Production / Library Music - Rules Of Success

couple of you have asked how to be successful at creating library or production music now if I knew the answer that I'd be a very rich man but library music is ostensibly a numbers game and with any numbers game there's ways of improving your odds there are three pillars of music for media pillar one the Grand Duke of media music is synchronized music so you've done something that people want off you it's a number one hit or you've been nominated for a Mercury Music Prize number two number two is commissioned music the director or producer has no idea of what they want the right person for the job number three library or production music now this is where someone can't afford the first two options has a vague idea roughly of what they're looking for not entirely sure and conversely your composing music and have no idea how it's going to be applied basically the way it works is you write a bunch of music insists on albums and then it gets put under nose of directors and producers which point you should get a fee cost exhibited now the reason we use book libraries biblia Tech's is it's a place we can go to find specific titles we can search by kind of subject matter I want to find out about French wine or indeed because the choice available we can browse for something that takes our fancy but the advantage of a library over a bookshop is we don't have to buy the books we just borrow them whilst the end user that may appear to be a sophisticated kind of library type affair to us they paint more like one of these coloring sugar and a whole heap load of hoof but I'm being abstract the question is how to get ahead in library or production music as it's called in the States and why would I offer myself up as an authority well I've achieved a lot in my career but by far the greatest monetary reward I've ever received is for library music it's a numbers game so here's ten simple rules from me that I think will give you better odds by far the single most important decision to make because not all library companies are created equal and when you research this further you'll find that a few companies hold a huge dominance huge market share now there are a lot of younger companies springing up but these companies are in growth stage you have to understand from a business point of view what they're investing in is the IP what they're investing in is the market share but what they're not investing in is ways to make you guys money and I know what your first question will be now I'm a little bit out of touch but I believe the big companies are EMI Universal but also the amazing success of extreme and audio network needs to be looked at but frankly you have to write loads of the stuff now if you think you're gonna nurture a career as a theater composer whilst maybe secreting a single polished Ruby into the raspberry chews in the hope that they will find it you're sadly mistaken the way it works is you need to saturate the marketplace with your material so that editors find you when editors find your stuff and like your stuff then they will search for more of your stuff so it's not only about saturating the marketplace to be discovered it's also sating the needs of the new fans that you make within the editing fraternity and that's why carving out a living from library music is a full-time exercise you know you can't hedge your bets between bit of theater music bit of kind of live dance some games music and chucks and library music out there it doesn't work that way these are each way bets when they come in you'll earn less now what you need to do is bet on more horses to win and hopefully one of those wins will actually be a unicorn and when I say unicorn I mean a track that changes your life if you speak to successful library composers they all have their one unicorn that track that went global no there's no space for that here this is not your interesting jazz Odyssey third album and it's a mistake I made repeatedly with library music if you want to be creative go off and make some albums all by yourself this needs to have a broad appeal you'll be like you know you've got your Smarties in this trough you've got your Jelly Belly's you've got your raspberry sours and you're creating little mini burritos stuffed with foie gras with a couple of little pomegranate seeds on top it just simply isn't appropriate you know going back to the horse-racing analogy it's like not putting your money on horses to win putting them on a bunch of kangaroos fun to watch but it's a horse race one thing I have noticed however about production and library music is that I feel that the 8020 rule is applied quite a lot now this is a business philosophy that states that 80% of your objectives could be achieved in 20% of the time so for me library and production music often just doesn't sound like the stuff you hear on radio like the stuff you hear on films and TV I think you need to spend a little bit more than 20% my parents are both actors and I spent a large proportion of my childhood in voiceover studios and the thing I found most fascinating was when they had to select some library music and the engineer would basically get this record out whack on the platter and they get the stylus need to literally go punk punk punk punk punk punk until the client went hang on a minute go back to that one with the thing and that's what the hook is the thing that identifies your track and hooks them it doesn't have to be a melodic one you can just be a sound or concept it's quite interesting my most successful driver tracks all feature vocals but I made the real money off the instrumental versions but I think it was the vocals that hooked people in I did a track with the dial-up sound of the Internet you know whereas be something like that it's just a thing I think the current thinking is that you kind of stake the hook very very quickly and then you go down to a three-act structure your first subject your second subject and then a big climax with a little hooky epilogue at the end library production music is still a domain of media composers largely and I think that when we're not working to picture or to dialogue we tend to overcomplicate if you listen to the real deal on on the radio it's almost arrogantly simple and I think if you listen to my examples below my more successful library tracks they tend to be the thing and then a very simple backing but also within the structure of those tracks there's lots of space so the thing happens and then there's round the rumble Rumble underscore underscore and then we go back