The Six Figure Musician - Earning A Great Living Through Music Licensing With Cathy Heller

hi I'm Dez Asante from the techmuze podcast welcome back to episode actually I'm not entirely sure which episode this is going to be I'm believing it 66 hopefully that doesn't change if it does I'll put notes in the in the in the show notes there and today we got the we got the pleasure of chatting with Cathy Heller who is a musician a singer-songwriter and who makes most of her living from what I understand in the licensing arena which is something I'm very very curious about Cathy how you doing today I'm doing excellent and you're such a sweet positive force I watched you a few year video and I was like oh I'd love to chat with him Oh perfect having me on I appreciate you taking the time I like having people on that are that have knowledge in areas that are relevant to what we talk about here at techmuze but are not necessarily things that I'm an expert in which is beautiful thing about being able to connect with people all around the world for those of you for those of my listeners who are not familiar with you just tell us a little bit about yourself what's your story what are you up to right now in your career okay yeah sure hey thanks everybody likes to talk about themselves right thanks for asking sacrum I got to LA when I was 24 I'm 36 now and I came out here like everybody else to be a rock star you know I didn't really know there was another way to make a full-time living at music and so I came out here to to pursue the dream of getting a record deal and um while I was in the midst of that I was getting a lot of feedback that my songs worked really well for TV shows and films and commercials and some of those stuff came my way and I started getting songs of mine on TV and I eventually started to realize that this was a place I wanted to focus most most of if not all of my creative energy and so in 2008 I started full-time working on licensing music and thinking about every single solitary way that I could be the best at it not only creatively but also from a business standpoint and that's what I do I license my music my music has been in commercials like McDonald's and Walmart and Kellogg's and Hasbro and tons of TV shows like Pretty Little Liars and Criminal Minds and promos for the office and NBC and I'm so so grateful and I think it's pretty inspiring to people listening that you've never heard of me and yet I make a really nice living doing music and so it's nice to be reminded that you can there's something there's definitely something between me and Katy Perry you know there's definitely something where you can do music and you can make not just a little bit of money but a lot of money you can make six figures you can make way upwards of six figures a year after year doing things that you love and there's a way to figure out the best way to go about that so I now not only license my own music which I've been doing for a while but three years ago I started a company licensing other artists music as well since I had the relationships I figured why not leverage that to help other people and I also teach classes on how to make sure that you're putting your best foot forward in terms of your writing and understanding what the audience wants whether you're pitching the film you're pushing of commercials you're Pacino trailers and so we work from a creative perspective and I teach online I also teach in person in LA at two different theaters and we bring in music supervisors from DreamWorks and Fox and NBC as well as from ad agencies and it's super fun and I'm also a mom and I have two kids and I just try to juggle it all and and I love talking about this so thanks for thanks for letting me on oh my pleasure in fact there's a number of things you mentioned there that I want to dig into because I'm really quite curious but let's let's wind it back a notch just to get the story started what's your background as far as being a musician is concerned obviously you're a songwriter or else you wouldn't be licensing songs but what about you your musicianship your you you play instruments when did that all get started yes so you're probably of run circles around me as a musician um you know and that's another thing is it goes to show that if you're very resourceful and you know how to find the best people to put around yourself and you focus on what you're really excellent at there's really nothing you can't do right don't have to be a wizard at everything so my musician story is my mom is a piano teacher and so I grew up with a piano teacher in my house and so I took piano lessons but I was playing you know the piano since I was tiny because that's what was going on in my living room every day after school was kids taking lessons but piano was not a place where I initially I was good at it because I I guess I had like a natural ability to connect to the music but I didn't like find my wings there I wasn't taught chords I was like reading music and doing classical music and even though I kind of enjoyed certain pieces I played I didn't find that as a bridge to becoming a songwriter um at least in the most like obvious way um but the music was there and I did a lot of stuff after school like taking voice lessons and also doing musical theater and then I did summer stock theater as a teenager and that was really enjoyable and I thought I guess for a while that I was going to be doing like musicals and grow up in like audition for Broadway shows and then I realized when I got to college that um I wanted to write my own songs I didn't want to sing other people's words because I wanted so much to communicate certain things to people and I didn't want to wait for the right script to come along to do that and so I started writing songs at like I mean I was writing when I was little but they weren't