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So yes, part of my “story” so we stay on topic is …yes… I have always been a higher priced guy on stock music sites where I can control the price. Any time I experimented with “sales” it failed on every level. I have always fought like hell to maintain non exclusivity with all the companies I began working with over the last 12 years, even with publishers who postured as “our exclusive way, or the highway” I NEVER gave into that and never will. It is a fact that when you have freedom ,flexibility, and control over your intellectual property, you can pursue several revenue streams all within your control and you will make a lot more money. I always tell myself “Thank God I never caved into exclusivity with company X.” Because had I done so, my annual revenue would be 15% of what it is now.
It saddens me to see guys talk about “mid 5 figures”. you will be stuck forever in 50K land when you put all of your eggs in those exclusive baskets where the Lion’s jaw is in control of your music perpetually.
Many may say “well we don’t have a choice because the industry shifted to exclusivity”. This is Rubbish, the shift to exclusivity and now the subscription nightmare happened because weak handed composers accepted every deal thrown at them for reasons I can not comprehend. In the end it just comes down to plain old ignorance and fomo. These music publishers were all con artist liars who promised “more placements” , “more attention on your music” , or a ” second and improved revenue stream” (Subscription in addition to sync sales)
All of those “promises” were and still are nothing but bogus deals (overt extortion) that stripped ownership and control away from the original creator and put publishers and stock site owners in the drivers seat. Who is to blame? Look in the mirror and see yourself.
What can you do now? Raise your prices immediately because LA writer is correct, people buy what they need and want, not what’s “on sale” for $5. Then upload your catalog to Content ID before anyone else does and never give a music publisher permission to upload your tracks into content ID.
Here is another story that’s interesting. I recently had a global financial services firm dealing in stocks and crypto e mail privately stating ” we found one of your tracks on AJ and want to use it on a global ad campaign, can we please ask that you verify that you are the rights holder? and Can we have you issue us a license directly? we don’t want any shenanigans for this this project and we do not really trust this site to issue a proper license with this kind of high international visibility.” How pathetic is that? The client can not even trust the stock music licensing platform to issue a valid license for their project! They also don’t even trust that the music they are licensing is held by an account owner that truly owns the music.
Agreed with all Music1234 said…..
You want to have a full time career? Forget about music…. (temporarily)
First….
Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$, Follow the money, Follow the $$$….
Music library owner – house in Encono.
Music library owner – vacations in France
Music library owner – driving Ferrari or Porsche
Music library owner – SWEET offices
Music library owner – company gobbled up by International’s conglomerate for tens of millionsComposer – renting apartment
Composer – signing away rights in perpetuity for nothing
Composer – has to have significant other working 2 jobs to survive
Composer – can’t afford kids or home in the suburbs
Composer – giving it away for “notoriety” or bragging rights
Composer – willing to work a day job cause that’s “just what you have to do to be a starving artist”Get the picture? Ownership = $$$.
Music1234 said he doesn’t know why people give away their creative works for virtually nothing. Actually, I think he does know. They do it for a variety of reasons :
– it’s the easy way
– they are too lazy do the hard work – which is MUCH harder than writing music
– they are too scared to call people directly and create relationships
– giving music away is instant “success”
– they can start making “pennies” almost right out of the gate – even though it’s at the cost of big $$ success down the line
– they are ignorant and too lazy to learn the ropes to long lasting success
– they believe charlatans selling success on the internet via paid classesAaaannnnnnd a host of other reasons.
Reality : He who owns the ball sets the rules of the game. Why give someone else your ball for no real return? Doesn’t make sense to me unless they are paying me $$,$$$ for a project.
Notariety, Bragging Rights, Feel good “success” don’t pay bills long term. Sacrificing your long term goals for short term successes is cool sometimes, but when you’re staring down a long career path, trying to figure out how to get to the goal of long term success and possible retirement….maybe short term successes are not so smart.
Things to consider……
Music Composer is the $13 an hour dude at Wal Mart all too often.
Music Library Owner is the King of all con artists, a mobster, pro extortionist, exploiter in chief, a shameful, greedy disgraceful human, nothing to be proud of in all honesty.There are other ways to control your financial destiny as it relates to production music, but you have to start by respecting yourself, your time, your value, your skill set, your worth.
I totally agree with Music 123 , that it isn’t the companies that are screwing us, it’s the composers signing crap deals and establishing new normals for the industry.