to the thing I think it's safe to say that most library production music has a shelf life and this is a question that's kind of down to you do you want to shorten that shelf life by hitting the zeitgeist but conversely also maybe creating a real burst of usage on that track and really hit the nail on the head certainly my most successful track was a kind of callous ripoff not on the particular tune but of a certain artists output and he was kind of Goldust for a couple years and we rode on the coattails of that if you listen to example a this is my third mostly trendy it's more kind of in the use of that type of music that was kind of bang on the zeitgeist for rom-coms made in manhattan sensible woman hitch that kind of thing and then that just kind of spirit went out of you know the film industry so the shelf life that trap is very short whereas the shelf life of example B is well it's music from no time it's like that music was never fashionable what even is it but it has a thing it has a hook you know the vocal saying is something that people clearly grab onto and then it has acres and acres and thousand pounds of fat underscore that kind of changes subtly so people can use it effectively and it is still being used to this day so you've backed your unicorn and she's come in but you only put 50 pence on her this is a key part of making a success lively music and it's difficult to have the look ahead to get this right because the rights issue is a bit of a kind of nuanced minefield basic rule is the more you take upfront the less you'll get at the other end so take as little as you can afford a good deal is 50% your publishing they'll usually take that and they can't take anymore by law in the UK and 50% mechanicals but there will be all sorts of kind of nuanced recoupment non recoupment deals giving you cash up front possibly reducing my unicorn was a hundred percent earned through mechanical royalties not through PRS welcome publishing royalties the other thing I would recommend is this is not the time to form a collaborative of say eight writers and do all of this stuff together the more you divide up the pie is ostensibly the less money you're putting on your unicorn on a technical note make sure thanks place you stem the out of your tracks this will give your tracks the best chance of being used on a variety of applications and to being used repeatedly on may be similar or connected to productions what identity is trying to not just loads of stems almost at the point of multi-tracks I also do alternative versions so recently to the library album which is very fairy tale ish and I did Slovak and Gallic versions of the different compositions the more you give them the more they have to work with I can't stress enough how crucial this is to a successful library traffic you need to give your end-user a modicum of indication of what your track is about what it contains what it can be applied to I know a legendary kind of library giant who told me that his biggest track by a country mile is called lo sabe drun if you look at the exhibits below Manhattan fairytale almost oxymoronic but it implies joyous playfulness combined with something that's likely to be urbane and modern pleasure zone will the zone bit for me implies that it's going to be slightly edgy we'll have a beat maybe and pleasure a degree of eroticism so cast away your ego cast away any artistic notions we're titling is concerned and just describe what it is or what you can use it for the final piece of the library puzzle is possibly the most crucial your track listing your tracks go into virtual albums editors like big libraries because there's lots of choice what they like is choice of albums not necessarily titles within it so if they're on to kind of track three or four as they pop through the different titles they'll probably think this album is really switch so as oats seventy percent of my income from library music is from track number ones 25% from track number twos 3% from track number fries then it tails off instantly into fractions percentage so it's crucial to get there as number one one of the ideas that I've had over the years we all understand the media it's Creek so this is your industry frontline with your library music your pop your prizes TV firm I always forget games and a lot of people just use they're kind of Hedgehog forces across the entire line now I believe the concept of blitzkrieg is to focus all of your forces just on one small part that line so you can burst through and encircle your foes and this is the way kind of lined up in my career so how his library worked out for me well this is my earnings landscape dollar up the x-axis years on the Y just from library music now I started writing library music in 97 and you'll see for the first three years my earnings were negligible and then suddenly they started coming in in 2001 and there was a huge spike in 2012 and currently earning roughly 1% of what I was six years ago most of these earnings were from me contributing to around 30 albums but there was this huge unicorn track that really took it to a different level the reason I focused on library music and dominated for a very short while is because to be honest I couldn't get arrested as a media composer when I joined the library Brigade I was the previous generation had been able to buy mansion houses in Hampstead our equivalent of the Hollywood Hills I kind of stretched to a small terraced house in East Dulwich maybe the equivalent to Culver City I put some seed funding into spitfyre audio and through library I met Rupert gregson-williams who introduced me to Harry from which my career began so literally owe everything to library music those figures Erna Belize days well to be frank I'm not quite sure I suspect like all areas of the industry it has become stratified but I maintain that if you have a laser focus if you aim to dominate a part of the business then it's likely you will succeed it's not about hedging your bets it's about betting on that unicorn you

Channel: Christian Henson Music

Views: 35,044

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Keywords: spitfire audio, christian henson, behind the scenes, orchestral programming, media composition, media composing, media composer, orchestral samples, orchestral sampling, behind the scenes in recording studios, recording studios, music programming, music programming techniques, library music, production music, library music careers, production music careers

Id: pIXSMMEb-zU

Length: 14min 13sec (853 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 12 2018