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Most people NEVER win the lottery. So basically, ASCAP is NEVER going to pay you.
Well, as an ASCAP writer I hit that ‘jackpot’ twice but it was mostly because, for half the year, over the past six years, BTN has been using several themes I wrote.
I co-wrote them with my wife, who is a BMI writer, and of course she’s been paid every quarter for all the air time.
So I feel your pain, as I’ve probably ‘lost’ upwards of $20K by being shafted by the survey system. So lame that it can’t all be done automatically in 2017.
Not sure what you mean Mark. I had theme music and background music on five shows in syndication and BMI paid more for theme (T) performances than for background (BI) performances.
Yeah oops! I meant for segment themes – ASCAP pays a THM rate on those. The rules are pretty strict, the same track has to be used in the exact same point in a show in each episode. BMI doesn’t pay a THM rate on segment themes, per their page here:
https://www.bmi.com/creators/royalty/us_television_royalties
“Note that when a segment theme is reported, it will be credited as a background use. A segment theme is defined as the re-use of a theme throughout a program.
Additionally, themes reported in use during interstitials or other short-form programming will be credited as a background use.”
I get the sense we all just got trolled.
There are some legit ways to ‘clone’ a track but slapping some vocals over the full mix isn’t one of them.
I just don’t see the back end earning anything near $20-$100k over a lifetime anymore. Doesn’t backend rely on syndication and re-airs?
Perhaps that’s the case for royalties, but just one decent license fee (commercial, trailer etc) could be $20K. I realize though that for some genres those types of license fees are few and far between.
How many of you would take $500-$1500+ for one of your tracks and give up your copyright? I can promise that some would.
By “give up the copyright”, if you mean where you would still get the writer’s share of the performance royalties, then sure, this is done all the time. Libraries with deep pockets routinely pay their composers $1000, sometimes more, for a work-for-hire buy out of licensing income. But the composer of course still gets their writer’s share of the performance royalties.
However, if you meant a dodgy deal where you’d be giving up all the future earning potential of both royalties and licensing, (I think that was your point?) then I would have to say NO WAY! I think that would be a terrible deal unless you were compensated for at least five years worth of potential earnings.
As long as the capitalist system survives automation and the rise of deep AI, and we’re not in a post-money Star Trek-esque society 50 years from now, your music has the potential to generate money for 70 years AFTER you have hopefully lived a long life. Personally, I wouldn’t sign something like that for less than 100k. I realize how ridiculous that might sound to some people, but it really isn’t so wacky when you consider how much one decent track can generate over a decade or more.
“Shoot for 5 super high quality tracks that will earn you 50K over 5 years in sync fees…etc.” The bottom line Mark and all is that it did take you writing 2000 for 5 to take off! Everyone of us vets here is saying “I wrote 1000 or more tracks”.
For sure – through sheer volume you’ll eventually stumble upon a quick and dirty track that is an unexpectedly big earner.
That said, most of my top earning tracks are ones where I spent days getting the music as authentic to the genre as possible, and as useful as possible (evocative, catchy, properly structured).
On the subject of working in the box, I sweeten maybe half the tracks I write with live orch elements. Samples are so good now that if you know what you’re doing, there’s very little to be gained from live orchestra unless you have a lot of exposed legato lines – and if you’ve actually written music designed to be played by a real orchestra (not for samples). I often add live guitar though, and get synth programmers to contribute parts to my music so I’m not reaching for the same palette over and over again.
There are trailer music libraries like Colossal and RSM that have almost no live parts in any of their music, and those guys are getting placements every week. Their main focus at the moment seems to be sound design heavy hybrid music (like Mind Heist but even less musical), so live stuff isn’t really needed.
But overall I agree with LAWriter – live parts are important for longevity and helps elevate the production value above competing tracks.
I don’t really agree with the comment about needing 1000 ‘amazing’ tracks (let’s just call them competitive with the top 10% of library music)… I certainly don’t have that many – maybe 100 what you’d consider really good ones? And those tracks, along with a mountain of ‘OK’ ones, pay my mortgage in the LA area. I imagine 1000 amazing tracks would easily make you seven figures, if the tracks were in the right hands!