Can any of you (Music 1234, LAwriter, etc) drop a link to any of your licensing platforms, personal website that you license your music from, etc? I’d like to see what a lot of this looks (and sounds like) in action. Thanks in advance!
Mike – speaking for me personally, I do not license via a personal website, etc.. I have long standing business contacts that I go through or publishers that sub publish for me or re-title for me.
Mike, Dropping links to our entire business model and telling everyone exactly how we accomplished what we did also goes against Business 101 rules. I too do not license off my own web site. I hang out where the buyers are going every day and it ain’t my web site.
When all is said and done, LA Writer and I achieved what we did through very hard work over decades, not years. We made mistakes and learned from them. One mistake I never made was signing insane exclusive in perpetuity deals. I have offered a lot of tips and content over the years on MLR. If you go back and read a lot of what I have written, it all comes back to this:
1. Lower Prices =’s Lowering your revenue, it fails every time.
2. Exclusivity (without advance payment for your work) = failure, loss of ownership, loss of control, loss of revenue because your tracks are tied up in perpetuity with the Lion’s who ate you up for free. (If a library pays you an advance of say $500 to $1500 per track for your effort, I do not have a problem with exclusivity although I personally would never take those deals unless I knew they were headed straight to an editors desk and solid performance royalties were going to be guaranteed on the back end)
3. Subscription = $2 per download as opposed to $20 to $50 per sync license. YOUTUBERS got a 90% discount they never asked for 2 years ago. Composers jumped on board and wonder why they only make 4 figures.
4. Laziness, not wanting to do what owners of intellectual property should do:
– register your cues at a PRO
-Join a PRO! Yes, we have people in this business who do not even join a PRO!
-Upload to Content ID yourself, don’t let the Lions do it, beat them to it and tell them to F__off if they expect that they should do it.
-DO NOT allow libraries to upload to DSP’s like Spotify and Apple – YOU DO IT. It’s YOUR creation and YOUR property.
5. Detection services, know what’s going on with your music, take action to collect as 100% writer and 100% publisher when you can. You’d be surprised as to how that can exponentially boost your income for the right opportunities. If the Lion’s jaws already are wrapped around your neck with a strong bite, well you are out of luck.AS LA Writer said “Get the picture? Ownership = $$$.”
Nothing I say will make a difference because music producers have a track record of shooting themselves in the foot every time. For every writer who says “no thanks” to a loss of 50% writers share deal or bogus subscription deal, it seems like there are 10 others in line saying “Hey wait, I’ll give you my music for nothing, and you can even own 50% of it in perpetuity.”
There is a lot of sage advice on this thread. To add to M1234’s comments :
LA Writer and I achieved what we did through very hard work over decades, not years. We made mistakes and learned from them.
This is absolutely true, and really – like it or not – true for everyone. To try to circumnavigate around these realities might net short term gains, but will undoubtable result in long term losses. Learn from your mistakes!!!
One mistake I never made was signing insane exclusive in perpetuity deals.
I have made this “mistake”. For the $1k-1500 price tag. Sometimes it worked out, other times not so much. I’ve got one AAA publisher who has hundreds if not thousands of placements for me, and nothing is showing up on BMI. Nothing. Tunesat is overflowing. Somehow they can’t seem to pull it together. Guess they are making too much money to be bothered, At least I got a decent paycheck UP FRONT. To do perpetuity deals with no SUBSTANTIAL (not $200) up front is equivalent to jumping off a cliff. A complete fail IMO.
Lower Prices =’s Lowering your revenue, it fails every time.
Um….Duh. Virtually any businessman knows this. Why don’t musicians? M1234 is dead on it.
Subscription =
It equals a fail. I’ve never gone down this road, and can see no circumstance that I ever would. I’d rather drive a UPS truck in the snow….
Laziness, not wanting to do what owners of intellectual property should do: register your cues at a PRO, Join a PRO! Y
Unbelievable. It’s the equivalent of taking a day job, and working hard, and never asking for your paycheck. Dumb. DUMB!
Detection services
I have never done these. BMI ignores them, and honestly, although I know I could probably net some more $$$, I’ve got better ways to make money and increase cash flow. ALTHOUGH, I completely admit that I might be the idiot here…. 🙂
Much like real life, owning property is one of the best ways to insure long term success. Avoid it at your own peril.
