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A huge asterisk to add to this discussion: check your contracts. Check your contracts. CHECK YOUR CONTRACTS.
Most contracts I’ve signed include stipulations that the library may assign its rights to another company. If an exclusive library goes belly-up, it still legally controls the music under their control, and if another library comes along and acquires it, your music might go with it too.
I have dealt with some libraries that simply ceased to operate (basically, they just gave up in promoting their music and the individual(s) behind it just moved on to other endeavors) and in this case, sure, you might think it would be harmless to assume the contract is over and done with (and in practical terms, maybe it would be if the library has no interest in the material), but legally speaking, the contract doesn’t cease to be valid. If the library owner comes along and reignites the flame of his company, or if another company acquires the assets of the first company, then your music may go with it.
Read your contracts. If you’re able to make contact, get the withdrawal in writing.
Try finding local music schools or colleges, send a note to teachers there. Even high schools, talk to band or choir directors and let them know you’re available for career counseling or career day or things like that.
I agree with all the comments above. EastWest do some really nice sampling, but the PLAY engine has been buggy and unfixed for a decade, despite continual new versions being released. It’s a total, total hog, and there is no detailed editing available (despite EastWest promising PLAY PRO nearly a decade or so ago). And there *are* sample problems which you may sometimes need to work around (e.g. out of tune samples, occasional artifacts, etc.). If it was a Kontakt library, you could fix it yourself quickly and immediately. Not so in PLAY. Anytime you run into limits, EastWest will tell you your computer isn’t powerful enough. Apparently if you have less than sixteen computers running one instance of PLAY each, you’re not going to really get the best performance out of PLAY.
If they were the only game in town, this would merit further discussion. But they’re not. There are AMAZING orchestral libraries available from the likes of CineSamples, ProjectSAM, LASS, and several others. Many offer cheaper “LE” versions to get you started if you’re on a budget.
Even with an 80% discount (which trust me, will come around again — EastWest stuff goes on sale approximately every other week), I would not recommend it.
well, the big difference is that NE’s tend to have zero or low up-front fees, while exclusives can still command some fairly substantial sync fees.
i’m finding almost no usages of my old non-exclusive stuff. exclusive is definitely picking up. jingle punks, with whom i was formerly non-exclusive and am now exclusive (but left my older tracks as NE), isn’t doing as much for me as they have in the past. i’ve been contributing to the exclusive library since jan 2012 and have only seen one or two placements (whereas my old NE cues still get regular placements). i’m suspicious that they have now grown so big that non-staff composers are highly marginalized.
The bottom line:
A lawyer can scrutinize the contract and see if there’s any wiggle room — any case to be made — for withdrawing the cues. This will, in the end, come down to the exact verbiage of the contract. (Most contracts nowadays are written smartly so that the library will make “best efforts” at marketing the music but can never guarantee placement, therefore an effort to find them in violation of the contract may be unlikely. But you really have to scrutinize the contract to find out. Every contract is different.)
I would chalk it up to a loss, but not so much of a loss that you couldn’t take the original session files, duplicate them, keep the instruments and mix, change the tempo, change the key, and rewrite a new similar cue with a new name, that you will then be free to license. (Note: you should be careful that no musical elements are borrowed from the original, so there is absolutely no case to be made that the cues are related.)
And you never know if suddenly that exclusive library may start paying off unexpectedly in the future…
True (when you play that card, you are calling that party a liar). And it sounds like you may already be there. I mean, you’re already hyper-suspicious that they won’t tell you details on the placement.
We are all in exactly the same boat. We all USUALLY trust our contacts to tell us the truth. There is no good answer to what to do when you aren’t happy with that trust, because, as you said, the only alternative can be relationship-damaging.
Bigg Rome, I sympathize. You basically have three options:
1) Play super-nice guy, be friends with the library company, and schmooze until, as friends, they can be more casual about letting you know placement details.
