Here’s another music licensing update for you. These results are a culmination of library and direct connections I’ve come in contact with through my run with a music licensing course.
Which licensing course? The 90 Day Music Licensing Challenge
Before continuing with this post, I strongly recommend that you get familiar with The Music Licensing Case Study or at least bookmark it. What started out as a simple case study, has become a licensing resource for most and I know you’ll benefit greatly from it.
Without further ado, here are my licensing activities from January 2014 until May 2014.
Placements From Music Licensing Companies
January 2014 – Probably one of the most annoying months thus far. 1.05.14, I saw a pending transaction in my Paypal for the amount of $500.00. A few days later the transaction fails.
1.17.14 I get another pending payment transaction for the same amount and again, within a few days it dropped.
Tried contacting the email connected with the sender, no response. Contacted Paypal, they were only able to give me the main company’s name, still no luck with a response.
On the plus side of things, I did make around $200.00 from other libraries.
February 2014 – $237.13 This is the result of sales coming from 7 or 8 royalty-free music libraries. The good thing is, there’s some money going into the PayPal account.
The bad thing is, I have no idea who the clients are which kills my chances of follow-up and possibly landing future placements with the client(s).
March 2014 – One library, 4 music cues, $53.42 after splits and fees. Not an exciting month, but it’s something. I’m sure some will look at libraries as a waste of time, but keep in mind, this all adds up.
The more music you have in libraries, the greater you increase your chances.
April 2014 – No commissions this month. Why is this? There’s no way of knowing for sure, but here are my theories.
- I might not have what the clients are looking for
- Decrease in traffic to the music library?
I believe this may have something to do with a huge amount of servers shutting down for 48 – 72 hours. Justhost, BlueHost, and HostGator are all under the same umbrella and when one has issues, they all do.
If you follow my Twitter you may have noticed me complaining alongside other users. I’m sure some of you are thinking okay your site was down for a little bit so what.
What you fail to realize is a lot of people make a full-time income online. Everything from the CS to the delivery is online. So for stuff to be down for 24 hours, even 5 hours, that’s a lot of money missed!
Then it hit me, how many libraries are using this guy’s as hosts and how much traffic have they lost due to the outage?
No site access = no licenses = no money for us music creators.
May 2014 – Things are picking up a little bit. In total, I made $182.96 after splits and PayPal fees. There we also more pending transactions which felt déjà vu like, but they are from a company I recognize and have been paid from before.
Total amount pending = $350 ← possibly not royalty free
Placements From Direct Connections
Direction connections meaning; music supervisors, devs, small library owners, etc.
January 2014 – I spent most of this month conducting meetings, trying to tie up loose ends and get the ball moving on some of these video game/sound projects.
For the synthesis project, the negotiation was for $800 with 25% of that being upfront… My original deadline was March but later pushed to May.
Right now, we’re arranging the time for quality assurance which is another way of saying quality-control. Everything should be wrapped up in June.
As far as the video game project… I did collect my down payment and was able to get my hands on a beta version of the game, but I had a lot of problems getting it to work.
It required me to root my android device. I’ve never rooted anything before and didn’t want to take any chances, so I settled for in-game video footage.
Total = upfront $475.00 (both projects)
February/March 2014 – Work, revisions, re-negotiations, and brainstorming. I try to get an in-depth idea of what my clients are trying to do as a whole, even if it’s outside of my scope or the project at hand.
As a result, I’m being offered an audio editing gig that’s contingent on the finalization of my current gaming project.
Total = 0.00
April/May 2014 – Two words Project overload!
In business, they’ll be times when things move slow. You’ll feel as if you’re not progressing and then out of nowhere WHAM, everything hits you at once.
In a nutshell, May was the month of outsourcing. I’ll dive deeper into this before the end of the month, but before that, get familiar with a post titled music libraries are biased.
Now, If you’ve been following this case study this post is not new, but it’s the prerequisite for what’s to come, so read it again :).
Closing Comments
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