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Why can’t the minimum fee for a track be $99 on the RF market?
Because the majority of customers will not pay that much. Simple as that.
And like MichaelL points out as soon as everyone is at $99.00 one composer will start pricing at $89.00.
It is a free market Glen. You cannot control it. What you are talking about is called price fixing.Did you know that the minimum “session fee” for a VO talent is $500 to record a TV or Radio spot?
I did know that and that is why I go to voices.com to hire all my voiceover artists for $150 – $300 a session.
Again, it’s a free market. Welcome to capitalism in the digital age.To all future library composers,wannabes, hobbyists and amateurs(especially those using loops) the library buisness is now closed. There are too many of you, making too much music (most of which lacks artistic merit). Please stop and go away, because you are causing the value of my labor (I use the term loosly) to go down.
Now that was worth the price of admission.
-Mark
I’m sorry to be so blunt Glen but you have no idea what you are talking about.
You sound scared. You sound like one of these old dinosaurs wishing that Beta had won out over VHS and “those darn cassette tapes will be the end of the music industry, mark my words!!” and “Oh My GAWD, people are downloading MP3s!! for FREE!”People are making good money in this new digital age and you can put it down all you want and insult how composers make their music but your old fashioned statements are not going to change a thing.
You and Mr Composer should just leave us “garageband composers” alone to disrupt your old fashioned industry.I’d like to post an example just so composers get a better feeling for what they might expect from non-exclusive libraries, or as they are called in this thread “lower priced libraries”.
I just received a really nice thank you letter from one of our newer composers that reads as follows:
“I just wanted to send you a quick email to say thank you for accepting me into your library and for the many sales you have gotten for me so far! I greatly appreciate it.”This composer is very good. He has high quality, professionally produced music in genres that sell well.
He has 79 tracks in our library which is just above the minimum amount of 50 needed for acceptance into the library.
He as earned a total of $1355.68 in the 6 months he has been with us.
That’s about $226 a month on 79 songs.That’s what you might expect from “lower priced libraries” if you are a talented composer with a smaller library.
Composers of this caliber with 300-1000 tracks in their catalog earn *a lot* more.
-Mark
Great advice from Art and Bronxabomb.
The “lower priced libraries” are going after a market that did not really exist before the digital revolution. The are millions of new customers out there that need legal music for their home projects and small businesses that definitely cannot afford to pay the fees that some composers are used to getting from broadcasters and ad agencies.
If you choose to tap into that market and make lots of sales at $39.95 to $129.95 then that will be just one more income stream for you.
Or you can only go exclusive and wait for that big break / payout (which in my opinion will be happening less and less as companies find affordable alternatives).
As suggested by Art a combination of these is probably your best bet.In regards to the amount of time invested to create a track, the fact is that they are already done, they exist. What you do with them from now on is pure profit. Uploading your music has been made fairly easy to most libraries, you do it once and then earn money forever. It’s not like digging a ditch everyday to put food on the table. If you made a sandwich and sold it to someone you would have to make another sandwich for the next customer. Music isn’t like that. With music you are selling copies of the same sandwich. I would suggest looking at your investment of time into creating and uploading music as if you were making a deposit into a 401k that starts paying immediate dividends and keeps paying them forever.
We have been paying some of our composers every month for more than 17 years. I think they would say their time investment was definitely worth it.-Mark
Thanks Denis. That’s truly an inspiring video. I’m off to the music store soon to ask them about this.
btw, here’s the old fashioned way of playing guitar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwClMVlKYxMWow! I so want one!
@Del Smyth
relax dude. sheesh. probably only 1% of the composers on this forum can afford hiring real musicians, including me. Give the guy a break.
What you’re saying is not “controversial” at all, it’s just kind of angry and mean.
@Greg
I think what you recorded sounds great. Much better than some of the midi sounding performances I have to “not approve” with a few of our ML composers.Questions
1. This is a midi guitar pickup?
2. only available for windows? nothing similar for mac/pro tools?Your performance sounds like it has pretty good dynamics which means the contraption seems to read velocity pretty well.
Thanks for posting this. Anything that can transform the talents of a guitarist to other instruments is pretty cool in my book. Why should we all have to learn how to play piano if we spent our lives learning to play guitar?
Mark
Hi Soph-
Art has a rule that we are not allowed to discuss specific music libraries in the open forum. It is important to add the comments on specific libraries to their MLR library pages so that MLR subscribers can find them and more importantly so it will add to and retain the value of the great product Art is creating here.-Mark
“pre-recorded royalty free loops and samples”
I would propose that these are two separate issues, samples and loops. Leaving aside drum loops from the equation since just about everyone uses them, if you are talking about melodic loops, an instrument playing a melody in a looped audio file then I would say you shouldn’t use it and the company you are submitting to probably is not interested in that type of composition.
