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If they’re not paying you upfront, it’s an insult to ask for more than 50% of the licensing. You’re literally giving them ownership of this music for free, FOREVER.
what would be your sound advice for those whose willing to stick it out the next 10-15 years?
If I can throw in my $0.02’s worth, this would be my advice:
1) write / produce the very best music you can, as fast as you can make it your best work.
There’s little point in churning out mediocre music these days. I speak from experience that two or three great sounding tracks can make 1000 times more than 50 lame tracks that were rushed out the door.2) there might be an AI apocalypse for library music in 10 – 15 years, so make hay while the sun shines. It might not be AI writing and finishing music from start to finish (highly unlikely for at least the next decade) but we’ll probably start to see good AI -assisted writing become commonplace within ten years. This will probably decimate library music composers because it will mean every composer can now write much much more music than previously possible.
If, before we get to that point, you have a lot of music in episodes of TV shows, those re-runs will at least keep you going for a while.3) focus on music that is harder for a kid with some loops and good samples in Garageband to put together, because a) there are more of those coming online every day, and b) that’s the kind of music that will be easy for AI to do first. Maybe record live instruments to sweeten your samples – further giving your music longevity.
4) be patient with the money, but be impatient with getting music out into the world (into good libraries).
So, do you think the main income source for the average composer nowadays is performance royalties or sync fees? I’ve been reading everywhere that PROs are paying less and less.
I write mostly for trailers, a little for TV, film and games. I’ve been doing trailer music for over a decade so I get a decent stream of placements, but royalties still make up about 50% – 60% of my total income… the trailer placements are just nice bonuses but the steady money is from TV air time.
pretty much the same experience as working with AdRev (the Haawk founder actually founded and then sold AdRev for millions), but a slightly better rate.
yes
2 to 3 a day?
If you are working at this Break-Neck CRAZY Speed, having zero free time to be human, and not seeing 6 Figures. Sorry, but there’s just no point in doing it.,.This was pretty much my first real writing gig after moving out to LA. It took me years to unlearn the bad habits you have to lean on in order to ‘write’ that much music every day, every week, for months on end…
Is it normal practice for music companies to not let composers feature spots they’ve written?
It sounded like it was the ad agency that didn’t want anyone sharing it. Which is unusual for commercials, I certainly haven’t run into that before.
But it’s getting common in the trailer world – some studios don’t like anyone claiming on social media their part to play in the production of the trailer.Tracks designed for TV and with no live parts take me about 10 hours, stretched out over two or three days. The breaks in between sessions give me fresh ears each day and helps a lot with a range of issues.
Tracks for trailers with no live recording can take me one night (for a custom short TV spot) to four days. With live recording, the whole process from sketch to recording to mix can take two weeks of work for one track.
I used to crank out tracks for TV at a crazy rate of two or three a day, but those tracks don’t make me nearly as much money as the ones I spend a lot more time on these days. Not to mention, rushing stuff made me develop bad habits, leaning on loops etc. Taking a lot of time seemed scary at first, but I improved a lot faster taking my time on each track. My aim is to make every new track the best thing I’ve produced to date… I might not always hit the mark but at least that’s the goal I have in the back of my mind as I work.
Hi Adam, welcome to the game!
As solo piano is something most of us can do in our sleep, there’s a TON of it out there.
If you want the music to be interesting to publishers and their clients, the piano music will need a lot of dressing up, interesting textures, awesome production value.
Do that and almost any library will be interested.Are you implying they want all your writer’s share too?
Firstly, I’d personally NEVER sign something like that with a library. Do you realize how much one track could make you in royalties, for potentially decades? (decades might be a stretch, but if it’s a hit track, we could be talking 100s of $1000s).
If someone asked for a deal like that with me, I’d throw it back at them and offer a rate per track for $150,000. I think I’d be ok with someone claiming they wrote my music for that much money, not to mention collecting the royalties for potentially my whole life + 70 years.Big libraries pay $1000 – $2000 per track for a buy out, where they get any future sync licensing income. Composer still of course gets all their writers share of the performance royalties.
That might seem great, but I wouldn’t sign a deal like that unless you were fairly sure they wouldn’t be targeting big license fees (like sticking to TV instead of trailers), and you really needed the cash.
Most high end trailer libraries don’t pay a fee upfront to own your music, but share the licensing either 50/50 or 60/40 (in the composer’s favor). Not great, but very few trailer music publishers feel the need (see: endless flow of willing composers) to pay for the music they get to own forever.
As already mentioned I’ll do things like start on a pick up, add beats (section transitions are good for this), and I always get the cymbals stemmed out separately so we have an audio ‘band-aid’ to cover over any odd meter. An easy way to lose two beats is to use the first half of one bar with the 2nd half of a later one.
This is how I do it:
Stems for a client:
– everything printed running through the master FX, but with a little less compression.
– I then (if there’s time) load these stems into a fresh new session and reduce the volume overall until there’s no clipping. Re-bounce / exportStems (stripes) for a mix:
– no master FX, except for any gain automation. Still print all the track automation, or else the mixer will have a rough time.
– Depending on the mixer, and their process, I will / won’t print reverb into each track.Some shows don’t mind if you add the shows to your profile, others freak out. It depends on the client I guess, and maybe the credited composer on that show.
Keep in mind that the libraries might not actually like you doing this either, as it’s technically their client.Hey Keltech. This is good stuff. Feel free to reach out to me at mark@markpetrie.com
I think we could potentially collaborate on some upcoming trailer projects I have in the works.
(I mostly do trailer music these days)