| [The Motion Sick] A Quick Guide to Indie Music Licensing Web Sites
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[Oct. 10th, 2008|04:36 pm] |
We use a variety of avenues in dealing with licensing songs. We're
working on setting up an interface on our own web site. Until then,
we work with Taxi,
Broadjam,
Youlicense,
Pump Audio,
Sonicbids (though Sonicbids has
very little publishing focus), and a handful of small publishers who've
licensed our work for specific placements or future general use (I won't
review those publishers here). I want to give you all a quick
breakdown in case you're curious about how these work.
A lot of people have requested feedback on how
the Taxi process
worked, so we've started a blog showing all of our experiences submitting
songs to Taxi. Thus far, for anyone curious, we've had a couple of
deals via their calls including a recent radio commercial (for
vitamins). These deals have approximately led to us breaking even
using Taxi and we hope that we'll actually see some positive cash flow in
the future, but it looks quite promising. Taxi is the most
interesting of the bunch because of the feedback they provide. The
blog is here:
http://themotionsicktaxi.blogspot.com/
For Taxi, you pay an annual fee of about $300 and then $5 for each
submission you make (so it can add up quickly). They send biweekly
emails with calls for songs. Calls might be seeking bands, artists,
songs, composers, lyrics, etc. You then submit to these
calls. Taxi's A&R team reviews your song and decides whether it
fits the call. If they like it, they "forward" it on to
the person that sent in the call. If not, they
"return" it and tell you why it didn't meet the needs.
Although people complain that this means your music gets disqualified
even though you've paid $5 (I.e., it never reaches the ears of the person
who wanted it), I think this system actually encourages people to make
calls through Taxi because they know it will be pre-filtered. If
Taxi just sent everything along, what would be the benefit of a call
through Taxi over just accepting unsolicited submissions? Still,
people complain about this. Taxi takes no percentage of any
deals you make.
We've also licensed several songs via
Broadjam, including the inclusion of
"30 Lives" in Dance Dance Revolution, so thus far, that has
been a positive cash flow outcome. Broadjam is essentially
identical in cost model to Taxi (the annual rate is cheaper - they have
different packages, but I pay $100 a year). Broadjam doesn't have
the same A&R process. They allow users to rate and compare
songs using some kind of silly system and then they deliver the whole lot
to whoever made the call, but the songs are ranked as per the user
ratings. So, the caller can listen to as much or as little of the
pool as they desire. Broadjam is perhaps easier and perhaps
easier to make a mistake with. You agree to some aspects of
contracts just by submitting songs via Broadjam, but I don't think they
are intending to be too deceptive. I think the intention is to make
it easy for the callers to use the stuff quickly.
Youlicense is pretty new as far as I
can tell. I joined just for kicks. They have hardly any
opportunities listed, but they serve as an easy access point for people
looking to license music. You can elect to prelicense stuff at
fixed rates (which I did not do) or have someone who finds you on there
make an offer to you. For no cost, you can upload a small number of
songs and allow them to make a 9% commission off of any licenses.
For $30 for 6 months, you can offer more songs and they take no
commission. I've just joined pretty recently and no offers via them
yet.
Pump Audio is the music branch of
Getty Images. It's free to use. They have premade
non-exclusive licenses. Once you give them stuff, they can pretty
much license it for anything non-exclusive and they take half of the
earnings. The thing that makes them worthwhile is that I expect
that many people will go to them for content. I wouldn't be
surprised if they become the largest licensing house, but again, I think
Getty just bought up Pump recently, so it's all just rolling out.
They have an "audition" process and then a song-based review
process after to decide what does get included. I am happy to say
that we passed the audition and that all of our songs that I've submitted
thus far have been selected for inclusion. There is no submission
or calling process here. People go to their site or use their
standalone systems to find music for things they need and then they just
pay the predetermined licensing costs. Inflexible, but I
think their volume of business makes up for it.
Sonicbids isn't really for music licensing most of the time, but
sometimes they have calls for songs for licenses. I wouldn't really
even include them here, but people always ignorantly compare them with
Taxi, so I'll throw them on the list here. You pay an annual fee to
be part of Sonicbids (I believe $50 for the package we have) and then an
amount for submitting chosen by the promoter. The thing that makes
me wary here is that the people making calls for submissions actually
make money off the submissions, so it encourages them to make frivolous
calls and encourage oversubmission. Callers receive all of the
submissions, no quality control, no ranking, etc. Anyway, we
basically use Sonicbids for submitting to conferences and things like
that where I (at least somewhat) trust the reputation of the promoter and
the cost replaces the application cost that would be paid submitting via
mail or any other system. For this, thumbs up! For music licensing,
eh.
In away, it's kind of sad that indie musicians have to pay to get
music in front of people who might use it for something tied to $$, but I
think it's realistically a fact of life. Taxi sends out regular
newsletters and one of the topics they cover is a question about just
that. Why should I pay Taxi when I could just do a lot of legwork
and get the same stuff for free. Their argument, a good one I
think, is that you can, but it would take up all of your time, so you pay
$300 a year to give yourself time to make music.
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