EP5 - What You Need to License Your Music
If there is one thing that can put you over the top when trying to license your music to TV & film, it's earning the trust of music supervisors.
I talk about the good and not so good ways of doing that.
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- If you want more tips and ideas on how to get your music into tv and film:
https://syncsongwriter.com - For my free cheatsheet that shows you how to connect with the right people in licensing:
https://syncsongwriter.com/guide - To join the Art Of The Song Pitch - a proven step-by-step process that shows you exactly how to license your music to TV & film successfully in precise detail, where we personally introduce you to top music supervisors:
https://artofthesongpitch.com
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Hey, it's Chris. I hope you're doing great and I have a quick question for you.
Do you trust me?
Weird question… I'm kicking off something here.
So, as you know, I like to use analogies and metaphors, but it's actually a very close to home question for me. You know, I put a lot of effort and energy and time and money and all of this stuff into helping indie musicians get their music into TV and film. I've been doing it for a very long time and I've got a track record to prove it.
You might be watching this and you don't know who I am. You might be very new to our community. Be like, “Why should I trust you, Chris?”
So it's not really about me. That's not why I asked the question, although I am curious.
The reason I asked it was to point out something that is so critical to everything that we do as people in this modern world.
We're bombarded with ads with people trying to convince us how to think, what opinions to have, what to buy, what lifestyle we should be we doing - getting advice from people.
It all comes down to who you trust.
Where are you gonna get your cell phone plan? What restaurant are you going to eat at? We go to things like Yelp and we go to things like Google Reviews. We try to compile this data set that will give us this picture of what that entity is that we're gonna interact with. And it all comes down to trying to figure out whether we trust them or not.
And the reason this really applies to you is because the number one thing in the music licensing industry, even if you've taken courses and you know what to do, you've got metadata in all your files and you've done everything by the book, you know, dotted your eyes, crossed your Ts. You're not going anywhere if you can't earn the trust of music supervisors.
Now you might say, “Chris, I'm in a music library. I'm in an agency and they're doing all this for me.”
Exactly, so the reason that you're in there is because they have trusted connections with the music supervisors. The only problem is you're a needle on the haystack because you're in there with a bunch of other artists and songs and so on.
Most musicians I talk to who are in agencies and libraries are not getting sync placements. So I'm just saying, the odds are stacked against you when you're doing that sort of thing.
But then, how do you earn the trust of music supervisors if you don't do that?
Well, you do it on the long road like I did. You basically move somewhere where there's a bunch of music supervisors. You go to a bunch of events and over the years you develop these relationships and gradually you move up the chain.
Or you can go through someone like myself. Which is what I've been doing - introducing indie songwriter to top music supervisors and that's how Sync Songwriter gets the results that we do with all the sync placements we get.
But ultimately in the end you need to know the number one thing that you've gotta work on and figure out a path to is getting the trust of music supervisors.
Without that, just like you, they're not going to answer that call that they don't recognize. They're gonna look at an ad where they’ve never heard the name before. And even if you're the most trustworthy, hardest working, honest musician, you're just simply not gonna be able to get that kind of attention from them without getting the trust of the music supervisors.
Leave me a comment below here. I read every single one. I respond to them all.
Let me know what your issue has been in the past with either people trying to get your trust that turned out maybe to be a scam, or I'm really interested in, what do you think about what I'm saying. Do you think that you need to earn the trust of music supervisors? And how are you gonna go about doing that? What is your strategy? How are you gonna push forward in the coming year to figure out what is gonna happen with my music? How am I gonna make that happen on a proactive level and not just sort of float out there producing music, uploading it, and hoping for the best? Hoping never works. It's like being in a life raft, hoping to be rescued. Hope is amazing. It can tide you through. In music licensing, it doesn't work at all. You have to have a strategy and be proactive about it and hopefully have a great roadmap to exactly where you want to get to.
Alright, talk to you soon.