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I’ve been only on royalty free sites this far, but I’m planning to send some of my better tracks to some “higher level” libraries.
This question might sound silly, but I am fairly new to this music library business. So basically I was wondering: if you send a music to library
and they reject you/ your music, how long should you wait before sending
more of your music? If they reject you, it’s not like a life-time rejection and you can try again later? (unless you are really, really bad… :D)Not a silly question at all. Most everyone has been rejected when submitting. The exclusive libraries receive hundreds of submissions a day and have a policy of 4 to 6 weeks for review of your music. They will contact you if they are interested in it, if not you will normally not be contacted at all. Therefore the “rejection”.
The rejection is not necessarily one of “your music is bad”, it may be a case that it is not what they are looking for to include in their library. I personally have been told by only 2 of the big (what I call the elite) exclusive libraries that “It’s good, but not what we are looking for.” The others I never heard a word back.
So, no it is not a life time ban of any sort on you or your music and you can and should try again after those periods.
Once a month seems reasonable.
I’d say every few months , maybe shoot for the moon in a follow up email and saying something like “I was just following up on my music submission, if I was rejected could you please give feedback to help my chances of being accepted in the future”. If you are lucky you might get some good feedback, up to and including if this library is right for you. But yes, it’s entirely possible you won’t hear anything back. I say give it a couple months to see if you get accepted, try again a month after that.
When being rejected I think it is a good idea to step back and evaluate if your music is 1. Up to par with the quality of the library 2. Appropriate content for this current library. Doing this will help with your own growth. I made the mistake of chasing every library on earth in the beginning, with music that lacked what was mentioned above. I kind of feel that you should show up on their doorstep with ‘guns blazing’, production wise. First impression is everything. And everything I just wrote could also be total BS….just my two cents.
“Once a month seems reasonable” – this is very bad advice.
If you send the best libaries a demo every month you will make yourself very, very unpopular and ruin any chances of getting in there. You wait at least 6 months. OK, if it’s a Mickey Mouse library send one every month or every hour or whatever but if you want to get into a big library – i.e Universal / Extreme / ANW et al then you do not do that. Sending a demo to libraries such as these is pretty much futile anyway. They will find you if they want what you do and it is remarkably brilliant and ironically, doesn’t sound like ‘library music’.
imo
“Once a month seems reasonable” – this is very bad advice.
+1 to what gibson les paul said!! Once a month would be making a total annoying pest out of yourself, especially with higher end libraries. They will totally write you off if you submit that often. 6 months is a much better minimum timeframe. And before you re-submit, be honest with yourself as to what is different and/or better about your follow-up submission.
“Once a month seems reasonable” – this is very bad advice.
+1 VERY bad advice!
Into the “circular file,” i.e., trash can, and onto the “blocked sender / do not use” list.
6 months seems excessively long to me, but it is what it is. Thanks guys.
Funny Story.
I was pitching a half completed production music album and it takes a long time because I agree with those that say only pitch it to one library at a time then wait – follow up – wait and if no response after 4 -6 weeks move on. ( i.e. don’t spam it out to 10 companies at once as you’ll end up having to p*** someone off if more than one company gets back to you )
So I had done this half a dozen times with this particular project with no success and on a whim I sent it to another company that someone had suggested to me. It got accepted and over the next couple of months we worked with the libary owner to get it fully completed.
At some point I needed to search back through my emails with the library owner and realised that six months earlier I’d sent the exact same playlist to the exact same person and he’d turned it down.
For some reason I’d forgotten I’d sent it to them 6 months earlier and apprently so had the library owner but 2nd time around they accepted it.
From this I learned a few things :
1. A rejection is not a flat out ” No ” it’s just a ” Not Today ”
2. Keep good records of who you sent what and when
3. If you wait 6 months it’s likely no-one will remember what you sent them previously
4. Timing is everything
just wanted to go back to naudio question above about whether you should send your songs to one library at a time and wait for an answer (or a reasonable amount of time) before sending it to the next library, or if you just send it to a few libraries at the same time and risk having to turn down some of them.
Given that things tend to move pretty slow in that area I could see the benefit of sending it to a few libraries at once, unless that’s considered bad practice and you would lose any chance of working with that library again in the future…