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I made over $40k last year from these models.
That’s a very impressive number. How many tracks did you need to upload to get to this point?
I’m with Music1234 on this. I am not at all surprised by the figures from those other composers. If anything I’d expect subscription income to be even lower than those numbers, and much much lower than regular sync.
One question though: why did these top writers decide to put their music into this subscription model? Can they get it back?
Interesting.. so did they just place their entire non-exclusive catalog with the subscription libraries? Or write new material?!
This thread is horrifying and sad. When I started licensing music it was a world where I was consistently getting $150-$300 per standard license (or $500-$800 for a perpetuity buyout). That was less than ten years ago.
I’m curious as to what QUALITY these top subscription writers are putting up. Are they the ‘3-6 tracks a day’ crew, or the ‘1 track a week’ folks?
But how could a writer have dumped everything they have in exclusive agreements into this? That would be against their exclusive agreement.
Hi all, first time poster here. Ive read through a few posts about subscription models on this site, and the deafening rejection to them by composers. With the main concern being that a) there is no real way to report accurately back to the composers and b) what about the backend royalties.
Looking at the Rocketium model, they make their users pay $2 per track. So there is a direct report on which songs were licensed, using this fee per use model. If they licensed 1m songs in a year, and paid Sound Stripe 50%, that’s $1m to Sound Stripe. And an estimate of a 3000 song catalogue, thats $333 per song (more if its a popular track, less if not, of course). If a composer were to have 25 songs then on average, thats $8325 per year. (plus back end i am guessing). This seems ok? Help me out. What am i missing here?!
I think micro-licensing deals are going to grow as there is more content created and content users need music – and everyone is a content creator these days. Surely if your music is registered properly, (eg audio-tracked) then you would be collecting back end royalties via streaming of the content on various online platforms. No?
The music is free to be used. However, if you’d need to monetize your videos, you’d need to use your own tracks.
That’s correct. I use Rocketium to create the MLR videos and their music is free. Of course I use our own music.
As a subscriber, you do not have permission to re-sell music. That forms part of the terms of use.
Ok let me frame this differently…If Rocketium (as an example) charge the user $2k per song AND PAY Sound Stipe $1 per song AND Sound Stripe pay their composers as per their agreements (estimating 50%) then this seems to be a BETTER model?? Composers get paid a per-license use. And companies with scale can make this worthwhile for composers.
Subscription aside (agree its a bad model). I just think there is something in this, which assists content creators and respects the fee per license model.
The $2 per license fee is listed on their website here https://rocketium.com/academy/soundstripe-integration-rocketium/
I agree… it doesn’t sound (to me) any different than the blanket licenses which have been part of the music library fabric for years and that I have always had an issue with. Under the “Blanket License” agreement, the client pays (quarterly or annually) for access to the library’s catalog. The total money from all the blanket licenses sold by that library gets added up and then split in half. The library keeps 50% and then the other 50% gets shared by all the composers that were on that blanket license deal.We (as composers) were always getting screwed because my share was 1/100th (if there were 100 composers in the library’s blanket deal) of 50%.
And that’s only IF the library is being honest… there’s no way of knowing what kind of money is being made with the blanket deal unless you hire a llawyer to audit the library’s books… which will probably get you ousted from that library (who cares right?)
On the other hand, the library gets a much larger sum of money because they get that other entire 50%… which could be thousands of dollars. We would never know without an audit done. Example: My cut from a recent blanket deal distribution was $24.83 and what I noticed is that the library owner had taken down all the composer’s names from the Source Audio site (their catalog licensing site) as well as made the number of “friends” (just about every one of them a composer) on their Facebook page private. So now I can’t determine the amount of money I wasn’t given!! When I first joined the library, it had around 100 composers but has since grown to over a thousand. So let’s say that 1,000 composers got $24.83 each, that’s $24,830! And that’s the 50% shared by the composers. The library got another $24,830 and the library is literally run by the owner and his wife and a couple friends… That money is only the Blanket License distribution. Now throw in the BIG money made from their 100% Publishing Share and they’re up there near 6 figures. That still doesn’t complete the picture because they are getting Direct Licensing fees which I used to receive (my first one was $500, then the next one was about $5 and I haven;t seen one in 3 years now) because again, there’s no way he’s going to pay those out, not when there’s no way for us to know. So he’s keeping all the licensing fees too! This doesn’t mention the Streaming royalties which are also shared among ALL the composers at a 50% clip!!I’ve truly come to despise music libraries and the mere fact that they are (almost) all owned by composers makes it even MORE disturbing… They should be ashamed of themselves for raping each and every last one of us on the mere premise that “you can earn money as a composer writing for music libraries!!” Yeah, if you consider pennies-on-the-dollar “earning money” (I don’t) or unless you still live at your parent’s home… it’s just a freakin’ anal blowout.
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