Just a decade ago British-transplant Steve Ellis was tending bar at Stony Creek Restaurant in Tivoli, substitute teaching, and fronting the rock band The Simpletons. He spent the greater part of the '90s in determined pursuit of a record contract. Ellis and his bandmates eventually found that record deals guaranteed neither fame nor fortune. After two disappointing deals, The Simpletons finally received the financial compensation and exposure they had been looking for when one of their songs was sampled for a television commercial. While Ellis maintains he can no longer remember the song nor the commercial, he says the experience turned him on to the potential of music licensing.

From behind his uncluttered desk, the white walls of his small corner office adorned with his children's colorful drawings, Ellis recounts his transition from aspiring rock star to entrepreneur. "It just seemed odd to me that people were getting paid to make fake music when there are millions of people out there making real music every day, all sorts of kinds," he says, referring to the production industry's use of "canned" music. Working alone from a spare room in his Tivoli home, Ellis began compiling his own music library, stocked with submissions from a handful of musician friends. Agreements were drawn up, defining Ellis's Pump Audio as a direct licensing agent, allowing the company to act as the link between independent musicians and companies in need of production music.

Thanks to the connections of an old friend, Ellis soon began talking with MTV producer Ari Pomerantz, and Pump, as it's called by its employees, was hired to rescore "The Real World." For the project, Ellis recruited Steve Askew, a producer who had worked with The Simpletons; studio technician Joe Schneider; and Simpletons guitarist Rob Tourtelot.

When asked about his company's rapid growth, Ellis, casual in khaki shorts and plaid polo shirt, leans back in his chair and matter-of-factly states, "It has just been one step after the other."

Joe Schneider, Director of A&R and Catalogues, holds PumpBox external hard drives.

Today, Ellis, Tourtelot, Askew, and the marketing and client relations staff work from a small converted barn in the center of Tivoli. Last week, Schneider and the music-processing staff moved their offices into a house across the street, affectionately dubbed "The Pump Dump." Though Tivoli is considered Pump's home base, sales offices have opened in cities across the globe, including Los Angeles, Melbourne, Amsterdam, and London.

Ice cream bar in hand, Jessica Kelly, Pump's director of artist relations, strolls back to her desk, her flip-flops slapping against the office's scuff-marked wooden floor. As the ice cream truck's jolly tunes fade down the street, she maneuvers through the tight, well-lit foyer-cum-office, its corners piled with boxes, televisions, and a forlorn vacuum. Back in her chair, she begins pulling packages from mail crates, some of the 2,000 unsolicited submissions the firm receives monthly from unsigned musicians all over the world. Since the company added the FastTrack feature to its website, thereby allowing artists to upload up to three MP3s for pre-approval into the Pump catalog, the number of CDs to be sorted through has decreased. Tearing open an envelope from Ireland, Kelly removes a number of forms and a CD with a homemade label. The paperwork, downloaded from Pump's website, includes a thorough, signed licensing agreement and a form asking the artist to classify the genre of his or her music as well as the themes of the lyrics. Once Kelly has entered all necessary data into the computer, the CD goes upstairs, where the classifiers, supervised by Schneider, decide how the songs should be cataloged, if at all.