If you aren't huge, the key to success in any business is to find a niche and run with it. Milt Okun's Cherry Lane Music publishing company has done just that:

The big record companies may be losing customers. But 79-year-old former band conductor Milt Okun and his tiny music publishing firm have figured out where America is really listening:

At stock car races. On the gridiron. And during cartoons.

Filling such nooks and crannies with musical themes has become a major business for Okun's New York-based Cherry Lane Music, a privately held firm that has found cash where the conglomerates of the entertainment world sometimes haven't bothered to look.

Cherry Lane has secured a stake in the orchestral scores accompanying the National Football League's programming, including today's Super Bowl with its more than 80 million expected viewers. And when young hordes tune in to "Pokemon" on the Cartoon Network, they too are listening to Cherry Lane — as will fans of NASCAR telecasts, under a just-concluded deal to provide musical theme songs for the auto-racing circuit.

Music publishers typically make their money by licensing songs from their catalogs to advertisers or other customers, as well as by collecting royalties from albums that include their tunes. But Cherry Lane's catalog of older songs is relatively small, so it has staked its fortunes on creating original music for TV shows and films.

With album sales on the decline, music giants such as AOL Time Warner Inc.'s record division or EMI Group, which has rights to an estimated 1 million songs, increasingly have relied on their publishing units to provide a cushion. In terms of library size, Cherry Lane is minuscule, with about 50,000 copyrights.

But the company's growth in recent years suggests that a music industry dominated by a handful of behemoths still can learn from hard-driving entrepreneurs such as Okun and Cherry Lane's chief dealmaker, Aida Gurwicz.

....By the early 1990s, the firm was looking for a new direction. Okun hired Gurwicz, an executive at a prominent classical music publisher, to restructure Cherry Lane's international royalty collection system. Along the way, they stumbled into their saving grace: the neglected corners of Hollywood.

Gurwicz discovered that the company's TV clients, such as the composer of the score for the show "Beauty and the Beast," hadn't received proper payment, in part because its producers hadn't filed the necessary paperwork with royalty agencies around the globe.

"We realized there were lots of shows like that," Okun said. "There was a hole in the market."

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