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Eggs & Baskets

Posted: Thu Aug 17, 2017 3:50 am
by cosmicdolphin
Greetings folks

So 20 months into this Taxi ride with my friend & co-writer ...having produced in the region of 120 cues there are now 4 Libraries happy to take music directly from us. ( Some got in touch via Taxi - some we found outside of Taxi )

None of them pay up front for anything so that's still a goal for us to aim for. 2 are Exclusive and 2 are Non-Exclusive and one of each is pretty established with the other 2 being fairly new but with seemingly good contacts and placements by the people behind them.

My question to those of you who have built up multiple outlets for your music how do you decide what goes where? Do you pretty much send even numbers of cues to each of them ? If they each have 30 of our tunes is that a good sample size to 'see how it goes' ..and how long does it take to know whether the Library will be a good earner for us ?

How many Libraries is "enough" ? Do you keep plugging away trying to get into new ones or do you get to a certain point and say "no more "

Mark

Re: Eggs & Baskets

Posted: Thu Aug 17, 2017 5:53 am
by davekropf
This is a great question, and one I'm interested in hearing others' responses!

Re: Eggs & Baskets

Posted: Thu Aug 17, 2017 10:03 am
by hummingbird
Congrats on your success to date. At this point it's a numbers game and the more cues you have signed the better. That means looking for other reputable libraries as well as feeding those you already have on tap. IMHO.

Re: Eggs & Baskets

Posted: Thu Aug 17, 2017 2:06 pm
by andygabrys
hummingbird wrote:Congrats on your success to date. At this point it's a numbers game and the more cues you have signed the better. That means looking for other reputable libraries as well as feeding those you already have on tap. IMHO.
The hard news is:

It might take several years to figure out which ones really are a good fit for you. Domestic royalty turnaround is 9 months in general. If you have have a foreign PRO like PRS, add another 6-9 months.

Things like Tunesat can help. Getting an email from the publisher letting you know of an up front fee is another good way.

If the fit is really good - the absolutely its great numbers of high quality cues.

Re: Eggs & Baskets

Posted: Fri Aug 18, 2017 1:38 pm
by cosmicdolphin
andygabrys wrote:
hummingbird wrote:Congrats on your success to date. At this point it's a numbers game and the more cues you have signed the better. That means looking for other reputable libraries as well as feeding those you already have on tap. IMHO.
The hard news is:

It might take several years to figure out which ones really are a good fit for you. Domestic royalty turnaround is 9 months in general. If you have have a foreign PRO like PRS, add another 6-9 months.

Things like Tunesat can help. Getting an email from the publisher letting you know of an up front fee is another good way.

If the fit is really good - the absolutely its great numbers of high quality cues.
Years ! Aww man..took me about 6 months to figure the RF Libraries were junk :roll:

Re: Eggs & Baskets

Posted: Sat Aug 19, 2017 9:25 am
by TerrellBurt
I usually go by rejections. Very optimistic huh? lol. What I mean is, if I make a song with a specific library in mind and then submit it to them but they end up rejecting it (this happens quite often), I'll usually feed the pipeline and submit it to a different library with the hopes that they'll sign it instead.

If the song is rejected by an exclusive library, then I'll submit it to a non-exclusive library or vice versa. And that's not to mention the group of songs that haven't been signed anywhere because they've been rejected by all of my contacts.

At the end of the day, it's all a risk you take. Choose the strategy that best fits your situation.

Re: Eggs & Baskets

Posted: Sat Aug 19, 2017 9:45 am
by LOCK88
TerrellBurt wrote:I usually go by rejections. Very optimistic huh? lol. What I mean is, if I make a song with a specific library in mind and then submit it to them but they end up rejecting it (this happens quite often), I'll usually feed the pipeline and submit it to a different library with the hopes that they'll sign it instead.

If the song is rejected by an exclusive library, then I'll submit it to a non-exclusive library or vice versa. And that's not to mention the group of songs that haven't been signed anywhere because they've rejected by all of my contacts.

At the end of the day, it's all a risk you take. Choose the strategy that best fits your situation.
Great Advice, thank you! I will definitely remember this going forward.

Re: Eggs & Baskets

Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2017 9:57 am
by VanderBoegh
Hey Mark, I'll share a little bit of my business model and experience in hopes that it helps.

Like Andy said, you won't really get a feel for which libraries are good income-generators for 1-2 years after signing a good number of cues with them. Personally, I like to really load up libraries so I can make sure that my tracks aren't getting buried amongst the other tracks. Having 1-10 cues in a library is a pretty small amount (especially for big libraries that have hundreds of thousands of tracks), and therefore will get easily buried. Like anything, it's all about the numbers.... So I try to get at least 50 tracks in each library I write for. Now, I must say that this hasn't happened for all of the libraries I'm in.... in some cases I do only have a very small handful. But in MOST cases this is the way I operate.

By having 50+ tracks in a library, you can better gauge if that company is worth your time and energy. If after 2 years they haven't made you any money and you have a sizable amount of music in their catalog, I usually consider them a dead-end and cut them out of my supply chain.

The above strategy, however, is very painful if you do it with exclusive companies. Signing 50+ tracks to an exclusive deal which you later find out to be a total dud is heartbreaking, maddening, and frustrating. So, for exclusive libraries I'll aim for 20 or so tracks. But with most of my non-ex deals, I'll ship out 50 tracks right away just to get things rolling.

As for the number of companies you should work for, the sky is the limit. I'm of the belief that you can never have enough libraries pitching your music. I'm at 24 (I think) right now, and would like to grow that number to 30 within the next year.

One thing for you to note at this point in your journey is that this is a very long evaluation process. The speed of cue sheets getting sent to your PRO, along with the delay of getting your royalties, make it so you can't really evaluate the success of your music and your libraries until you've gotten a few more years under your belt. I wish it were different, but that's the nature of the beast.

And though you didn't ask about this, there's the whole "exclusive vs. non-exclusive" debate which has been hashed out many times in these forums, and is a whole different animal.

Hope that helps.

~~Matt

Re: Eggs & Baskets

Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2017 12:27 pm
by cosmicdolphin
VanderBoegh wrote:Hey Mark, I'll share a little bit of my business model and experience in hopes that it helps.
Thanks for this info Matt, was just the type of info I was looking for. :D

24 LIbraries..wow...that's a lot ! :o ..does this make it difficult with Taxi Listings ? Not knowing whether or not you are pitching to someone you already have a working relationship with? Does this include the one's you've ditched or is that active ones ? Have you ever had any conflicts where more than one non-ex is pushing the same track to the same music supervisor, or is that not anything to be concerned about.

We are currently working towards getting 50 into each non-ex ..we around around 30 at the moment so that's something to aim for...and we just signed 10 to an Exclusive with another 10 ready to go once I've completed the alt mixes so maybe sticking at that for a while would be a good idea...We also each have a free Tunesat which covers us for monitoring everything so far.

Yeah I delved into the whole Exclusive Vs Non-Exclusive and figured the best approach is a diverse portfolio 8-)

Mark

Re: Eggs & Baskets

Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2017 10:06 am
by eeoo
Just to throw a wrench in the proceedings, one of my most productive publishers only has 6 of my cues. They do an upfront buyout so they are confident that what they sign will get used but still, for only having 6 of my cues they are ridiculously productive.

EO