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I actually tried the jingle business when I was fresh out of music school, 15 years ago. From my experiences, I highly DON’T recommend this business haha!
In the US, jingles are mostly considered old fashioned and cheesy. However – other countries, like NZ and Australia, still LOVE them.
In the US, you’ll hear most jingles airing on AM radio, and some FM. There are a few on TV, but usually it’s smaller companies, playing local ads.My strategy was to listen to the radio, and make note of all the companies using background music in their ads, but without a jingle. Even better was if they had a slogan. I would then track them down and offer to write a custom jingle and see if they like it.
Your best bet is car dealerships, they still seem to like jingles the most. Second is trade companies like electricians etc.
I literally sold my first one, then went nuts and wrote a dozen more for various companies, and though they all liked what I did, I got strung along until they turned it down.
The problem is, who do you go through? The two obvious paths are:
1) the company directly. Figuring out who is in charge of marketing is a bit of a mine field – one manager might like your jingle but then the owner hates jingles… d’oh! Also, you’re very likely dealing with complete non-musicians, they’re possibly tight with money and tough to even discuss marketing with.2) local, small time advertising agencies. They often buy out the air time on radio in bulk, so it’s highly likely that you’ll have to deal with them at some point. They guard communication with the client fiercely (could make things difficult as a middle man), and might want a cut of your jingle writing fee.
After all that, how much can you charge for a local business’s custom jingle? While a nationally airing jingle for a large company could get you a five figure fee and potentially mega bucks in royalties, a local one is in the realm of $1500 – $3000.
My advice… stick to working with libraries : )
Maybe this is a US based thing, but here there’s an extra layer to all this when a commercial license is involved. Yes, there are the usual mechanical royalties, usually split between a label and the writer, and someone making an album to sell to the public must get this clearance.
However, when you are doing a cover for potential licensing, you actually still have to get permission from the copyright owner (usually a label) to do it, and in many cases that involves the original creator of the track.
So not only do you have to get a mechanical license the usual way to sell the cover to the public (Harry Fox), you need a good connection with the label that owns a song, in order to get them to sign off on the rendition and commercial use of the song. You could create an amazing cover, get the clearance from Harry Fox, and the public loves to download it from iTunes, but never be able to LICENSE it for commercial use because someone at the label (and maybe the artist) doesn’t approve it.
I know that trailer music companies go as far as to only target songs from labels they have connections to, and by artists (or estates) who are open to commercialization of their music.
I think if someone can’t afford to pay someone part time $15/hour for a few months to do busy stuff like data entry and metadata, they can’t afford to be running a business – period, and shouldn’t ask a composer (who has very likely spent 10’s of $1000’s on a studio set up) to give up 50% of the licensing. Or maybe I completely mis-read your comment as it’s 4am here!
Hey Rob! I wasn’t implying there was no cost or time associated with high end licensing, for sure there is always some overhead. I just meant to say it’s not building a rock solid, enterprise level ecommerce website that is in the range of $30k – $100k to design, build and populate with products.
A lot of what you described could be done by an assistant or intern. A high end licensing company lives and dies by two things – connections (to a lesser extent) but mostly the quality of the music. If they already have good connections with trailer editors and music supervisors, the only thing they really need is great sounding, project appropriate, authentic music.
All that marketing and schmoozing some companies do is highly over-rated and more ‘busy-ness’ than anything else. (I’ve heard this directly from owners of very successful music licensing companies). All that really matters is that you have music that the client is eager to use – they just have to know of it and be willing to listen.
All of which is why I think a 50% cut is a little low, particularly for an experienced composer that needs little direction or management.
(BTW I’m not ready to build my own high end licensing company yet – I want to write as much as possible, always learning something new from each track, and leave the business stuff to someone else!)
Maybe I can add a $0.02’s worth.
I don’t know if 50% is the fairest rate, considering the work that goes into both creating and selling the music.
However, I have a small idea of how much time and money goes into setting up and running a music licensing website, one that actually shows up on Google and ultimately generates sales.
I initially put together a site for probably the cheapest you can go, in order to have a significant variety of music and show up organically on Google. I also spent a lot on different forms of marketing, including AdWords. Getting to launch was around two years and about $20,000 – remember that was very cheap and includes all design, data entry and coding. I’m now re-booting the site and it’s costing an extra $20,000. Still pretty cheap compared to the competition, who have full time staff.
I know of a new site that a music house in Canada put together which cost them $100k, and took two years to build.
I think composers pay 50% to not have to deal with any of this – they can relax after uploading all the music, while the music library continues to invest and manage the business. A comparison to Uber isn’t apples to apples, because the Uber driver is actively doing the work, generating the income entirely through their labor, while a composer does initial labor but then makes residual income from the intellectual property.
Going through the whole process gave me newfound respect for well run music libraries i.e. ones that actually make a you a tidy income stream.
My opinion is that 50% is fair for online sales (we still get far more than photographers), but is not as fair for high end licensing, which doesn’t require as much initial investment (which is why you see new ‘trailer music’ licensing companies popping up every week). I think at that level, 60% feels better.
The whole process was pretty long with several dead ends. I’ll post the full story if you or anyone else thinks it would be useful.
It might be really helpful to know what the dead ends were, and what ultimately did the trick!
Oh geez… glad you could get it sorted. It’s a headache when it goes as far as a client’s claim on your music (I’ve had claims like “Joe’s Secrets to Sales Success” on tracks before) but for a big label to get entangled, I wouldn’t know where to start!
What was your process for dealing with it?
What if you can make 300 good quality tracks a year? Would you be able to make $100,000+ in 3-4 years time?
