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Could you buy an episode of a show on iTunes? To see how how the music is used to picture would be more informative than just listening to the music by itself.
I think this ‘library’ is more than just another subscription based library.
It’s supposedly ‘AI’ creating tracks. Probably accessing loops? If you’re a pessimist, this looks like the beginning of the end for library music composers. If you’re an optimist, this will just show to the world how valuable good quality, original writing and production is. I tried it out and the results were pretty lame, and the choices of genre slim. I imagine with some time and money invested, the quality could go way up.
I couldn’t read the RT article (paywall) you posted but they just won the UK’s TechCrunch Disrupt. If you’ve watched the show Silicon Valley, you know this is a big deal: http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/08/jukedeck-wins-disrupt-london-2015/
“Jukedeck is a platform that lets users create custom, cheap, royalty-free soundtracks for their videos and/or podcasts, all without any musical talent. Users simply choose a tempo, mood, style and the length of the track and Jukedeck does all the heavy lifting.
“Users can get their first five songs free each month, and then pay $7 per track, while larger businesses pay $15 per soundtrack. There is even a $150 fee for the exclusive copyright over a user’s song.”
You can see an interesting video where the Cambridge educated creators pitch JukeDeck, and talk about ‘expensive’ $40 tracks on this page: http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/07/jukedeck/
If I may ask, what did you mean by “placement”: “but the mixing / placement needs a bit of work to be up to the level of trailers”?
It’s more of an art than science, so it’s hard for me to articulate this properly (and also because I’m no expert on this either!)
One important thing I learned to do was always listen to great work by guys like Thomas Bergersen after I’m done with a piece. It’s humbling and also useful to hear the differences in my production.
There are things we can do in orchestral mixes, even if it’s all samples, to simulate a real orchestra on a stage. Think about how an orchestra sits, with the brass at the back, violins mostly to the left etc. Then think about how you can make things sound close and far away – it’s a combination of the amount of reverb (and using additional reverb to ‘wrap up’ some instruments) – lots of reverb makes things sound a bit more distant, panning, and EQ. EQ is something you need to be careful with as it’s easy to take out some of the fidelity of the samples, but tweaking the amount of low end can also simulate how close or far an instrument is. EQ is also important for assigning frequencies for sections, for example, there are a lot of orchestral instruments competing for attention in the low mids (cellos, basses, trombones, low horns, the decay of drums etc), let alone piano or hybrid sounds like synths and guitars.
Something you can learn from the master Thomas Bergersen is that as incredible as his orchestral MIDI sounds (let alone his writing), his huge sound often comes from some neat tricks where he subtly blends synths in with the organic instruments. Even if a track is not supposed to have a ‘hybrid’ modern sound, the mix can sound more impactful with tricks like boosting the low strings with a sub bass, or a warm synth lead under the horns.
In addition to learning a lot from listening to music by experts in the field, VI Control is a great resource where other composers share their knowledge. Blakus is incredible at mockups – I recommend checking out his site and videos: http://blakus.com/category/tutorials
All that said, a lot of the big trailer music companies still send out their music to be mixed and mastered by a professional. Sometimes it’s a better use of our time and areas of expertise to hand off those responsibilities to someone else 🙂
Hey Vicky,
I like it a lot. For high end licensing (trailers), the production of the 1st act is good enough (the synth coming in at about :45 is a bit dated). The strings in the 2nd and 3rd acts, and the brass in the 3rd acts sound like good samples, but the mixing / placement needs a bit of work to be up to the level of trailers. That said, it’s more than good enough for TV and certainly better than most RF tracks in this genre 🙂One thing to watch out for – the 1st act, to me, sounds quite a lot like: Thomas Bergersen’s Final Frontier which is a very well known track. I realize you can’t copyright ‘piano and descending diatonic chords’ but the overall instrumentation, harmonic rhythm and style is quite similar. Maybe too similar? I know that at the high end of trailer licensing, companies are more cautious not to be seen ripping off well known tracks. Even if there’s a low chance of a lawsuit, it’s just not something these companies want to be known for.
To clarify, are you referring to the library “buying out” the tracks for that price, or are you saying the library gets about 800 – 2000 per track in sync fees when they land a placement, which you split with the library? so far I have only gotten one nice $2,000 sync fee. The rest have been closer to $200. I have never had a library pay me up front to buy the tracks out.
I was referring to upfront fees.
Another question, have you noticed a big difference in income from library to library per placement when they are back end only? Or do most companies like that sell to the same size broadcasts which generate the same or similar back end income?