A good example would be Two Steps From Hell – I doubt they have more than 200 tracks between them, yet they are massively successful. It helps that they’re pretty much the best at what they do.
Awesome discussion here!
I’d like to clarify a few things that were brought up, just based on my own experience working with a wide range of libraries:The PMA is a huge organization with many members and only a handful of those could be considered Elite. Any library can join the PMA just like any composer can. No barriers.
This is important to keep in mind, membership in the PMA is not necessarily a position of status, price level etc.
The PMA (elite) will bash non exclusive work and RF work and unless you are an A list composer will not offer any upfront.
This is not exactly true. Perhaps you mean they won’t offer upfront + licensing? That is very rare and only for a composer a library needs in their catalog.
This is what pretty much any major library will offer you – one of these:
– no money upfront, around 50% of licensing
– a fee – $500 to $1000+ per track, NO licensingThe first question is “So, which libraries do you work for ?” If you do not have any A lists in there, it does not go very far. And if you mention Non Ex or RF, it will NOT go down well at all.
I have personally never been asked that, except in the trailer side of things, where a library wants to know how many of their competitors already have my ‘sound’.
I’ve written about 2000 – 2500 library tracks. Many old, (now mostly sub-par) tracks went to RF ‘add to cart’ libraries. The sales were good, hit an apex in about 2012 and have plummeted lately. I haven’t been adding quite as many tracks in recent years, but a drop of 95% from five years ago surely can’t be explained by just that.
On the other hand, the tracks of mine in libraries that are geared towards TV and higher end licensing are doing well – and interestingly some of my best performers are evergreen tracks written 5 – 10 years ago. You’d think they’d be buried under a mountain of newer music by now, especially considering the size of the libraries they’re in (UPPM for one). I think it comes down what many others have said here – a handful of great tracks, recorded live, in timeless picture friendly genres, will always beat 1000 mediocre quickly hashed out tracks.
The other critical ingredient of course is the library you give those tracks to. An add-to-cart site like P5, AS, AJ etc might make you a small stream of income from five amazing tracks, (if anyone can find you), but in the hands of a library focusing on the higher end of the business, those five amazing tracks could realistically make you at least $50K each in royalties and licensing over 10 years.
So while it’s a nice idea to have the publishing to your music, I disagree with the comments about needing to own the rights. Pretty much the only way to work with a publisher that will get healthy license fees (four figures and above) and have the best shot at network airtime, is to have them be the exclusive company pitching that music.
That said, there are a lot of libraries that want the rights (forever) to your music that they won’t pay for, and probably won’t get good fees for (or even decent royalties from, for that matter). Just don’t confuse these guys with the heavy hitters that will require the rights to the music, and more than likely reward you for it.
TL;DR Always consider the source – someone’s take on the industry is based on their own unique experiences – shaped by the quality of their music and which libraries represented it. Some will say stay away from big libraries that demand the rights to your tracks, while others (like me) will tell you these are the kinds of libraries you want to work with.
ASCAP does more surveying than BMI, so you’re less likely to make money on lower tier cable channels. The folks at ASCAP justify it like this – they’ll lose money by doing the paperwork on every minute of music used on lower tier cable channels like the BTN. They also told me that if you do get music to show up in their infrequent surveys, you’ll likely match or get more than what a BMI writer would.
Here are some other differences we’ve found when comparing BMI and SESAC to ASCAP:
ASCAP pays a THM rate for themes (only on TV), which is a really nice bump if you get it, which BMI doesn’t do.
SESAC takes longer to pay, about one quarter later than BMI and ASCAP. SESAC will claim they pay more. I’ve heard mixed things about this but they are definitely paying a bit more (maybe temporarily) for my UPPM tracks that got switched over last year.
When I met with SESAC they told me they were starting to pay royalties on trailers, something ASCAP and BMI don’t do.
