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Streaming services are great to showcase your music, Spotify, Apple Music.
There is a lot of babble on some that you have to post frequently, high qual and all that, but you can have accounts on your own terms. You don’t have to follow that advice, if you don’t have much reason to grow your channels fast.
Some is great for research, and hooking up with likeminded people, and your channel will grow anyway at a slow pace, even if you don’t do much. You can treat it anyway you want, it can be your CV, it can be a collective of friends, it can showcase some of your work, it can be your artist profile/ brand, it can just be fun faffing around.
Anyway, you can just use some casual, without putting any pressures on yourself. I like it on those terms.
Wow, the same number of streams on Spotify, would have brought you about 6000$, if you own all the rights. Seems like a really bad deal.
Music1234’s post above is so true, it hurts. Well summed up in 1-9. Business 101.
Should be a sticky on the front page of MLR.I put zip faith into AI’s as creative. Any kid with zero musical skills would do a better job, pressing patches with one finger in Omnisphere.
Yeah well, do not feed the monster. Too many composers do, but these deals are «practice» deals for 14yo kids. When buyers cant afford music, or wont pay for it, dont give it to them. You raise demand by creating scarcity. Trade 101. Eventually new buyers will come along, who will differentiate themselves on music, and beat the shi* out of the cheapskates. These things are ez, but obviously not for modern musicians. Worst business people ever.
I don’t get angry, and just talk with my feet. “Deals” like that have no intrest to me, and I dont sign away music to libraries that does blanket deals either. I think this case reveals how scummy this business is, so if anything, Ive become more alert about what I submit and to whom I submit. But Im an amateur who can cherry pick as I like. I feel for you pro’s who are caught up with companies like these.
I can’t give you advice, but I think this is quite uncommon, and I have rejected submitting to a library with similar demands last year. I will rather crawl in the gutter and have rats eat me before I accept an “offer” like that.
In Europe, it’s is illegal not to be able to resell a library. The developers adhere to local laws, where ever they live, but seems there is a potential frontier there..
Yeah, well, they have to find a way to lose the freemium business model. It doesn’t work.
I dont know, I find the free speak add value. Nowhere else can you find this. One man’s “negative” can be another man’s “positive”. Negative people tends to be engaged and root for change, positive people just go with the flow and doesn’t really add new perspective, afik.
If we are grown-up’s, we should be able to solicit valuable opinion ourselves. However, if negative comments is a competitive strategy to scare people off, it’s not legit.
Depends, I think business knowledge is important with a collaborator. I think collaborating is a bit overrated in general, but with the right persons with a complementing skill set, I can definitely be an asset.
At least you have to give your music away to these companies, to render it worthless. So why even consider it?
Musicians have never been entitled to make a 100% living off of passive income, and historically quite few has pulled that off. Times have been better, yes, but markets become saturated in the tail of that when everyone pursue the same.
Following this study, passive income from compositions, is mostly less than 20% of a full income for a musician (see the cases). Mileage may vary. http://money.futureofmusic.org/about-the-project/
I guess owning a music library, subscription based or not, could be added to the lists.
Thanks for this thread, Im a european music producer and over here we appreciate branch organizations very much because of the knowledge they can disseminate, the networks they can facilitate and the overall influence they can have on creating a sustainable platform for professional work.
The Op started with a batch of questions, I’d like to use for structure:
Would it be helpful to have a point of contact at the PMA you could use as a resource?
– Yes, looking at the US library market from abroad, it’s a jungle with all sorts of people publishing information in forums, in context with their own business propositions ect. It would be nice to have an entry point website, with some basic reference information on types of libraries, types of contracts in the business, affiliate branch organizations in the US and world wide, how to find a good match for my music, and other types of resources.What questions do you have about libraries?
Researching libraries is easy enough, but understanding how they do business is less so. So, I wonder how they are working to find clients, and what other type of work is actually going on in the libraries. Some reports on that would help me connect more with their efforts.Also more insight into the clients, who actually use production music. Maybe some portraits. Who are they? What work are they doing, and what are they trying to accomplish? How does music help them? What are they looking for? When does the music work for them? What is “good music” for library clients?
What doors do you wish were open?
To be honest, I wish more doors were closed, so unskilled teenagers using torrent software can’t get one finger compositions licensed into major network productions and take work from talented musicians who have spent 20 years to get where they are, and built competitive studios with their spare change. So, Im a bit in the gatekeeping camp. We need serious people to open and close doors by putting up criteria for quality in the writing, production and performances.What guidance do you feel is missing?
Especially more guidence about the who, when, where, why, how and what library clients are looking for. I also feel the PMA could work to educate library clients about music, because that may contribute to improve their own media productions.For the record, I took a look at the PMC 2017 programme and thought the sessions looked awesome! I will definitely find my way to the event in London, UK the coming years!
What thoughts do you have about the art and the business of production music?
Crafting good production music is a different artform than writing hit songs for the Billboard charts, and again different than activist artistry. Doing production music can be a really great way for artists/ writers/ producers to hone their craft and skills, to have fun making music with the freedom to stay local, and to consolidate later in the career when combining music production with teaching gigs and other paths.The order of business does seem to be in a bad shape, as many of the other posts in this thread has emphazised so well. The internal working and quality control in the PMA is therefore important for me as a writer as well, as I find it hard to support an organization with low credibility. So for me to be interested in the PMA as a writer requires that the brand is intact and that the standards are set high in all regards, but especially in the way the business is conducted. Work towards transparent criteria, accountability, fair compensation, quality contracts ect. is all things that is important to create a sustainable business platform for library composers, libraries themselves as well as their clients.
If you write for libraries already, what do you know that should be more broadly shared?
Making good report, build solid connections, take your time to do proper research (MLR is GREAT for that!), join a common interest in library clients needs and not just the deal at hand (thus my suggestions above about getting to know more about the clients), Im not in a PMA library as I write – but working together is important, good communication. Library music is all about useful music, and less about music that stands out on its own, so collaboration and good communication with libraries can really bring out more useful productions.If you don’t write for them already, what would you need to know before you jumped in?
Basicly more transparency, more information. I would like to know the incentive to why I would sign, the ROI (tying work up exclusively is a BIG deal), what contacts do they have, what productions are they in, what are they looking for, who are they, what backgrounds do they have, what affiliations do they have, where are they present (events, conferences, US only, EU, World). More web, more video, more prescence – like other businesses in competition. Just get more of a feeling for them, I guess.Well, it’s my take on this. Maybe not so interesting in itself, but maybe as part of a wider data set. Thanks for your prescence at MLR, I really appreciate your perspective in the forums as well.
Limitations works for me. A brief is a limitation. It motivates me to get into production mode to know that someone out there, right now, is looking for that type of music.
Maybe I could do anything, but a brief keeps me focused on getting that particular task done, so I dont get caught up in endless analysis ond choice paralysis.
Passive consumption of videos, online forums and learning activities works as procrastination for me, and I do too much of that too. But what really works is to feed my productivity in a concrete way, and learn as I go. I feel that energy comes from spending energy, letting each step lead into another.
I use things like music calls from libraries, and listings from different sources, and if I don’t have that – I make my own – on a piece of paper with some music examples, and keywords – and use that to sketch out a batch of 3-5 tracks at a time.