[Mark_Petrie]

Useful social media (I never really understood the point of Twitter for anyone other than politicians and celebrities) is a cheap way to get your music out into the world. Like Edouardo, I’ve found great collaborators through it. Several business connections have come from people discovering my music on Facebook, SoundCloud and YouTube.

[Mark_Petrie]

check these pages out:

Performance Free

https://musiclibraryreport.com/p-to-p/pump-audio/comment-page-34/#comment-23598

[Mark_Petrie]

When I worked for companies that wrote all the music for a reality show, 1 season was around 40 – 60 tracks of a variety of moods, all stemmed out, at least a minute in length. There was also some writing to picture for important scenes – some of those cues could be as long as 5 minutes.

I don’t think all 40 – 60 would necessarily get used, but the producers wanted a pool of music for the editors to pick and choose from. Some tracks would get used again and again, others never made it on the show.

[Mark_Petrie]

yeah – the squares and rectangles placed on a vertical keyboard. Unless you do a lot of preparing and reading parts, getting fluent with the piano roll is probably more useful.

[Mark_Petrie]

For most composers in this day and age, it’s more useful to be able to read a piano roll well than to be a great sight reader.

[Mark_Petrie]

There are some great poly-rhythms going on in those demos. I love that goat sound (or is that a violin?)

[Mark_Petrie]

Sounds about right, I’ve heard it’s around $2000 per million views.

[Mark_Petrie]

We do this in trailer music all the time. Some of the TV shows I write for also like the breaks. Avoiding a cymbal crash before the break is a good idea, but anything with a long decay can be cool as long as you let it ring out and die off before coming back in. I don’t think complete silence is always necessary, especially if you’re giving them stems. I think it’s wise to still make it musical – some people will just want to play the music from beginning to end.

Here are some examples of my work: (I apologize for the big press photo in each demo, I need to figure out the new SoundCloud settings!)

gap at 1:11

gaps at :53, 2:00 and 2:30

gap at :54

[Mark_Petrie]

Quality of the music aside, I can’t help but think this elaborate, clever idea is probably more work for an editor than they really need. There’s so much great library music out there now – surely with a bit more searching they’ll find something they can edit to.

If construction kits were such a great idea, why isn’t every editor using the stock Apple Loops that come with Final Cut? Some of those are actually really good!

[Mark_Petrie]

+1000 for Michael’s last post. Spot on.

[Mark_Petrie]

ASCAP’s paid me about the same as Michael for network promos. Small amounts per usage, but they probably only run a couple of seconds. $18.59 seems to be the cap, maybe that’s for 5 seconds of music.

[Mark_Petrie]

Touching on something Michael brought up, I think we should clarify the difference between:

1) a library that is marketing itself as ‘royalty free’ where there are no further sync fees for future use after the initial payment, yet
still insists on clients filling out cue sheets if the music airs on TV, film or radio.
This is the vast majority of websites competing for google searches containing the words ‘royalty free ___ music’.

2) a library that is marketing itself as a catalog of music that doesn’t have to be reported to PROs. That is,
100% performance royalties free.

The latter is a small minority of what’s out there, and even some websites that cater to clients that don’t want to pay annual fees to PROs (like restaurants, websites, hotel lobbies, on-hold systems to name a few) still allow their composers to be PRO affiliated, and encourage their clients to fill out cue sheets if they are not on the hook for the PRO fees (TV and radio advertising, TV shows for example).

[Mark_Petrie]

Are you giving up 50% of the writer’s share? That’s unusual for a high caliber library. If that’s the case, someone is going to get half of the writer’s royalties and will also appear credited as a co-writer on YOUR music. These days I try to shy away from these deals, but I did plenty of them early in my career.

It’s a really nice upfront fee, but remember they’re collecting all future licensing revenue – you won’t see any of that. One good license (a major commercial for example) could cover the 28k. Perhaps 28k in the hand is worth a lot more ‘in the bush’ though 🙂

[Mark_Petrie]

It won’t matter that much upfront unless you’re making a timed edit. However, it’s not very professional to have your final version start with a second or 2 of dead air.

I like to have as little silence as possible at the start, so the music starts immediately.

Don’t cut off your reverb trail artificially, let it ring out for as long it needs. Again, no need to cut it early unless it’s a timed edit (even then, I usually include the tail in the timed edit, in case someone wants it).

[Mark_Petrie]

You have to get some “work for hire” contracts that will pay you 10K to 25K a pop…or even 140K!

I’d argue that relying on the upfront money from work for hire deals, where you give up licensing, is a hard way to get to an income of $100k a year and requires constantly churning out a lot of music. Licensing is a side of the business that might be out of reach for composers at the beginning of their career (the competition is fierce), but just to give you an idea: successful composers in the trailer side of things make the bulk of their income from licensing, not royalties. I know of one composer that made over $200k from the licensing of one great epic track. Not to mention megastars like TSFH!

There’s a huge range of success in this business – I just met with a library who told me their top earning composer makes over 2 million a year in royalties.

You have to go after those lucrative jingle projects from multi-nationals like McDonald’s, IBM, Toyota, Apple, Microsoft. You have to write hit songs. You have to get some of themes from hit TV shows under your belt and some big placements into big movies.

That sounds more like how to get a 7 or 8 figure income!

As Tbone said – and I wanted to repeat it again because it’s really what everything boils down to:

It depends hugely on:

Who represents your tracks
How good your tracks are
The genres you write in
Luck

Perhaps somewhere in there is: determination / tenacity / self-motivation (writing when you don’t have to)

[Author]

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