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I’m not sure what the point of self promition would be for library work, it’s not like any of the end users are likely to see my posts. Some of my libaries post on various platforms and sometimes my tracks have been used.
Sounds like a low-tier way to monetize music. There are way better options in production music. If you want long-term earnings, run from royalty-free models like this and get into legit PRO-registered libraries with TV/Film Clients.
I have never before heard of one time fees being called royalties, i have always been under the impression that royalties are of a reccuring nature.
I get why you’d think royalties are always recurring, but that’s not quite the case. When a track airs on TV it generates a single performance royalty. Think of it like this: When my track is placed in “Keeping Up with the Kardashians ” I get a small amount royalties every time it airs. Because the show airs all around the world they trickle in from all over so in that sense it is recurring but it’s only because it keeps getting re-shown.
Some TV shows only air once, like a sports event so it will only generate a single perforance royalty.
The monies you are earning from this royalty free library are often referred to as micro-licenses , so every time one of their subscribers downloads it you get a cut of the revenue it generates. Obviously each track can be licensed multiple times so you may continue to earn from them over a period of time but it sounds like low amounts.
I think generative AI music going to have a hard time supplanting us. Aside from the many hurdles it has to overcome like re-writing the copyright laws, being sued for stealing training data, and getting good at writing sync music which has a bit of a different remit to commercial music in general then I don’t see how the end user benefits.
The production companies already get music at a low cost, along with all the assets that enables them to better fit it to their project like alt mixes, cutdowns, and stems.
Faffing about with multiple prompts trying to get something that workd sounds like more long winded workflow to me. Maybe I am missing something but the convenience factor does not seem to be there.
” They ” usually say upbeat uptempo positive sounding music gets used the most but I’ve had the most success with tension type music. But that’s just me, I grew up listenening to a lot of Depeche mode, it’s in my DNA.
Whatever you’re best at will probably get used the most.
As others mention it’s not finacially viable to pay someone else to mix your library music tracks.
It might be worth doing it once or twice just to hear the difference especially if the mix engineer is willing to walk you through the session as a learning experience/tutorial.
But otherwise I’d say the best way to learn is to do a lot of mixes alongside some type of educational resource. My reccomendation is the book ” Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio” by Sound on Sound’s Mike Senior as it comes at the subject from the angle of getting pro quality results from a home studio and you basically follow the steps in each chapter which I think works better than random YT videos as it helps lay the foundations first ( i.e. it starts with the sound of the room )
If you think Suno is good wait until you guys hear Google’s new Udio model
With Taxi it took me 20 – 30 forwards to get a libary contact. So 10 would be a little on the early side in my experience to expect any results.
I’m not sure how much music you’re making but if it’s 10 forwards in a year and your forward rate is reasonable then you may not be making enough music to get any decent traction. I wrote 73 tracks in my first year with about a 40% forward rate and landed in a couple of libraries as a result. Those libraries got me some nice placements in 2017-18 ..reality shows like Keeping Up with The Kardashinas, Catfish etc. I still get backend royalties off them today even though I’ve long since moved on to bigger better publishers.
I think we can all agree your tracks are of sufficent quality so it’s more a question applying yourself to write enough music to create enough tracks and albums to attract a library or two. Taxi is one route but have you tried writing a full album and then approaching libraries directly? There are other sync channels out liek 52 cues and Sync My Music that reccommend this method and it’s worked for me in the past too. It’s more work , and more legwork than Taxi but it’s essentially free to do.
Whilst I like watching Eric from Make Music Income, he doesn’t seem to make that much music income from sync according to his videos and is a lot more focus on the bottom end of the market like stock sites and sheet music sales. If you’re aiming to turn sync into significant income I’m not sure how much relevant advice Eric can offer because he hasn’t done it himself, and you’d likely get more pertinent advice here for free from people in the trenches who’ve already been there and done it for a number of years.
