TAXI.com

Library Blanket Licences....Good for the writers?

mmm....seems to me on average writers will get less.

How is that blanket fee split?

Thoughts

Blanket licensing has been around forever. For many high volume music users it's really the only way to go. Imagine a high volume content producer like NBC news having to needledrop license a hundred or more individual cues every day...the administrative overhead would be ridiculous for both the client AND the library.

So a library has a choice of either offering blankets to such users, or not doing business with them.

How it's split among the writers varies. Some libraries don't share blanket license fees, others share them on a pro rata basis either per cue or second.

Independent of this, blanket agreements can prove very lucrative for a writer on the backend side, since a typical high volume content producer may have many hours of programming airing every week, and some of them may be almost wall to wall library music.
Whereas a typical needle drop client like a production company producing a primetime drama series may only produce 26 episodes of programming per year, with perhaps an average of 4-5 slots of library music being used per episode (the rest of the music is written by the show's composer).

So the one client has perhaps 100 slots available per year for potentially royalty generating placements. The other may have as many as a thousand per week.
This sheer volume both makes the blanket necessary and ultimately makes it worth to the library and individual writer; the greatly increased royalties can easily make up for the lack of upfront needledrop license fees.

Wrap me in a blanket!!

Matto
Thanks for the info. I didn't realize blankets go back so long; I thought maybe they were more a product of cost cutting and the drop in what composers make in the current market.

Question... I noticed on my ASCAP statements that placements made by blanket deals are acutally indicated as "blanket" on the statements. Does a lower rate get paid by the PRO for those? Or is it just information?

Thanks again... And mazz.... be happy to wrap you in a blanket next time I see you.

Casey

I think the rate is derived from the usage, rather than the type of license, but I'm far from expert in this area.

Casey H wrote:Matto
Thanks for the info. I didn't realize blankets go back so long; I thought maybe they were more a product of cost cutting and the drop in what composers make in the current market.

No it has nothing to do with cost cutting or the recent flooding of the market, it's just a more feasible way of doing business with high volume music users. I would guess that the large, venerable instrumental libraries that have been around for decades do a majority of their business via blankets and have done so for a long time.

Question... I noticed on my ASCAP statements that placements made by blanket deals are acutally indicated as "blanket" on the statements. Does a lower rate get paid by the PRO for those? Or is it just information?

You are confusing two entirely different "blankets". When the term shows up on your PRO royalty statement it denotes TV stations which are licensed by the PRO on an annual blanket basis. Local broadcast stations pay ASCAP/BMI either an annual blanket license fee to cover the music on all the programming they air, or they pay on a program by program basis. The PRO statement will usually indicate which is which. In BMI's case the stations are separated into TV Local BL and TV Local PP so it's very obvious. It is something that mostly applies to syndicated broadcast programs, not cable or programming produced/owned by the major networks.

This "blanket" has nothing whatsoever to do with how a library may have licensed your music to a program's producer, ASCAP/BMI have no knowledge of this since they are being paid by the broadcaster, and whether a piece of music is licensed via needle drop, blanket, buyout or even gratis use has no effect on the PRO royalty rate.

Matto, thank you for your reply.

My question came about after viewing a vid on mazz' A glance into the world of music libraries, where she said it would cost less for the broadcaster.
I am sure there are many different blanket agreements with pros and cons.

Its seems for blankets the admin for the broadcaster is cut and for the publisher. Thats fine and makes sense

.....re cost..
I wonder if the blanket agreement is priced so it is only marginally cheaper in fees but avoids the admin or does it heavily discount our work selling it in bulk.

I have no problem with blankets if they are priced fairly and split the fee but if they are selling music on the cheap and not sharing the blanket fee then it seems that the library owner gets their future secured by selling the work of others on the cheap.

So.... on what basis does the publisher not share that blanket fee pro rata?