Music 1234 – : thumbs up :
Nothing I say will make a difference because music producers have a track record of shooting themselves in the foot every time. For every writer who says “no thanks” to a loss of 50% writers share deal or bogus subscription deal, it seems like there are 10 others in line saying “Hey wait, I’ll give you my music for nothing, and you can even own 50% of it in perpetuity.”
I have been working on Library Music for almost a year now, and have just turned down a perpetuity agreement with a new library after reading these threads. So there are some new composers listening. What you’re saying made a difference with me so keep it up! 🙂
@PAMMUSIC, the reality is that the only way to stop the insanity and exploitation is by unionizing to set certain standards related to composing music for media. These would be my top rules if we had the MPU or “Music Production Union”:
1. Writers maintain 100% of their “writers share” under any and all circumstances and it is illegal (extortion) to pressure them into giving up any percentage of the so called “wrters share”.
2. A Sync licenses for YOUTUBE and all other “social media” will be set at $50 minimum fee for a sync license
3. Subscription models are banned, illegal, a breach of international law, and music assetts can only be licensed one at a time, for one project at a time.
4. Only the original creators or writers can upload their music to youtube’s content ID system and collect “ad revenue”
5. All members of the MPU must be a member of a PRO
6. Exclusive Music production requests must be commissioned at a fee of $1000 per track or a minimum of $10,000 paid in advance by a publisher, to writer for a 10 track album.I can add a lot more but if everyone worked under these 6 basic principles, we’d quickly reverse the most pathetic state of conditions we are currently in – $5 sync licenses getting sold, $15 a month for all you can download subscription models, 50% writers share getting extorted by sleezy music libraries, 100% publishing share being extorted by corrupt TV networks like VIACOM and Discovery.. Stupid weak handed publishers giving into these deals or they are just lying to writers about thier woes with these networks. Also it should be illegal for some TV networks to bypass the cue sheet protocol, and payment of blanket license fees to PRO’s. ESPN/ DISNEY is another corrupt network that is getting away with not paying PRO’s under the bogus excuse of “we do direct licensing”. Yeah right….they do “direct licensing” of PRO registered music but do not have to pay PRO’s for access to this music. How the F__K is that legal????
Great info and discussion here. Thanks for all the info.
Hello to all.
I have been doing production music since 2004, seen some great libraries come and go, and now seeing what has become of this once thriving revenue stream; it has made me completely re-think how I do business. One BIG thing I have found out is that this really is about your relationships, and not about how many “cues” you have in libraries. After making my rounds to pretty-much all of the so-call top tier libraries. I took this “pandemic opportunity” to refocus, re-brand, and “lose my production music, and production music library identity”. I have literally spent the last year or so only focusing on specific types of projects, library music that has a non-recoupable budget attached, and dissecting my music and (hopefully) finding what it is really good for.Seems like I landed on a few things. For many years my output was about 125 to 150 cues/tracks a year. I am now making several times the money while only having an output of about 30 to 50 pieces a year currently..
Grateful that even though I am self-taught. I am an actual musician, and have several “Change-ups”. In addition, I am extremely grateful that I learned to navigate these treacherous waters; and not getting caught in the current “production music bottle-neck that is taking place somewhere around the B.S Libraries/Scams, Lower-tier, and Mid-Tier”..
This thread is titled ‘Full time composers – Share your stories’ and yet it seems to have been hijacked once again by people complaining about the current state of the industry and how it’s all going downhill and whose fault it is.. There are so many places on these forums where one can read these complaints – it’s a shame some seem to think it needs to happen here as well
This thread is titled ‘Full time composers – Share your stories’ and yet it seems to have been hijacked once again by people complaining about the current state of the industry and how it’s all going downhill and whose fault it is.. There are so many places on these forums where one can read these complaints – it’s a shame some seem to think it needs to happen here as well
I dunno. To me personally, if they care enough to think about it, put together a cogent thought, and type it all out, that’s a valuable part of a “full time composer’s” story. The last thing I want to read is a bunch of get rich quick stories from folks preaching a paradigm that’s close to two decades old – at a cost of several thousand dollars – that doesn’t work anymore.
IMO, smart folks will try to read between the lines and get some insight. The last thing I want to do is plow headlong into an industry that’s got no future. (Im not saying writing production music has no future, just making an example). If all the full time pro’s are complaining….that’s something I personally want to pay attention to. Cheers,
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