I’m also not convinced about how you’ve marketed yourself. I feel that using a ‘brand” in a relationship business when it’s essentially just you who is the brand comes across a little misanthropic. As you meet people and start to build a network they are far more likely to remember you if they know your name, rather than smoe arbitary brand name you came up with. I’m also hoping you’ve stopped using the rather glum looking portrait you had of yourself as I think it gives a bad first impression and doesn’t exactly scream ‘ I am a great person to work with ‘ which you may or may not be.
Mark – UK
Funny Story.
I was pitching a half completed production music album and it takes a long time because I agree with those that say only pitch it to one library at a time then wait – follow up – wait and if no response after 4 -6 weeks move on. ( i.e. don’t spam it out to 10 companies at once as you’ll end up having to p*** someone off if more than one company gets back to you )
So I had done this half a dozen times with this particular project with no success and on a whim I sent it to another company that someone had suggested to me. It got accepted and over the next couple of months we worked with the libary owner to get it fully completed.
At some point I needed to search back through my emails with the library owner and realised that six months earlier I’d sent the exact same playlist to the exact same person and he’d turned it down.
For some reason I’d forgotten I’d sent it to them 6 months earlier and apprently so had the library owner but 2nd time around they accepted it.
From this I learned a few things :
1. A rejection is not a flat out ” No ” it’s just a ” Not Today ”
2. Keep good records of who you sent what and when
3. If you wait 6 months it’s likely no-one will remember what you sent them previously
4. Timing is everything
Generative AI is essentially a regurgitation machine spitting out remixes of it’s dataset re-assembled at sample level. There is no ‘thought’ or ‘intention’ behind it and there probably won’t be until someone is able to create an AGI ( artificial general intelligence ) which is still in the realms of Science Fiction.
PS – Ironically it says ” Maintenance Note: Fingerprinting is back online.” and it hasn’t worked since.
I get Euopean detections most days but I’ve not had any since 14-10-23 09:57 on German Channel NTV
I think this is the longest it’s been down IIRC
Hi Ell,
Yes, I have exactly the same issue. Placements on US TV shows going back 2-3 yrs and all I have received is the UK royalties which are between a few pence to a few £’s
A lot of them appeared as ” Unnotified Works ” and had the wrong publisher showing in my PRS account so I raised queries with PRS which took several months to hear back about – All they said was the writer still gets paid even if the Publisher is incorrect and basically ignored the part about the US royalties being missing.
I have replied back to them about the missing US royalties weeks and weeks ago..still waiting to hear back. The Library is also trying to help and get the correct publishing info to PRS.
My placements are for show like Keeping Up with The Kardashians and The Challenge , and whilst each one is not worth a fortune it’s still a significant amount and a fair chunk of my placements to date.
Mark
What RobertJ6401 means about “properly assessed ” is he didn’t take kindly to some T**i screener feedback and subsequent peer reviews and felt there were places to obtain more objective reviews.
Subjective as these things are though I think there is a bar to get over if you want people to pay you for your music and if you can’t get get over that bar ( ( i.e. pitch, timing, mixing, arrangement etc.) then it doesn’t matter if you’ve made 10 track or 1000. The market will ultimately decide.
I’ve had some placements with Pink Shark so I know they are Exclusive, it mentions on the “about us” section that everything needs to be ” one stop”
RadioSparxx is the streaming part of Audiosparxx so they stream music into retailers etc, very very low rates and in 5 years and thousands of streams I’ve not earned enough to meet the minimum cash out amount.
Crucial got me a placement and a sync fee and are non-ex , you can also look at which projects they have pitched your tracks for ( even if you didn’t land them ) so worth a try IMHO. You can submit 3 tracks at a time and they take around 12 weeks to let you know.
These types of screening companies base their whole business model around the fact that the majority of members will fail. And fail repeatedly whilst paying for the privelege. Even better…the only ones to blame for that failure is themselves….it’s ingenious.
That’s why they market themselves so hard….they need a constant churn of new hopefuls to submit to the listings. If all the submissions were great they’d soon have no business as the composers would rapidly outgrow the service.
The profit isn’t in the small minority of members who “make it”…they are just the tip of the iceberg and great marketing copy. It’s in the 80-90% who’s music isn’t good enough and in many cases never will be.