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Hey Youngrich, who am I to not believe you? Congrats on a winning strategy. I wish I knew your short cuts because for me, I have been grinding away at this for 2 1/2 decades and I have only earned through good old fashion hard work.
I actually believe anything is possible. Let’s all tone down the pessimism and doubt and let this discussion continue because in this business anything is possible and clearly all of us have seen stranger things happen where suddenly a lot of money comes falling down out of no where (Don’t we all love those moments!)
By “distribution costs” – I am talking about the time involved in either:
A. Self Uploading music tracks to stock sites (direct license models) or
B. Submitting music to publishers who then distribute to multiple overseas publishers and register all titles at PRO’s.It takes me and others a lot of time to do those tasks and yes I too at times employ people to handle that admin work for me and no I am not using free interns to do those tasks. You personally may work 1 hour a day on your model, but still just managing the inflow of music from 70 writers takes time so clearly you have an employee who is working for you. Or perhaps you do not?
I have one final question: if you don’t own a library, do you just distribute the music of 70 writers to another Library/ Publisher?
Hey everyone, before we pull out the pessimism weapons and trash Youngrichyrich’s claims…let me say that his model does seem reasonable to me from a financial perspective only. If any of us find 70 writers and we are getting 100% pub share of the 15 tracks a year these writers are writing for this publisher, the earnings curve looks about right. BUT, where I am skeptical is the one hour per day effort going into this. Sorry, but just finding and evaluating 20, let alone 70 writers and then fielding submissions from them, publishing them for sale, registering them at PRO’s, writing keywords and descriptions for all releases, requires A LOT more time than 1 hour a day.
If however, the entire process is automated and everyone auto uploads and you do not curate and review the music at all, maybe this kind of model does work for 1 hour per day.
Anyway, @ young and rich and beautiful, if you are a publisher you are off topic. The discussion is about what 1 composer/ writer/ music producer can make from their own efforts writing music and submitting them to libraries, publishers, and do it yourself stock sites.
Finally, certainly you have overhead running such an operation? So while your sales may be 250K this year from the 70 writers/ 1000 track catalog, I am sure you had to spend a good chunk of that $ running a web site and engaging in other marketing and distribution costs. This type of “part time side hustle” where you are only working 1 hour a day seems to not really add up.
For the record, I typically spend 15 hours a week just writing, mixing, and mastering 1 or 2 tracks, but then I spend another 15 hours a week doing admin work: Studying Tunesat detections, filing claims at PRO’s, organizing metadata on spreadsheets, registering new titles at PRO’s, typing e-mails, reading industry news here and other publications, implementing uploads to the sites I sell on or distribute through.
1 hour a day does not get you very far when you are first starting out.
In fact any composer reading this who is just getting started, you better be ready to work non stop for many years writing at least 700 to 1000 tracks to get over 6 figures in earnings and you better write super creative, emotive, catchy, beautiful, powerful, etc. tracks that the market will want and have some decent shelf life.
@ Youngrichyrich, So you have a stable of writers writing for you and you are taking writer share on each composition/ title? or are you taking publishers share? Are the earnings as “writer? or publisher? or both?
Are the earnings back end only from PRO? or do they include “direct” sync licensing? Blanket fees sold? Advance payments? Streaming from Apple and Spotify, etc….ADREV earnings on youtube? HFA?
To add some flavor to the discussion – In My first 4 years, Back end PRO royalties always exceeded direct licensing earnings, but that then started to shift and eventually direct licensing caught up to PRO earnings and lately they are about the same. Other important yet smaller sources have been Spotify Streaming, HFA royalties.
When you have the asset earnings from several angles, it makes it a lot easier. Typically that situation can only be created if you maintain full control of your catalog. If all writers would just never sign cues over exclusively ever again, we’d all be in a better position to earn more because you then have the ability to put your music where you want to put it creating multiple revenue streams from the exact same asset.
I didn’t start working with libraries that paid well upfront ($500 or more per track) until about four years into writing full time, and those deals were work for hire, as in, I got the writer’s share of the performance royalties, but no licensing. So in the long run, I started to move away from most of those deals as they felt a bit like fool’s gold.