2) Audit them, as your contract certainly allows for.
3) Wait for the PRO statement to show up. As stated above, it may or may not provide the detail you’re looking for. You can also go into the ASCAP/BMI databases to see if that cue has been registered by the library company or the production company, HOWEVER, sometimes they get bundled into newly named collections of cues so you won’t necessarily find the details on the placement.
Speaking personally, a library company that is sketchy about providing reasonable details after the deal has closed, is a company I would think twice about working with in the future. After all, they can’t survive without composers like me. (I know, I’m only one, but still.)
I don’t think it’s a liability, but there could be reasons.
A lot of times, placements are fickle. An editor chooses a piece of music, puts it in the project, it looks like it’s a done deal, and then a committee at the company for whom the project is for has to approve it, including spouses, mothers-in-laws, etc. At the last minute, if someone doesn’t like it, they’ll change it out for something else. In addition, even when it really is a completely done deal, the process of the editor’s company (or the target company) actually PAYING the library company is another process that can be instant or can drag on for months. Deep in the fine print of the contract you signed is a clause that probably states: if the library company doesn’t get paid, YOU the composer don’t get paid either. (In other words, the library company is responsible to cut you your share, but only of the monies received.)
All this makes for a mess of communication and I can understand why some companies would be hesitant to share information until the check is actually in hand. (Once it is, there is NO reason to withhold this information.)
A secondary — and perhaps more political reason — is that they may be afraid you’ll cut them out of the deal. For example, Target decides to use a cue from Blue Music Library, and Blue calls you up and says, “You got your music in a Target ad!” But then you spend hours sleuthing through the internet, find out the campaign, then the ad agency, contact them directly, and offer to cut them a cheaper deal to license the music yourself directly. (Your library contract probably prohibits this, but they’re worried about you finding a gray area.)
That’s not to say I agree with the practice of keeping it secret. In the majority of music libraries in which composers aren’t getting paid up front to write cues/songs, I think there has to be a mutual respect because both parties are dependent upon each other, and if a library company shows me disrespect, I don’t feel the need to work with them again. If I felt like a library company was being unfair to me in this way, I’d terminate the relationship.
I’ve actually had a phone call similar to this with at least 4 different library companies, and in each case, we’ve developed enough rapport to where they don’t mind telling me what the placement is for.
If all you want is a document that specifies writers’ and publishers’ splits, that’s a pretty simple deal. IMHO not worth having to go to a lawyer for. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.
I’ve been using DP8 for a good long while. I think it’s fantastic. The perfect balance between power and convenience. I find Pro Tools to be too simplistic and lacking some power features (especially MIDI). I find Logic to be overly complex and it’s hard to do even simple things quickly. DP is right in the middle and for that I love it.
I haven’t tried the brand new Logic Pro X. I know it’s a lot more simplified so hopefully that’s a step in the right direction. So many of its features were just there to catch up with the competition though that there’s nothing that makes me think I have to switch.
The only thing I really like about Logic is its huge suite of bundled instruments (even though not all of them are top quality). The new virtual drummer stuff doesn’t really excite me because within a couple of months, you’re going to hear it everywhere and then even untrained ears will start to go, yeah, that’s Logic. Just like people do with GarageBand Jam Packs today – they got way overused by amateurs and I actually have music supervisors telling me, please please don’t just send me stuff made from GarageBand Jam Packs.
I don’t have the background to promise this is the “right” answer but I do have a TV theme with a co-writer (50-50 split, one of us is BMI and the other is ASCAP) and the BMI member is being paid approx. 8x more than the ASCAP writer when the statements are compared side-by-side. And no, it wasn’t just a single statement anomaly – this theme has been playing for 2-3 years and cumulatively it is a huge discrepancy in money. We are investigating with ASCAP but they are slow to look into it.
I would caution this is only one experience and who knows if in other situations ASCAP might pay 8x more than BMI…but this experience does correlate with Art’s post above.