIBI. He claimed that his business experience has made him as well-versed in music business law and music publishing law as most lawyers.
While he spends most of his time working on the business side of ALIBI, he discussed his affinity for working with composers. “I love working with the data side, the creative side, and working with the composers and artists to produce the music, even though I don’t do it too often anymore,” explained Parks.
ALIBI’s catalog of music can be found at: alibimusic.com/work.
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