what percent would you charge to shop to library?

[mojorising]

I’m representing some bands catalogs helping them get their music in to the right fit of a library. I landed them one, and the library suggested I take the same percentage of publishing that I will for any potential sync, which unfortunately means I would need to dig in to the artists “writers share”. What would be a fair percentage? These bands more just want to hear their music on TV for the exposure than the money so they have left it in my hands completely. But I want to be fair. So if my cut is 20%. the publishing would ultimately be 50% to library, 20% to me, and 30% to artist. Same as sync but I doubt there will be many sync deals. Would 15% be more fair or does 20 seem about right? would love any thoughts on this.

[Advice]

I think the 15-20% range is fine. The issue for you is many tracks get placed in libraries but never earn anything. That means a great deal of your effort will be unpaid. You may want an arrangement that includes a minimum fee per year for each track you pitch. If you are going to take Writer’s share only for where the pitch was YOURS, you will have to re-title and register the new title with you as a certain percentage writer. That might prohibit working with exclusive libraries.

Also, instead of taking Writer’s share directly from PRO, a lot depends on how much you trust your band friends. You could have an agreement that you get $X/year for each track you are pitching and they must pay you Y% of every dollar revenue they earn as a result of your efforts. Harder to track yes but keeps the messy portion of Writer’s share out of it and doesn’t interfere with exclusive library deals.

Good luck! 😀

[Happy Ears]

15-20% of writers seems fair, most likely the library would take 100% of the publishing.
It’s basically a commission based sales deal.
Your time spent middle managing it between the library and the bands are the investment for which you collect the fee in form of writers share. Of course the possibility of having wasted time on this also comes back to you and your judgement. Not sure how fair the deal would be if you didn’t have to put a little work into it.
Just do it non exclusive and re-title as a way top say out of other versions of their songs. if they sign a record deal later they can keep their original title for that, the library can pull out the re-title (the audio) and not pitch it further but can still collect from previous placements on cue sheets under the re title

To have the artists and bands pay you a fee would be a hard sell for music library deals, that’s more of a song plugging deals where they are pitching songs to big artists ex Tim McGraw or Reba and some song writers pay cash fees to be part of regardless of results.

Don’t worry too much about getting into a exclusive library later, these guys wanna be rock stars and probably don’t care much about not being able to sign with Jingle Punks Exclusive versus Crucial anyway.

[Mojorising]

Thank you guys both for the input!! It’s very helpful

[Author]

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