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Reality TV composers still pay upfront, but they’ll take some of the writers share.
You can still find libraries that pay upfront, but the libraries that pay well ($800+ per track) have a very high standard of production, and it gets higher every year. They’ll also take all the licensing.
When I started out, I was pumping out 1 – 5 tracks a day. I ended up having 3000 tracks out in the world. Turns out though, today I make more from a track I spend a couple of weeks producing than I do from dozens of ‘assembly line’ tracks. With an ever increasingly crowded market, quality stands out and allows libraries to charge large license fees.
Naming tracks is an interesting subject. My experience is that a library track name is ideally short, evocative, and not too vague. However, at the higher end of the business – trailer licensing – the names start getting vague and mysterious. Think names of ancient cities or gods from obscure mysticism : )
Tbone said pretty much exactly what I would have advised : )
The big ‘PMA libraries’, more often than not, pay a good fee upfront to buy you out of the licensing income. We’re talking fees of $800 – $1500 a track.
They then recoup the fees by using their immense distribution systems to get licenses from every corner of the world – from prisons to political ads, CIA training videos to reality TV.
A lot of their licensing comes from venues where performance royalties aren’t generated for the composer. However, the royalties can still be really nice when you write for these big libraries – especially for international use (which requires a lot of patience). I’ve also seen the occasional spike in my statements with radio airtime for a political ad that must have been blasted ad nauseum for weeks!
My main beef with RF is the race-to-the-bottom pricing system a lot of the libraries follow for top tier usage. I’m sorry, but even $500 is not enough to charge a company for a national US commercial license. And that seems to be the higher end of RF license fees. This is why my own library has a budget cap on where the music can be used. Because of this, we recently secured a five figure license fee for an international ad campaign, and just last week, $2k for a regional spot.
Thanks! Yeah I figured as much. Even the smaller libraries I work with have joined MCPS for this reason. It’s done so differently in the US – the PROs don’t have set licensing fees like in the UK, Australia and New Zealand.
Can I ask a favour of you? Could you please email me a screen grab of what you find under my name? It would be super interesting to know what they are listing as unclaimed. Could be that I’d have to set up a MCPS account to claim them. I’ll owe you a favour : )
Thanks,
Mark
mark@markpetrie.comHey CloudNineAudio, Looks like you have to have an account with them to see those details. Are you talking about MCPS royalties?
love the SoundCloud tag – #awesome guitar
I once received an email from a prophet telling me they were using a track I wrote for their religious ceremonies.
This placement was pretty cool too – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3jLRhttb5g
How do you guys work with just one session file? Are you using something like DP’s chunks?
I tried doing it a few times in DP and Logic, but every time something got moved or deleted unintentionally, usually by selecting a whole track.
Maybe you could get away with adding a simple extra layer to the synth stem.
I’ve been in this position before, and learned that it’s always best to use more than one sound – not relying on one particular patch at any one time.
Hey Keith, it looks awesome. I would probably need it to run on multiple computers (networked or copying the file and working on it while on the road). Any chance you could make that work in the future?
Just thought I’d throw this out there – https://synfulauth.com
The winds and violin patches sound amazing.
Best of all – virtually no ram is used, and very little processing.I wrote for a TV documentary when I was 21, but missed out on about $500 in royalties because at the time I didn’t even know what they were – doh! Signed up with a PRO a few years later and started getting royalties from then on.
My best ever check (to date) had a really nice amount of network segment theme airtime, but frustratingly I had to wait about two years for that because of paperwork issues.
I can share that doc (spreadsheet) with a few folks, who would like to contribute, and it will show up here.
Awesome! With enough people contributing this could be a really useful doc. I’m just throwing this out there – maybe it’s a doc that when finished is available to full members of the site? Could be a way to help boost paid membership for Art…