Well that depends on the library’s clients right? Where (what channel, what country) and when it airs. Also, one library might have a direct / exclusive partnership with a TV production company and get a ton of placements, then something happens a year later and the whole thing dries up. Or a deluge of music gets added to a library you’ve been doing well with, and your tracks are then lost in a sea of others. A show might be doing ok in the US, but for some reason does really well in Europe, so the international royalties are better than domestic. I’ve had a track make more than 100 other ones, just because it ended up as a theme for something, or because it was used on a radio ad a million times.
So the end of that long answer is yes, it varies, but mostly based on the success of the libraries that have the tracks.
I’ve worked with 1 – 6, not really with 7 (performance free). My experience has been up and down with all of them. RF libraries had great years early on, then the past three, maybe four years have been much lower. High end buy-out libraries are somewhat consistent in royalties, but occasionally give a nice spike in income, depending on where the music ends up. The highest end of licensing – trailers and commercials – was something I moved into more recently, as my production got better. That world is a bit like winning the lottery – no money upfront, the company owns the music but there’s a chance you’ll get half of a big license fee.
FYI there’s a ‘3a’ and a ‘3b’ to use your categories: ‘a’ is exclusive, well paid upfront buy-out (like $800 – $2000 per track), ‘b’ is exclusive, no money upfront, 50% (or more if you’re lucky) share of licensing. I guess there’s a very rare ‘c’ as well: some upfront ($100 – $200) and a share of the licensing.
My advice is just like what you said, spread your music out amongst established libraries in a range of those categories. You never know what income stream will pick up, or dry out. With broadcast TV transitioning to PPV and a la carte viewing, Where will royalties be in ten years? No one really knows the answer to that.
Don’t just jump on the same library bandwagon as everyone else – I’ve been involved with some libraries that got a lot of attention from this site and the income dropped dramatically once an influx of new composers uploaded their tracks. Do your own research, like scouring the end credits of TV shows, to see what companies are supplying the music. Maybe you’ll find that perfect company that needs a lot of music but isn’t yet inundated with dozens of writers.
Keep in mind that some tracks might be sub $40 because they’re shorter than 2:00
If you execute this plan, it sounds like you might be half way to creating your own library, or at least working as a supplier to a bigger APM / West One type distributor. You might want to look into doing that, because the deal points you’re talking about are awfully close to that type of arrangement.
I guess it depends on what “exclusive” means.
There are libraries that take ownership completely (FOREVER) of the music. You can’t do anything with the music once you hand it over. This happens at pretty much all the top ‘PMA’ libraries, where you either do a buy-out and get paid upfront in lieu of future licensing, or you sign a deal where the library is the owner of the music and splits the licensing with you (no money upfront). The latter is a typical deal for the trailer music world. These deals don’t usually allow for the composer to publicly release the music on iTunes etc, but I know of some nice exceptions.
Then there are royalty-free or TV-centric libraries that are exclusive for a set amount of time, or ‘exclusive’ in that they just don’t want you to put the same music in a direct competitor’s library. Perhaps that’s where you guys are getting some conflicting information.
Hey Peter,
You can always print an underscore mix.
Aside from niche categories like purely percussive or sound design based tracks, I think melody is key to creating that ‘gravitas’ which grabs the listener and makes them feel something. That doesn’t necessarily mean a sweeping sing-along type tune – it could be simply be the top notes of a chord progression or a basic three or four note phrase that comes and goes.
Some of my most aired TV tracks are very basic block chord based bittersweet tracks. My most licensed trailer tracks feature choppy rhythmic melodic ideas – still (hopefully) memorable melodies, but essentially short ideas that stay out of the way of dialog.
A typical A – B – A structure where the B is less melodic and smaller (often pedaling on 1), and the second A section is bigger, with a definitive ending, is a common and smart way to approach a lot of production music (especially for reality TV).
How about The Holiday? Jack Black’s character is a trailer music composer.
wow that is pretty brilliant. I wonder how often their customers use that flexibility.
Really cool! Would be nice to be more than four layers though. Some genres need more – maybe eight would work for hybrid stuff?
I wonder if library music will eventually move to converting tracks into a format like Apple Loops, where small changes in tempo and key can be made easily.
If you work on a track for days to polish it off, why not just make the best track you can make and work on the same track for 40 years? That track would change the world.
Funny!
Sometimes I feel like I’ve been working on / getting to the same track for years. Maybe that’s the goal of a composer – to get to ‘that track’. Or maybe it’s getting late here and I need to go to bed… (I’ve been trying to finish a particular trailer track for the past week)
I think you should wait if you can – I was just discussing this with a friend. Apple is ‘likely’ to introduce better versions of the cheaper iMacs at their unveiling on the 9th.
The current iMac doesn’t take a lot of RAM, hopefully the new ones will be better in that regard.
Check out this great site for Apple rumors: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com