Could not agree more. I would absolutely never ever hand over my tracks for a lousy $500. Controlling your entire catalog to sell however you want, and wherever you want is the easier road to 6 figures. My earnings trajectory was strikingly similar to Marks. I think a newbie writer can get there but they have to be willing to dedicate 5 to 10 years and write 1000 really good tracks! You have to put in the time.
Thanks for sharing your journey Mark. We’re all still on this journey and I do not look forward to the day when earnings start to drop year of over year. I can deal with stagnation, but I’ll get concerned if I ever see earnings drop year over year. That has not happened yet but one gets a sense that it may happen soon with the disturbing trends we all see. Further devaluation by composers accepting horrible deals out of ignorance and paranoia, too many networks paying blankets, but no PRO – GAC, HGTV, SCRIPPS, ESPN, Big 10 Network, etc. This practice is officially annoying and is just overt theft. I am getting thousands of detections on these networks and never am I paid royalties, but I will protest this soon and just ask these libraries for money. They serve up my music and others, pocket blanket fees ($300 to $1000 an episode, or juicy annual access to the entire catalog for a 1 year blanket license fee), then don’t share any money with the writers. This is bogus and unethical.
What’s even more bizarre is how cue sheets get filed, but the PRO’s don’t pay off them anyway. Something does not add up. Then we all earn .01 cents for streaming on HULU Amazon VOD, and NETFLIX. .00000037 cents a stream…….SAD!
I pulled the calculator out. I singled out my best royalty line item royalty payment from the internet audiovisual section of my BMI statement to analyze it. BMI seems to be listing stream counts on statements which is pretty interesting.
The reality of streaming royalties is pretty bleak:
I had a :27 second cue on 1 episode of The Voice stream 1,691,000 times. The pay was $10 for those streams. This is 0.000000591 cents per stream on HULU.
The exact same cue paid $70 for the broadcast performance on NBC.Amazon VOD – an NFL cue that paid $370 for 1 live tv performance on Fox for :25 secs of air time paid $8.35 for 2,113,904 streams
0.00000395 cents per stream
But check this out. I have been reading and also calculating streams on Spotify and what spotify pays…often .0004 cents per stream (on average). If HULU or AMAZON were paying similar rates 1,691,000 streams x .0004 cents would actually = $676!
Future of streaming is not bright. Time for AMAZON, the most profitable company in the world, to pay the F up!
The biggest problem in my opinion is aggressive price dumping by writers. It’s writers undercutting writers with ridiculously low prices. When you see highly skilled music producers who are the top selling artists on certain sights dumping their prices down to $5…well….that’s just pretty pathetic, and problematic. Again revisit “artists themselves destroy our business” thread. Composers are their own worst enemies.
Post a link to the mp3 clips you found in tunesat and someone here can help you determine if it was an advertising spot or a Promo for a show. I have a track running in very heavy rotation in Spain now as a promo.I contacted my USA publisher and copied the tunesat detections data and sent in an mp3 clip. The publisher reached out to the sub publisher in Spain and I should get some royalties eventually I was told. You should hope that this is an actual tv spot. 1800 detections of a TV spot should result in meaningful royalties so it should be worth you spending a few hours building your case and claiming what’s yours.
Same here. I wonder why I bother registering with them!
I think we just never know. I was asking myself why am I spending a lot of frustrating time prepping spreadsheets for HFA, but boy am I glad I did! Soundexchange pays rights holders and featured artists for all radio including music choice, pandora, sirius
https://www.soundexchange.com/artist-copyright-owner/digital-royalties/
HFA pays Spotify streaming mechanicals, facebook, youtube, and all other digital streaming platforms.
We just never know where our music will end up so it’s always better to be over registered as opposed to not registered at all.
Yes very informative and it seems like what I take away most is this: It’s better when one person is EVERYTHING: writer, publisher, mixer, label, artist, featured artist, master owner, copyright owner, and so on. Google/ youtube are just getting away with murder IMHO. YOUTUBE (Google) should be paying all the PRO’s $1 Billion each so we can truly be paid fairly from the PROs when our music streams on line. I’m tired of seeing pennies earned from streaming and internet especially in an era where people consume visual media content on youtube as much if not more than cable tv.