How many songs are in libraries

[bfdcsd]

Silly question: anyone have any educated guesses as to number of songs lying around in librairies?

Seems to be 452 libraries in MLR’s dataset. Some libraries have tens of thousands of songs, others maybe only a 1000, though I’ve never seen one that small.

An online sync school I was duped into taking posits there are 500 or so tv shows on, with some of them using dozens of pieces of music per episode. Going high, if 500 shows use 100 tracks a week, that’d be 2.6 million. But they don’t usually have shows every week of the year. Maybe half is a high estimate. So, 1.3 million tracks.

The 452 libraries listed in here normally have between 10 and 100 or more composers? With a bit of overlap, no doubt, as most I read who have any luck at all with sync are in more than one library. So let’s say 400 libraries have 50 composers. That’s 20,000.

That would be 65 tracks for each of the composers.If each averaged $100, the math is easy.

As I try to figure out if there’s any use in working to make music to throw in the huge pot of what’s been collected the past decade or three, I think about these numbers. I hear a lot of music in libraries that’s similar in quality to what I can produce, but I hear a lot that’s way beyond what I even think about.

And yes, I make music becuase I must be creative in some way. But I also like to eat, and with every rejection and every new great idea to make a better track comes more time to invest patching my thin skin and figuring out if I can use or even understand the next great idea.

Whaaaa. Sorry for the moaining.

I would like to hear some ideas on actual or best-guess figures for the calculations, though. I’m beginning to feel like I missed the boat on this by a decade, as well as am I trying to force myself into something I don’t really have any business being in. If so, wouldn’t I have already figured all this out?

Signed,
Smart enough to know better, dumb enough not to care
🙂

[Author]

Posts