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First things first, make sure you keep ownership of the music, unless they’re paying you well. They might need to be reassured that they can use the music without any restrictions, sell it within the film etc, through a ‘license in perpetuity’. The indie clients I’ve worked with have usually been fine with this type of arrangement.
This way you can recoup the loss (considering how much time it takes to score a film – it probably will be a loss in terms of preventing you from doing other paying work) by putting all the cues in NON-exclusive libraries. You just have to make sure they’re always non-exclusive libraries, and that there’s no adrev shenanigans involved.
Back to your question about deferred deals – by all means, ask for as much as you can, but there are a lot of ways film distributors can hide money through a stack of expenses, just look to The Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson had to sue for his back end money). Also, independent production companies often fold soon after the film is released… that’s not to say that they’re all unscrupulous, but a lot of indie filmmakers form companies that only exist solely for the purpose of running a film, and naturally the company is dissolved after the film is done.
Don’t forget about legal fees, graphic design, setting up bank accounts, book keeping, registering the company / DBA. An e-commerce site selling downloadable files is more complicated than most web designers are used to – the expenses mount as they figure out solutions to issues that seem to pop up every day. Also, consider the time you’ll be spending on it that will take you away from your income producing work…
Audio fingerprinting has been discussed here a lot. What this article doesn’t really cover is the elephant in the room – re-titling.
Non exclusive libraries, even ones that use prefixes instead of a full re-title (like Jingle Punks, Audiosocket, Getty etc), will still have issues if their tracks are in libraries that show up with a service like Tunesat.
Audio recognition could be the end of re-titling libraries (which I’m sure the major buy out libraries would be happy about), but I can’t imagine the big re-titlers like Getty going down without a fight. Or maybe there’s some kind of deal made in a few years where re-titled / non-exclusive tracks can’t make any performance royalties (I hope not).
Also, I wonder how much the PROs would have to lower their rates if they actually paid for every second of music aired on TV and radio.
certainly : )