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15 tracks might get you in the door with a royalty free or purely online licensing library, but in that area of the business it’s all about volume… frankly it’s unlikely you’d make much money with so few tracks. You need a lot of tracks in RF libraries just to increase the odds of getting discovered – once a customer finds a track of yours and likes it, they might dig through your other music to see what else they might want to buy. For that to happen you need to show up in the search, and on a huge site like AS, good luck!
You never know, maybe you’ll do well with 15 tracks, especially if your tracks are in the zone of what most people are looking for. Definitely keep building that number of tracks if you want to make a significant amount of money from selling tracks on online libraries.
If your orchestral music is at a high level of production and composition, consider approaching bigger brick and mortar libraries with your 15 tracks. A pre-packaged album of great ready-to-go music is much more likely to get the attention of a producer / manager at one of these libraries than a composer sending demos for consideration on future releases. The bigger libraries either pay nicely upfront, or share the license fees. Depending on their focus, you could also make significant performance royalties from TV airtime.
15 great tracks places with a well connected library could potentially make you a lot more than uploading to a massive vault of tracks on the web! Just my $0.02 worth, I’m sure others will chime in with theirs 🙂
Sounds like it might be useful, especially if they’re keeping the info current. There are plenty of other places to get that, but it’d save you a lot of time to have it all in one place.
I saw this graphic a few months ago that they made:
http://www.musiclicensingdirectory.com/state-of-the-music-licensing-industry-2013
It looks really nice but I have no idea where they got their stats from, including this:
‘Getty Images owned “Pump Audio” platform take the highest commission from fees at 65% and are the only company that take more than the artist’s share’
…. yeah right! Maybe they should spend some time on the MLR. : )
And how could they know that ‘40%’ of music licensing companies retitle tracks?
I’ve had a little bit – it’s come from the UK, France, Germany, Canada and other countries that pay out on theatrical airtime. The US does not, unfortunately.
I’ve never seen any royalties from shorter TV trailers, just like with all the ads I’ve had music on. The big money for trailers is definitely in the licensing!
ASCAP has a program where you can proactively assist them in getting paid for TV advertising airtime. It’s still done on a ‘survey’ basis, so it’s a bit of a lottery. Here’s the page where the info and forms are:
http://www.ascap.com/members/payment/commercialPromoGuide.aspx
If a library (or any other client) is asking you that question, they’re most likely just checking to make sure you had the legal right to use the loops and samples. They don’t want to get stung like Vanilla Ice and The Verve did 🙂
Yes it is quite easy, that’s how a lot of production music is uploaded to YouTube. People are also able to rip music from SoundCloud, iTunes and even YouTube (for that delicious double / triple compression effect).
However, the likelihood of a company that could pay for a license actually trying to get away with this is low – most sane people wouldn’t risk their business to save a little bit of money. So we don’t need to worry too much about it. In fact, I’ve actually landed a few gigs because of fan made videos on YouTube, as have friends of mine (including one that recently got hired for a big budget film).
I’ve been told by several composers (who like me, use a lot of virtual instruments) to not move beyond Snow Leopard for Logic. Too many bugs and apparently it runs a lot smoother / faster in SL.
Maybe you should hold off an upgrade until the new Mac Pros come out (allegedly next month) and the fabled ‘Logic X’!
why does location matter?
Audiosocket shares publishing, non-exclusive.
Hi John. Generally, libraries that pay for tracks expect a high level of production value. They are also prized clients of composers that may make a good chunk of their living from such gigs. For that reason, it’s unlikely that you’ll find people willing to divulge such info on a public forum. That said, to start things off, you might want to check out the big libraries, who do pay nice upfront fees: Killer Tracks, Warner Chappell, Megatrax for example. Just make sure your demos match or exceed the quality of what you hear on their websites.
Most libraries sell instrumental world music. My own experience has been that it’s not the most in demand genre. You’re best starting with companies that have a lot of traffic, and a strong presence on the web. Try googling ‘royalty free world music’ and see who pops up. Then look them up on this site to learn more about how they treat their composers, and how much you might make from working with them.
I’m a little confused – ‘exclusive’ usually means worldwide and forever, and almost always entails giving up all the copyright. You’re lucky to get more than just the writer’s share in any deal these days. By the sounds of it, you’re either getting 75% of the publishing, or 50% (if they’re saying they get 25% of all the royalties).
It’s always worthwhile getting an entertainment lawyer to look over the contract, however a good one over here will charge you several hundred dollars an hour. Depending on how long they take to look over the contract and how much re-wrting / negotiating they end up doing for you, it could add up to a lot.
This brings up an interesting subject – the growing audience for instrumental production music.
Over the past 6-7 years I’ve written a lot of library music, some of it ‘epic’ trailer music.Recently, people have been finding my demos on various library sites and uploading them to YouTube. Epic music has a big following and some of the videos featuring my trailer music have over a million views.
At first I thought it was a bad thing – it felt like my music was being stolen. But then I started to realize that a composer could use this publicity to their advantage, and last September I ended up releasing an album of instrumental music (that I had the rights to) on CDBaby and iTunes. The album’s done pretty well, becoming an income stream that matches most of my library deals.
I love SoundCloud, when I finally get around to updating my personal demo website, I’ll use it as the main demo player (no flash!)Bear in mind a lot of the work that a library owner does (and the money they spend) is in promoting the website. Having great music and a nice website is just the start – you have to show up in Google searches if you want to make any money. Search engine optimization is a huge job which never ends, as you constantly have to keep up with changes in the search engine algorithms (what worked great five years ago can get you penalized today), and you should be promoting the site through social media daily.
another thing to add..right music…wrong style for a particular library
This is definitely something I’ve run into a lot, with libraries that are paying upfront or are just plain ol’ picky. I’ve had an epic track get rejected by one trailer music library, and then get accepted by another, who went on to license it for five figures. Sometimes libraries have a very specific need, for whatever reason (perhaps a themed album they’re working on), and it will prevent them from taking your music, no matter how good it might be.
Great thread!I try to do the admin and technical stuff in batches, like 1-3 days in a row. That way it doesn’t constantly interrupt the creative flow.
I usually work on one track at a time, I find I’m more efficient that way. I have an assistant who helps me with stemming and uploading files, which has been a huge help.
I have BackBlaze running in the background all the time. I do a manual back up of my projects about once a month, a system clone about once a quarter.