If you are talking about samples, like a sample set of a vintage synth, where you have to play/create your own melody using the samples of the synth that the company provided, then you’re just fine.My personal opinion: Music pieced together from melodic construction kits, like bass lines, guitar melodies and horn lines, that someone else has written should never be entered into a music library as an original composition.
For example, one of our composers creates popular music construction kits that you can download royalty free to help you create your own version of his music
http://www.equinoxsounds.com/dlg/cart/index.php?action=desc&pn=234&c=35&page=8
I would never want to see music created from this construction kit submitted to our library.
Using a construction kit like this and then adding a guitar solo or sax solo on top does not make this your music, in my opinion, even though it is considered royalty free.I’m not sure how apple loops and garageband work though. Maybe they don’t have loopable melodies.
And again, these are just my opinions.
-MarkIt looks like PRS was never allowed to say exactly what the revenue split was due to their agreement
This is about as specific as they got:
“This means that YouTube videos will generate ‘micro-payments’ in royalties and it will therefore take many of these micro-payments (ie streamed works) to equal £1.”It also looks like the PRS agreement with Youtube ran out in June 2012 and they don’t mention it being renewed anywhere so it is possible the program no longer exists:
http://www.prsformusic.com/creators/helpcentre/Pages/YouTubeDealHelp.aspx#7As for Youtube “Royalties”, BMI and ASCAP have no arrangements that I have ever heard of where they pay actual royalties to composers. They may pay part of ad revenue (and many people simply call that a “royalty”) but there again you have to sign up for youtube contentID system in some form and choose to monetize your music from the clients you’re selling your music to.
Here is the big “Youtube Royalties” offer from last year
http://www.youtubelicenseoffer.com/
If you click on What is a Royalty?
http://www.youtubelicenseoffer.com/faq#Q4
You see that it is just ad revenue and another form of contentID system except managed by yet another 3rd party system (instead of simply doing it yourself and earning 100% of ad revenue instead of 15%).Here is BMI’s statement on what they are doing with licensing music to the internet
http://www.bmi.com/creators/royalty/internet_music_mobile_entertainment/detail
No mention of Youtube that I can see.-Mark
soundcloud url?
you’ll probably get a better answer if people can hear your music.>the ability to recognize path statements for files stored on another server.
Great suggestion. Thanks Art.
>What about the the legal and contracts with clients administrative matters
This is all taken care of automatically within the system. Clients receive their license via email and all accounting and administration is automatic. You will rarely ever have to talk to or interact with a client using our system, unless you want to of course.
>Wordpress is based on mysql/php.
Right, so is Drupal and Oscommerce and many other CMS platforms.
My point being that you would have to hire a WordPress, or Drupal or Oscommerce specific programmer to create anything on those platforms because you have to work in the specific confines of those platforms.I chose to ‘roll my own’ rather than fight with limitations of the different systems available that sit on top of mysql and also because there are tons of inexpensive php programmers out there. wordpress and drupal not so cheap.
Maybe you thought my reference to CGI was meant for WordPress? I just meant that most software packages being sold are blackbox-like scripts that are not editable by the user. Our system would not be a black box.
>The one thing I don’t believe you mentioned is multiple play lists.
We would offer our cookie-based save-4-later feature where customers can save as many songs as they want for review at a later time. No separated playlists though.
The main reason being that we do not want customers to be required to create a user account to get access to any of the features.You would also get the Send-to-Client feature which is really popular with our customers (sends a list of tracks to a client with previews, areas for notes, approval or disapproval, but does not show the person approving the price of the track).
You would also get the Temp Download which gives editors a watermarked MP3 preview to pop into their timeline for approval before purchasing. This is a very popular feature on the site.
>Another feature I have is the ability to assign every track a “type” of alternate mix
That’s a possibility. Not for ML because with 150 composers their edits and alt mixes are far from standard. But I guess it would be good for an individual site owner that knows he will be uploading those same types of edits every time for every song.
>The advantage with WordPress is that there is a huge community invested in extending and maintaining that platform
There are lots of disadvantages to using WordPress as well. Mainly because at its heart it is a blogging platform, not an ecommerce platform. It is much harder to program for WordPress than it is for mysql/php (which is also a hugely popular and stable platform).
As for me retiring you would simply be able to hire a php programmer to continue adding features you like to your site. php is a completely open system, not a black box like CGI.
You could edit and customize the site to your liking before I retire as well 😉I will create anproposed list of features that will be available in the white label product and post them here for review before we get started.