BMI has what seems to be more accurate, easier to read statements. That said, all the PROs like some ambiguity in their statements. It’s almost as if they like us to be confused…
The present glut / deluge of music is OK if you’re able to get high quality, polished music out to good libraries, but here’s the perhaps obvious down side:
it’s getting a lot harder for part time composers and those straight out of music school to get a decent residual income stream going. Particularly for those that have a ways to go consistently delivering top notch, polished sounding music (like I did after college). Sadly that means a lot of talented musicians will let go of pursuing their goal of becoming a full time composer, maybe dropping music altogether.
We had a golden era – approx 2000 to 2012, where decent music software and equipment had become affordable to a lot of people, and the supply of music barely met demand (so standards were much lower for library music). For a few different reasons, including, I think, the spread of high speed internet across the world, it’s now a very different scene with exponentially more competition.
Who knows? Maybe we’re still in the golden age, the one before AI took all the library work (yikes!)
Aiva is the first AI to Officially be Recognized as a Composer
I think MichaelL nailed it right here:
There are composers with 100 tracks who make as much as composers with 1,000. The latter part is especially true if you write trend-based tracks rather than “evergreen” tracks.
From my perspective – just looking at how my tracks are performing, the lower end side of things – RF / micro licensing – has become a lot more crowded over the past five years, but particular this last year. One site that used to make me more than $1500 a month a few years ago is down to maybe $100. The re-titling side of things seems to be getting more crowded too.
Overall, like what Michael said, it seems the key to survival now is quality over quantity, and working with libraries that get your music used in more lucrative ways.
Because with all that doom and gloom I mentioned above, you can still make a great living with library music, particularly with in demand genres that very few others can do well.
It’s a moving target, as the production value expectations in areas like trailer music go up every year, but there are still many composers doing really well, some with just a couple dozen tracks released a year.
Big Ten Network is surveyed by ASCAP, so if you’re lucky and your music shows up on that one day they decide to choose as the survey day, you do pretty nicely. If not, nada. BMI doesn’t do this – they pay a very small per minute rate.
Most network sports games pay decent day time rates. Local / regional sports air time shows up near the back of your statement where the per minute rates are nickels and dimes.
The hard part is not recieving royalty checks, because they are very expensive to cash in the Netherlands. But to apply for an American bankaccount is much harder..
Can you set up direct deposit / money wire to a non US bank account?
Wow! I really admire that Art. My schedule is all over the place – resembling something like this in any given month:
week 1: do everything else before 4pm (sleep, go out, meet clients and friends)
write library music, send parts to musicians from 4pm – 10pm. Work on custom music from midnight – 4amweeks 2 and 3: write new music and revise last week’s from 6pm – 5am. Hopefully no custom work or it’ll get nuts.
week 4: revise and stem all tracks from the month from 3pm to 5am. Hopefully no meetings, custom work or for that matter, much of any social interaction.
I’m working on making things a lot more efficient, to claw back some time from ‘busy’ work, to get more music out the door and be more social!
Hey Danny!
is this the new strategy for you and other established artist in selling your music? i.e. cut out the middle men spotify/itunes and selling direct to your following?
CDBaby and the other companies still send your tracks to iTunes, Spotify etc.
In fact looking at my sales, CDBaby.com sales are just 4.5% of what I’ve made from public sales – the other 94.5% is iTunes and a little from Spotify and Amazon.
Overall, I still think CDBaby is the best one:
– You can actually call CDBaby with any questions.
– CDBaby sells CDs as well as downloads.
– you pay CDBaby once and that’s it. DistroKid and Tunecore have an annual fee where if you don’t pay, they’ll take down your music.
– CDBaby and Tunecore can pay via Direct Deposit. Everyone else is Paypal only, taking a cut out of every payment.Tunecore is a close second for me, there’s an annual fee but they don’t take a cut of sales. If you’re selling a lot, it might be worth it going with them.
Here’s a good comparison:
CD BABY VS. TUNECORE VS. REVERBNATION VS. DISTROKID VS. ONERPM: DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION – 2017