"Know the lingo. Be aware of what the standard deals are."

[Paulie]

"Know the lingo. Be aware of what the standard deals are."

This quote from an interview with Seth Littlefield resonated with me as a fledgling Taxi member. One of my biggest fears is that if I am fortunate enough to receive a negotiation call, I have no idea what a "standard deal" looks like. Musician unions have books I can go to and look up standard rates based on gig length, doubles, yadda yadda yadda. is there anything like that for library placements, tv cues, beds, etc? How do you know if the studio is giving you a fair deal or trying to lowball you knowing that there are plenty of other options out there? Is it just the Wild West, take what you can get?

[andygabrys]

basically, no. Its sort of the Wild West, and you take what you can get up to the point at which you feel its un-equitable.

there are no deals that are written up in a book someplace. In fact, being an AFM member, you are likely aware that composers are offered no protection under the union, whereas players, arrangers, orchestrators, music copyists, conductors etc. are.

Keep in mind I am not an attorney nor do I know everything about this business, but in my experience there are some generally accepted deals for this age (this continually evolves):

Direct to supervisor placements, or direct to agency placements you retain 100% ownership, copyright, all up front fees, plus all backend (writer and publishers shares). Usually this means you need a publishing company set uo to recover your publishers royalties unless you are with BMI which will pay you the publishers share under "excess writers clearance" with only a writers registration.

Some supervisor placements look at little more like a library situation, with the supervisor taking some portion of front end and back end payments. This is likely because the supervisor is making their own "library" of tracks.

With most library or publishers today, a 50/50% total split is very normal.

A) upfront fees (sync or master use licenses) - 50% goes to you the writer, and 50% stays with the publisher / library. Usually the money is paid to the publisher, and they may deduct "reasonable and normal expenses" or something similar, and pay you 50% of the remainder.

B) blanket licenses (which seem to be increasingly common) you are paid a pro-rata amount based on how many tracks you had included in the blanket pool vs. the total number of tracks in the blanket pool - which usually means its a pretty small amount as a lot of libraries are in the area of 20,000+ tracks.

C) There there is royalty backend paid to you directly by your PRO (like ASCAP, BMI, SESAC) - again a standard split is you retain 100% of the writers share (50% of total) and the publisher retains 100% of the publishers share (50% of total).

there is some variability with these numbers as well.

Some publishers might give you 25% of upfront payments. Occasionally some will offer more than 50%.
With backend - some publishers may give you 50% of the publishing (or some other figure) - usually this is a carrot o sign exclusively or to sign vocal songs.

There is also the question of "exclusive" vs. "non-exclusive" publishers:

A) Signing tracks non-exclusively - there is never a up front payment or royalty advance. There might be a contract length specified - maybe a year or 2,3 or 5 with the contract rolling over at then end of it if you haven't specifically cancelled it.

B) Signing tracks exclusively - again there is a contract period, might be 2 or 5 years, or in perpetuity:

1) standard 50-50% of some other situation similar - and no upfront payments. This usually allows you to participate in any sync / master use / blanket license fees.
2) a work-for-hire (WFH) situation where the publisher pays you a standard amount per track (these days seems like $75 - $150 is the range for instrumental works, and more than that for vocal tracks) and this represents a "Sync" buyout where you won't get any upfront money in the future and only get writers royalties. You also sign over the copyright.

There are pros and cons to signing exclusively and non-exclusively (a long discussion with many believing one or the other is better, and some playing the field and doing both):

non-exclusive means you can still pitch your track to direct to supervisor listings

exclusive publishers usually will exploit tracks on a world-wide basis using sub-publishers and this could lead to substantial uses in other countries where there are royalties paid for theatre performances of films (which don't get royalties in the US or Canada).

Things to look out for (keep in mind this is my own opinion - you have to make up your own mind):

Performance free licenses: increasing in popularity, at least one giant in the music library business has gone to this model and there are several channels which use this as well. Basically a composer gets some up front payment sort of equivalent to a blanket fee and that is all the earnings forever for that placement. So the PRO's are not involved.

Publishing splits: Some exclusive libraries market their music to end users with the perk of offering a publishing split - i.e. the production company that is using the music actually gets a kickback from the PRO's by owning some part or all of the publishing for the pieces they use. If you are giving away 100% of the publishing anyways, maybe you don't care, but in some cases the publishing disappears and the writers share might also be cut up so that you as composer get 50% or 75% of the writers share.

Its up to you.

One last thing: in most cases, publishers have agreements that are pretty much "fixed". They are usually not interested in negotiating any of the deal points - either you like it and sign it, or you politely turn them down.

It might be worthwhile to check out this seven part series with Matt Hirt and Michael Laskow discussing agreements among other things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FguwMMsDZA

Hope that helps - good luck!

[andygabrys]

I left out a major thing for me (if you live in areas where there are filmmakers / video producers and you are interested in the same it might be important to you as well):

if you are negotiating a creative fee for producing a film score or a custom TV score especially with an independent company:

Generally you are likely "low-budget" which could mean anything between free and some pay.

In these cases, I would negotiate to keep all copyright, writers and publishers royalties and negotiate some reasonable creative fee based on the number of minutes of score music you are producing. If you are working with a company that requires you to sign away the music in a WFH situation, you should try to retain the writers royalties, and hopefully get much more up front.

In general, to keep as many rights as you can, you are going to be issuing a non-exclusive, in perpetuity, all media license to the filmmaker. There also might be a period of exclusivity that you need to agree to. I have done several indie films where the music was locked up for 2 years, which in these cases was enough time for the films to go through the festival circuit.

How much you give away and how much you get depends on budget and track record, and what the projected distribution of the film is going to be.

If you are negotiating a festival only license it might be worthwhile to do a google search on production music rate cards and see how much some libraries are charging for "non-commercial festival licenses" - cause they sure aren't giving them away for free, and it helps to know what you are leaving on the table if you give somebody a piece for cheap or free.

If indie film work is your bag - consult the book http://www.amazon.com/Emerging-Film-Com ... 930&sr=8-1 "the emerging film composer" which has a lot of good info as to how to determine your composing fees, and different kinds of situations you might encounter.

[Kolstad]

Good resources I've found are Robin Frederick's "Shortcuts" books and this one to get deeper into the business side in easy lingua (as easy as it gets, though ) http://www.amazon.com/The-Musicians-Gui ... G3ECWXSV1M and http://robinfrederick.com/

I'll also pick up that book you linked to, Andy. Looks very interesting!

[Paulie]

Holy cow Andy... THANKS for,taking the time to lay all of that out for me. I really appreciate it.

[Joseph]

whoah...

[sansharbour]

Great post

Andy thanks again for posting a huge amount of helpful information on this topic of what a music library might offer.

I too was wondering about what type of contacts may be offered

This post came along at the right time.

Best
Don