I think that in a great majority of cases (except super-big stuff), the real money is in the back end anyway. This is especially true for BG instrumentals. I know someone who has music on Idol Rewind through a solid library (and Taxi client) of this type and gets very hefty PRO checks every quarter. And I have a number of placements through this method-- the credit list on my bio gets longer and longer which opens other doors and I do get PRO money. A placement on a network show, for example, which gets re-broadcast on a regular basis can be a nice money-maker.

And... No one has to work ONLY with this type of library. Putting some tracks in one like this and others in libraries with different business models is a good thing anyway.

I'll let matto answer your actual question, BTW...

Casey

jdhogg wrote:My question came about after viewing a vid on mazz' A glance into the world of music libraries, where she said it would cost less for the broadcaster.
I am sure there are many different blanket agreements with pros and cons.

If I recall she calls it a "win-win" in the video because it's cheaper for the network and gets their music used all the time. She could've called a win-win-win since of course the composers also benefit if their music is being used all the time.

.....re cost..
I wonder if the blanket agreement is priced so it is only marginally cheaper in fees but avoids the admin or does it heavily discount our work selling it in bulk.

Please remember that in this type of blanket agreement they are not "selling" the music, they are licensing it out for a given period of time so it generates performance royalties it would otherwise not generate.

I have no problem with blankets if they are priced fairly and split the fee but if they are selling music on the cheap and not sharing the blanket fee then it seems that the library owner gets their future secured by selling the work of others on the cheap.

The libraries that know what they are doing are proud of their catalog and conscious of its value and would not be selling it "on the cheap". However they will balance the various types of income against one another and may be willing to e.g. give some on the front end if it means better back end. And of course they won't be able to escape the realities of the market.

So.... on what basis does the publisher not share that blanket fee pro rata?

1- It's a real time suck to do the accounting. If you have a blanket that involves, say, 10'000 tracks written by 500 different writers then preparing a statement for each of them every quarter takes a lot of time. Some libraries will be of the opinion that it serves them and their writers better if they spend that time doing more marketing and getting more clients. The writer might lose out on a few hundred bucks a year in blanket share but gain a few thousand in performance royalties as the library keeps expanding its clientele and generating more and more plays.

2- The cost of writing and producing great broadcast quality music has steadily decreased over the last 20 years. The cost of marketing that music properly has increased considerably during the same period (yes you can slap the music on a website with a search engine and call that "marketing" but that's quite obviously not what people like Marsha Sill (or really any library that you would want to be in) do. Additionally producing a piece of music is a more contained and finite expense, but marketing that same piece is an ongoing expense. This is why some libraries feel it's fair if they take a larger share of the front end and e.g. don't split the blanket license fees.

3- Composers have flooded the market with re-titled music so a library doesn't HAVE to share the blanket and can still build their catalog...this is where IMHO ignorance and greed on our part has had a negative impact on the value of our work.

Note that I'm not advocating not sharing the blanket license fees I'm just explaining the reasoning a library may use. I would say that for me personally it wouldn't by itself be a "deal breaker", I would consider a number of other factors as well.

In the end the old adage that "50% of nothing is still nothing" applies. Or a modified version of it, where, say, a 35% total share to the writer with one library may work out to far more on a song by song basis than a 75% share with another library. And if the one library does so much better with your music than the other, then capitalism would dictate that the former may feel well justified to collect 65% of the total revenue particularly since their expenses are probably considerably higher as well.

Remember it's the music business. We musicians tend to think we are very special because we can create this amazing thing called music, and without us the music business wouldn't exist. Which is true of course, but without the business people marketing our music for us, most of us would probably never make enough from it to live on.

I think the truth is the musicians need the business people and vice versa. Who needs whom more depends on circumstances and the individuals and businesses involved.
In the end I think we have the much better job and that in itself is a blessing. That's not to say we shouldn't stand up for our rights and demand our fair share, but we shouldn't live in paranoia that everybody is out to rip us of and take unfair advantage of our incredible talents either...

Good stuff here gents. Nice thread.
B