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But isn’t writers uploading their music everywhere, making ill advised deals, and not understanding anything about anything what we complain about all the time here? Aren’t those the points that we site concerning the devaluation of music and the race to the bottom? I wouldn’t hold this story up as advice to others to follow or consider it amazing. It’s a story of luck, and the same luck could be found in making smart deals and understanding how the business works.
Jesse, most of my income comes from custom writing songs for the educational market. Whatever the client says, goes. I may think I’ve provided the greatest song ever, but if they say slow it down, change the melody and make it shorter then I say how slow, how much shorter and where should the melody change. And you know what, sometimes it actually makes for a better song. At least for the intended purpose.
So it’s easy for me to take that attitude over to library work. Like LAwriter says, you have to stay unattached. If you are happy not to change it to get placements, it may be a candidate (as is) for streaming radio/background music deals or compilation albums instead.
I think you are having trouble taking no for an answer.
The first lesson I learned many years ago was to keep vocals sparse and non-specific. I was told things like don’t use proper names and dates. For an example my first publisher said don’t write a song about meeting Mary Christmas time of 2004. It’s not going to fly.
You’ve captured a nice groove in a style very popular these days. If feedback says it’s too wordy and story driven for licensing, make a new version. But you might have grown too attached to it to do so!
There’s no way to sort by date for series or episodes, so it’s real easy to miss, especially if you have a list of series well into the hundreds. Sometimes you don’t notice because the series is listed multiple times for different seasons like “Show Title” and “Show Title S2”. Or maybe you read something like “Baseball Wives and “Basketball Wives” as the same thing. There’s not much you can do but keep a list and painstakingly compare to your account. At least they are alphabetical.
Yeah, you don’t want a tail to start at ten seconds of a 15 second edit!
Maybe they don’t want to wade through the vast amount of music out there and would rather have a collection of tunes that meet their requirements presented to them.
Like Advice says, it can be good for making relationships with libraries. My highest single license fee ever earned was because of a library I connected with via a paid submission. You just never know….
I had this choice just a few days ago on a full length vocal song and decided on the button ending. I suppose you could do two mixes and send a fade out version for digital distribution streaming opportunities and the button version to libraries for placements.
The licenses granted by XXX…may be in perpetuity
They are saying they can’t take away a licensed use of your music. For example, a filmmaker licenses your music for say a training video. Later you remove your music from the library. This does not affect the filmmaker at all. His or hers right to use your track in the training video stands.
And you really want to write production music?
I did 15 years ago. 🙂
Right Jesse, if they don’t re-title under a non-exclusive agreement, and they are not adding a unique identifier to your title, then they are not collecting publishing royalties. You would have to assume they make all their money off of sync fees.
A great question and not sure of what the answer should be. I have been just registering without the keywords so it would just be “Fight Club” The again I could be adding “Fight Club Aggressive Orchestral” as an alternate title.
I would think just as “Fight Club”. With the keywords being in parentheses, it makes it look like that is the proper title.
You have to understand re-titling for what it is. It’s simply a way to make sure royalties are distributed properly for placements of your music. This is the system that is in place at the PROs. to do this. It is not evil. I suppose there are other ways they could have come up with to keep track of paying out royalties for music represented non-exclusively, but this is the system as it stands. Re-titling a song is not intended to deliberately devalue or create confusion, it’s intended as a way to track royalties. If a company doesn’t care to represent music that is using this method of tracking royalties, they don’t have to, but I wouldn’t feel working within the system to properly track royalties is a bad thing.
Art, do you register your cue(s) with your PRO as “Fight Club” or “Fight Club Aggressive Orchestral”?
And here’s another for your consideration: