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If you put your music in Identifyy/HAAWK, you will be locked into a three year contract with them. They won’t allow you to remove your music from Content ID unless you sell the copyright off.
Do NOT use Identifyy. You are locked into a three year contract with them when you upload your music to their service, and it is impossible to remove your music from their service. Whitelisting of YouTube channels etc. is completely at their discretion. You will completely lose control of any music you upload to their service.
Any subscription site not offering an upfront payment per track is a complete scam. The revenue-share model barely worked with pay-per-track RF, and it certainly will never work here.
Hey, I heard your tracks in the other thread. I’d suggest going straight to submitting to exclusive libraries that focus on TV placements. Your music is of a very high quality, and I would say you have a very good chance of being accepted into libraries that will earn you good money.
With regards to RF, I would recommend waiting to see how that market evolves over the next year before putting much work into it. Even in the last few months, things have been declining quite dramatically.
If you do end up going that route, I actually found that on RF sites my happy ukulele tracks were among my worst-sellers, while my sparse emotional cues were among my best sellers. Weird huh?
Yes, for RF the full versions of my tracks were only 30% of my sales. Stingers and timed cuts are very important for that market.
I was making between $500-$1000 month from Pond5 in 2018, but it started to taper off in 2019. I tried to expand out to other RF sites, but was always either rejected or given terrible terms, so when I left Pond5 after the change, my revenue from stock music dropped to $0. From what I’ve heard, their sales are so bad now that I haven’t lost much revenue by leaving.
I still sometimes make sales through my SoundCloud, but you’re talking the odd $50 maybe once every month or two.
I don’t think I’ll be putting as much of a focus on library music this year. I have ~200 unpublished tracks consisting of both re-worked RF music and new music that I was planning to finish up and shop around to exclusives, but the situation regarding royalties seems so volatile at the moment that I’ve become extremely reluctant to sign them away without having a better idea of how things will play out. I don’t want to be in a situation where they’re stuck in libraries for years, being placed in situations where they just won’t earn me anything.
I’ve been talking to the lead signer of a successful foreign pop-group recently who wants to license beats from me, so hopefully that’ll lead to greener pastures. But if not, I think I’ll be focusing web design/programming work for the next year instead of music until things settle down. 🙂
Are you sure the composer isn’t also the owner (or a partner, etc.)?
“so we want a really driving cue for this commercial”
“say no more fam”Those Waves plugins are always “on sale” at ~$30 anyway. A lot of companies seem to be doing this now.
Thanks for sharing that.
For comparison, here’s some of my own (50/50 split) Pond5 numbers. These are average monthly earnings for a selection of tracks between Oct 2017 and Aug 2019. All 100% MIDI based, priced at $29.99:
$15.90
$3.67
$11.02
$13.45
$1.45
$6.23
$14.69
$9.96
$5.71
$0.87
$0.72
$0.00
$2.46
$0.87
$4.22
$0.00
$2.54
$4.20
$33.37
$13.62
$13.17
$1.64
$7.77
$2.14
$0.00
$1.08
$5.42
$0.00
$28.98
$11.26
$1.10
$0.00
$0.00
$14.46The only thing I’d be weary of is accidentally signing your music up to YouTube’s Content ID system through a third party service like AdRev, which I think CDBaby opts you into when you distribute something with them. This can get you into trouble with quite a few libraries.
2nd on jamming all versions into one file. Much more cost effective
I wonder if you could jam every single track in your catalogue into one giant file. 🙂
I would think all mixes in one file would create a different digital fingerprint than one mix in a file. Just a guess as I have never tried it.
I’d assume they split the file up into tiny sections and fingerprint those, because you have to be able to detect partial uses
I do not see a bright future for direct licensing on stock music sites because the price of a music file just seems to go lower and lower by the minute.
I raised my prices on a certain RF website last week from $30 to $80 (later down to $60), fully expecting my sales to drop to almost zero. To my surprise, the rate of my sales hasn’t slowed at all since I raised my prices, and my revenue for the past week is doubled as a result. (Of course, one week doesn’t say much, but it’s still a surprise to me)
That’s what annoys me so much about this whole situation. From my perspective, it feels like neither the composers nor the market itself actually want lower prices, and yet the prices are still trending downwards…..