Royalty-Free services... thinking of taking the plunge

[waveheavy]

Uh, this all sounds confusing.

Per MLR, 'Performance Free' is the model where there's no sync fee paid, no back-end, only a single up-front fee paid. These are not... the traditional royalty free (RF) libraries which a good majority of them do... file cue sheets with PRO's and you get your writer's share and the back-end.

Some RF libraries offer 'exclusive' and 'semi-exclusive' deals, file with your PRO, etc. It's apparently an ever-changing model, so RF can't be used to generalize that "Performance Free" model when speaking of RF libraries.

MLR also said, that in the RF world, you live or die based on metadata / key-wording.

So it appears that one should do some research of the RF library before submitting, to see what kind of business models they offer, and stay away from those that offer the "Performance Free" model.

[VanderBoegh]

Wow, I was surprised to see this thread pop back up again, as it's been nearly 2 years since I wrote the initial post.

But since some might find this interesting... I never went down the royalty-free path after all. I don't have a single track available on any RF sites. So, at some point after writing that initial post, I must have either decided against it, or forgotten all about it, lol.

~~Matt

[waveheavy]

Wow, I was surprised to see this thread pop back up again, as it's been nearly 2 years since I wrote the initial post.

But since some might find this interesting... I never went down the royalty-free path after all. I don't have a single track available on any RF sites. So, at some point after writing that initial post, I must have either decided against it, or forgotten all about it, lol.

~~Matt

Good to know you haven't missed the RF ones.

[SteveBaruah]

Thanks for the insight, Matt.
I've just had 5 cues accepted on Pond5, I'll see how it goes but I'm not expecting much.


KR
Steve

[cosmicdolphin]

I put about 40 track on AudioSparx, so far in 9 months or so they have almost netted me $1 in streams and zero sales.

It took a great deal of time to upload and tag them all, I probably could have written another 10 Taxi submissions instead...also you can't remove them so I can't use them for anything Exclusive now.

I think it was probably a good move 5yrs ago but it's totally oversaturated now.

[SteveBaruah]

HI Cosmicdolphin,

I think you're right, I put 5 tracks on Pond5 and the pages haven't even been viewed, let alone sales.


KR
Steve