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Astonishingly low ball. The library should be named and shamed, so other composers can steer well clear of such a company.
This part of the documentary feels like a dire ‘Who Killed the Electric Car?’ portion. The ‘Revenge of the Electric Car’ follow up would go into the explosion of micro budget producers who still need legal access to music (royalty free sites), and the growth of cable (creating more opportunities for royalties and licensing).
Trailer music (something I’ve been involved in for a while) sells pretty well on CDBaby and iTunes. Sure, you can find it all for free as low quality mp3s on sketchy looking sites, but there are enough fans out there who value our work and are willing to pay for a high quality file. I don’t have to go on the road to drum up sales, (YouTube, SoundCloud and Facebook help with that) selling t-shirts and playing gigs in small towns. I think we have it pretty good as library composers!
Normal for whom? RF libraries? Small libraries run by a TV composer? Large libraries run by multinational record companies?
Each of those types of libraries run their business and make deals with composers according to their cashflow and leverage… can they interest an established composer into giving away future licensing revenue with a big upfront fee? Maybe, if they can afford $1000 per track and if they have a good chance of making the composer some backend money in performance royalties. Can they interest a composer in giving up the tracks for free, in return for half the licensing? Perhaps, if it’s a trailer music company that has a track record of getting big placements (and large license fees).
Or maybe it depends on how easy the music is to whip up – how much time the composer needs to invest in it, and how many others can do a similar job. Basic reality TV music that takes just 2 – 3 hours to spit out might be a tougher genre to negotiate on, as opposed to high end trailer music, where 1 track might take weeks to produce and finish. Same can be said for genres that involve a lot of live recording and specialist musical training to sound authentic. Not everyone can deliver those genres to a high level, therefore a composer will probably get a better deal.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is that there are many levels to this business, and if there is a ‘normal’, it’s a different one for each of those levels.
Thanks guys 🙂
Michael has some awesome sounds, I don’t have all those. Thanks for the shopping list!
I tried using Hollywood Strings and Brass, but even with a ton of RAM (40GB) and SSDs, I can’t incorporate them into a session with anything more than a few tracks. Real shame, the samples are awesome. I might go the VEPro route next year, so I’m hoping they’ll work ok on a dedicated slave computer.
I love 8Dio’s stuff, I have all the Adagio sounds. Kontakt for the most part is much more efficient in terms of processor use and RAM, than Play.
For hybrid sounds you can’t go wrong with Project Alpha.
My backup is two additional hard drives. Serious question, but why pay for online backup rather then do this?
As Art said – to cover all bases. Fire etc.
Have you found more joy in slowing down? More success?
A lot more, the $ earned per minute of slower, more refined music is noticeable.
I used to ‘write’ (and I use that term loosely) very quickly when I was working for TV music companies full time. Sometimes we’d be writing 5 or more tracks a day. It was fun to crank out a lot, but it’s unsustainable, and after a while very unsatisfying creatively.
Those early years were my real start in the TV world, and I’m grateful for them because I learned a lot from the process of assembly line style composing. However, it was really important for me to get out of that mould and and move towards a model that valued quality over quantity. I found just that in higher end library work, where I would be commissioned a decent amount of money to produce a limited number of tracks. There was a higher expectation of quality – the music has a longer shelf life (TV cues often never see the light of day again after the show has aired).
About 7 years ago I started getting involved in the trailer side of things, where quality is vastly more important than quantity. These days I can easily spend 3 – 4 days on a trailer track, then have several more days of revisions, then producing dozens of files for the orchestrator, recording session, and mix engineer.
On the whole, I find this slower process far more rewarding – both creatively and financially.
Fresh thinking is always good, but I have to agree with the other guys here. It sets the libraries up for embarrassment. I can’t imagine they’d be thrilled to go through something like this:
Library: “Hey, remember that track we recently gave you a few months ago and you liked a lot, thought it might be good on that project you’re working on soon? Well, ummm, it’s no longer available. Please remove the track from your hard drives.”
Client: “What?! Why? We loved that track! What happened?”
Library: “Well, the composer also gave it to another library that got it used before us, now they own it.”
Client: “What the ___?! Hmmm, ok, so which library was it? I still want to use that track!”
When doing :60?s, :30?s etc,, do you make sure you are getting out hard at 60 or 30, or do you leave the tails long for the editor to chase the fade?
I personally think it’s best to edit the cuts so that they sound musically ok if someone was to completely stop at :29.9 or :59.9. (not cut off right after a beat), but then leave the tail in there in case someone can use it like that.
I prefer to work from the midi of the original full length version, that way I can add pick ups and change the tempo slightly if necessary. Sometimes a cymbal crash or roll needs to go, little tweaks like that make the edits less jarring.
I thought your tracks were very nicely written – you have a good ear for melody and chord changes.
The production (MIDI execution, sample libraries) lets you down a little, but that’s mostly because you’re attempting the just-about-impossible… a totally orchestral sound with no hybrid elements or live parts. Some of your tracks sounded like an ‘orch mix’ or strings stem from a trailer track, like they were very strong ideas that weren’t fully dressed up.
I hear music like this a lot on documentaries on Discovery and the Science Channel (Through the Wormhole, The Universe etc). You could watch a few of their shows and pause the insanely fast credit roll to figure out who supplies the shows (or contact the producers directly).