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I have the same question
I used to do fairly well on PT and ML, but they slowed to a trickle, so I stopped submitting.
Performance royalties on commercials, as More Advice hinted at, are literally pennies per play in my experience.
Even though they are no substitute for accuracy of monitors, I really like my Ultrasone 650s. I bought them in part for the ear protection features that they have, but really like the spacious sound.
I was too, but they have reappeared. There is still a glitch on mine though b/c some track entries within certain cue sheets are duplicated. Anyone noticed that on their end?
It shows that they are back up on the main page but when I hit “view” I still can’t access them… Anyone else experiencing the same thing?
Man, I hope this is my last post on this… A lot of this is about math and More Advice might help his case (and mine) by thinking more exactly rather than in ballpark numbers. More Advice says “imagine what the income would be if they sold at $100 a track and only sold 1/3rd the volume at that price point,” but the math works more in his favor than that.
The difference in my mind is:
a) Sell at $100 on a 50/50 split site = $50.00
b) Sell at $17 on a 33/66 split site = $5.61You only need to sell 1/10th the number of tracks, not 1/3. That’s a big difference. That’s the difference between selling 1000 for micro money and 100 for reasonable money, plus there is the side benefit of not joining the race to the bottom, and at $5.61 per track, the finish line in that race is not too far away.
Be sure to look at the bottom 50% who have sold 20 tracks or fewer. Then realize that only the top 2% have sold 1000+. It kind of mirrors the global economy in a way.
A statistician would need to jump in here to tell you what your chances are there.
For me, I would just refuse a 33% artist cut on principle.
MichaelL, to answer your 2 questions, no, I’m not at all.
It’s true that there may be “only so much sameness that a market can absorb,” but there is also only so much diversity that the market will accept. In other words, most of the video/film clients out there actually continue to demand and use “U2 / Coldplay knockoffs and happy ukulele music.”
I agree with More Advice on both of his points:
1) I have raised my prices and am making more money for around the same number of licenses per month
2) Number of sales is basically flat even with more music out there
I agree with TV Composer Guy, and anyone else who has said something similar, that it is a slippery slope – things that would not have been acceptable a few years ago are not given a second thought now, and that will be true another few years from now as well.
Attempting to create laws or alliances to combat these problems is far-fetched, but one thing that any individual can do is: just don’t pollute your own ecosystem.
By that I mean, try to consider how a deal you make now may adversely effect the future market of everyone’s music, including your own.
I’m with ASCAP and the publisher statements came out today, but the writer statements come out in a couple of weeks. With BMI do writer and publisher statements happen on the same day? Just curious…
If I may be so bold, I think that most of the points on all sides of this are valid, just often expressed so passionately that they evoke equally passionate and misunderstood responses.
We would all do better to value rhetorical skill as much as compositional skill and not use the same tired “loops and beats” in discussion. We all went to school for that right?
Glen, when you use the word “slave” you can see how easy it is for MichaelL to use that exaggeration against you when he says, “TV execs and library owners are not sitting in board rooms trying to figure out ways to make ‘slaves’ out of composers.”
The truth is that library owners, like all other business people, do sit around and have meetings. Businesses have meetings to help further their business goals. They are not trying to make slaves out of anyone, but every decision a business makes affects something or someone. Some win, some lose.
My heart is with Glen, but I know the realities of the world we live in now.
MichaelL is right when he says, very simply, that it is supply and demand. I also think that what I said earlier in this thread about the “demand” for exclusivity being somewhat of a cover for libraries to acquire the free assets of composers is also valid. I didn’t say that they were enslaving anyone – just that they made a logical business decision that almost hard for them NOT to make.
Be logical. Imagine yourself on the other side. Think about motive. It’s not hard. Then you can act, or react, accordingly. If you are not doing that then you are thinking about your situation in a vacuum, and something like asking every composer in the world to set a minimum price, however noble, or even desirable that is, starts to actually make sense to you.
First of all I doubt that there is really the clamoring for exclusivity from production companies that certain libraries are making it out to be. I know from personal experience dealing with a few prod. companies directly that they don’t care if the music is non-exclusive as long as they like it.
Secondly, any large production company that does care about that sort of thing may want a piece of the back-end action like TV Composer Guy says above, but they will pay for it and probably not go through a library anyway b/c they want absolute exclusivity – meaning that they have their own in-house library.
Thirdly, if you are a library and you informally poll prod companies whether they prefer Exclusive or Non-exclusive, what do you think they are going to say? Exclusive, of course, but just because it sounds better and/or would make them feel more special.
Lastly, you have to realize that a library sees an exclusive catalog as something that they can sell at higher blanket license fees now, and possibly to a larger publisher down the line. Your tracks may be in a relatively small library now, but could be sold to Warner/Chappell later. You are likely not to get anything in that transaction, but that depends on the deal.
Basically, what I’m saying is that the libraries are using the excuse that the prod companies are demanding exclusively, but it’s most likely the libraries who want it. It’s less hassle for them and it’s a completely free asset.
Libraries have just sensed a small tide turning and are riding a little wave. There are really no reasons not to if you have the clout to attract artists.
It’s been fixed – at least mine has.