It depends, of course, what ‘good quality’ means. If your work is amongst the best you can find on RF sites, then you might be one of the best performing RF composers. Top composers on sites like AS, ML etc make four figures each month.
If they’re amongst the best you’ll hear on reality TV shows, then (in a good, not too big library) you’ll become a go-to composer for reality TV editors (they often look up a composer’s other tracks when they find a piece they like). Depending on the shows and where they air, after 3-4 years at 300 tracks a year, for sure you could making $100,000+.
My take (and this is based off 11 years of writing full time) is that 900-1000 tracks could make you anywhere from $20k – $200k from reality TV performance royalties, and where you fit into that range depends on these things:
1) consistency – 300 tracks a year for 3-4 years is a highly ambitious goal (more than one finished and delivered every weekday of the year), especially to maintain consistent quality across a fairly diverse range of styles and emotions. But if you can pull it off, 900 – 1000 good tracks is a great foundation for living off your music full time.
2) Your tracks are in the hands of smart libraries that aren’t too big or easy to get into (you don’t want to be a needle in a haystack that is constantly having tons of ‘hay’ / tracks added), and actually have good connections to TV producers and their editors. Where the music airs matter of course too – networks and 1st tier cable are much much better for royalties than 2nd tier / obscure channels. I think that still falls under how smart the library is 🙂
3) Your tracks are what the client wants and will use i.e not just the library but the library’s clients / customers. Your tracks can be amazing but never get used because they’re not appropriate for the client’s projects, (which could come down to structure, style and feel) or on the other hand, the production might not be super great but you somehow captured just the right vibe / tone of a show and make a killing.
I guess a 4th deciding factor is where the business is headed in terms of performance royalties rates, cord-cutting etc, but that’s a whole other topic 🙂
We do it with final mixed basic stems, so you can do some band-aid editing if necessary like muting or adding a cymbal swell. It’s an art form so I like to outsource the editing as much as possible to someone much better at it than myself 🙂
PerBoysen’s method is solid, but I’d first recommend trying this faster way if you’re in Logic:
Select “Bounce 2nd Cycle Pass” and do not check “Include Audio Tail.” You also need to be in “Realtime” Mode as opposed to “Offline”.
Yes to first question, very likely yes to the second, unless the deal is that you retain ownership of the music (license for a set period of time).
Also, an ad agency that works on big budget projects will likely require you to get a big errors and omissions insurance policy. They like to push you to the limit when copying the temp, and want you to be the one liable 🙂
That info you’re after is so ‘golden ticket’, I’d be surprised if anyone would part with it, at least online!
That said, if anyone wants to know what trailer music companies are doing well, just search on YouTube or Facebook for “MOVIE NAME – TRAILER – MUSIC BY”. You’ll probably find out who the hot companies are right now just by doing that.
One of the regular posters here recently said that he made the mistake of sharing that info and his income from a particular library dropped something like 40%.
Was that me? Because that DEFINITELY happened with at least two companies 🙂
Cheers guys!
Hey Danny, I don’t want to discourage you from doing anything you have your heart set on, but I thought I should emphasize that the trailer side of things is very competitive, and generally the production value has to be top notch. It’s taken me years to get to point where SOME of my work gets placed. Lots of people think that they can write trailer music because it sounds easy – musically it’s usually very basic, but where you earn your money is in the production… creating a huge sounding yet not squished track, and musically something familiar and authentic to the trailer ‘sound’ but not a cheesy knock off.
My advice is to spend some time going after lower hanging fruit, like TV performance royalties and royalty free sales, just because it could be hard to chase after trailer placements if you’re just starting out, especially with no residual income streams set up. If you’re writing for a music company that mostly targets trailers, then you’re probably not getting paid upfront, and will have to wait months (if not years!) to see income from it.
That all said, if you really have the chops to compete with what you hear on trailers today, go for it!
Cheers guys!
Although you don’t do edits, do you use stingers, hits, etc as edit points in your trailers?
Yeah, if it’s an action track, it’s a really good idea to separate your crazy finale with some space, and even big final hits, so the editor can easily cut them out and use them as needed.
Is there a standard length for trailer cues? 1:30 – 2:00?
Most libraries prefer 2:00 – 3:00
But it shouldn’t matter – one library I work with just says make the track as long as it needs to be, i.e. if the idea doesn’t need to be longer, it’s ok to have a sub 2:00 track.
The big prize in trailer licensing is to have a trailer use your entire track end to end, as that commands a big license fee. So it pays to have a track long enough to cover a whole trailer, just in case.And should each “act” be similar in length or longer in the finale?
I would suggest watching recent trailers that used instrumental music (a lot are using songs at the moment).
You’ll probably find that act 1 is around 40 seconds long, act 2 is about the same, act 3 and the finale is about 30. There’s often a cool down at the end too.
Your big 2nd act and massive / ridiculous 3rd act is more likely than the ambient 1st act to get used on TV spots (which usually use energetic music throughout), so I like to make those parts longer than necessary. You never know what a trailer editor will latch on to, so it’s a good idea to give them more than they need.Also when submitting trailer music to libraries, are different versions, lengths, stems, etc. usually required?
I wouldn’t do any of that until you send them the full version and get feedback. A successful trailer music company will likely have revisions for you – they usually do for me!
Every company is different, but I almost never make edits for trailer companies. If you’re delivering final files, it’s a good idea to make sub-mixes like no choir etc, and even mastered stems that can be summed together.
If the trailer music company is mixing your music, they’ll often want your unmastered stems. I prefer to give them basic, grouped stems to preserve the sound I’ve carefully created, but some companies like full control over your mix and need detailed tracks.