songs that I you know was showing to anybody except for my family and then when I was in my early 20s I thought maybe I could write songs and so I would sit down first with a lyric and then I would start to sing it and then I would go to a guitar or piano and again wasn't like so versed in the chords so I would just try to figure out like what what I just said okay and then I would go over to a producer and I would say here's my lyrics and here's my melody and the producer would say alright well how about this as an arrangement and I would say cool we kind of work on it together um and that's been my that's been my process and I've just kind of honed you know getting good at what I'm good at honing writing lyrics honing writing melody and then really figuring out who are the best producers for me to work with and trying to bring a lot of value to them so that they want to work with me right that makes sense so so you've really operated on a real from a real collaborative perspective which i think is very very cool and I think it's something that that you know listeners should take note because as you've pointed out you don't have to be a master of all of the different aspects that that surround not just music creation but music production as well I was going to ask you a little bit about that I was on your website earlier having to listen to some of the tracks and not only are they well written songs of course but they're well produced as well so you must have you know you must have a team of reliable people with expertise in various areas to to achieve that end result I imagine yeah no it's true and you know as you continue to grow as a creative person as well as as a person you you find better and better people to work on your team you know your ears become more sensitized to what really is great and of course we only can begin where we are and so ten years ago I thought of music I was doing was good but I would look back back and you know it was kind of not as good as it could be now right because I've grown so the producers I now work with I think are just better and better and examples of you know hopefully my best songs haven't even been written yet but yeah I think I've and I used to ask the right questions you know and that's all I think everything comes down to and people will say that being successful is only dependent upon resources you know well I can't be successful with this because I don't have enough money or I can't be successful because I'm not old enough or I'm too old or I can't be successful because I'm too bad I'm too skinny I'm I don't have time you know whatever the resources that they're missing but the truth is that your greatest resource is just being resourceful and um I I definitely didn't have all of the resources you know when I came to LA didn't have tons of money and tons of clout and tons of experience and a father who was a producer I didn't have any that right so I had to continuously build on being resourceful and so you know one of the great questions that people listening could ask if they wanted to I think at all times we should be thinking about who we can collaborate with is a little bit better at what we do because if you're playing chess against someone who's as good as you or less good you're going to actual maybe less good at the end of the game if you play against someone if you're playing basketball against someone who's better you're actually gonna get better just by playing with that person and so I used to ask the question like who would be the person I want to work with as a producer and then I would spend time on Google and I would look at what artists are working with what people and then of course there were people who wouldn't return my emails and there were a few who would be open to returning my emails but then I would have to bring something to the table I'd have to you know kind of show up with a lot of smarts and a game plan you know they were going to spend the day with me as opposed to somebody who had more more on their resume why would they want to do that well maybe because I was just like super you know excited and enthusiastic and passionate but also maybe I said you know well I'm trying to be resourceful and I'm going to come to you with a game plan I want to write this music for TV and I've already kind of figured out um you know what these shows want and so I have some lyrics and I think we have a good shot if you could produce the songs and again bringing the producer references like what is the show listening to well here's three songs that this show loves and now just let the let the producer absorb that and it's amazing I guess my point is it's really simple to be resourceful and it's amazing how many doors will open to you when you when you just take no prisoners and you don't decide to be defeated and you just say like I'm just gonna like really approach this and ask the right questions and and and sort of leverage as much as I can and not necessarily have to have it all but but need to um need to just ask the question of what what would I need and who would I need and it's amazing you just keep putting one foot in front of the other um you know things seem to go the right way absolutely yeah it's like I don't know who said it first but there's a phrase that's bandied about that says if you're the smartest person in the room you're in the wrong room and that harkens back to what you're talking about about you know up trying to associate with people who have skills that are a little bit beyond where you're at and that's what you're you know that's what you're going to be drawn towards as far as your own development both creatively and otherwise I imagine would be the case that's really interesting and yeah you touched on a few great points there that I think are important too to reflect upon and the main one strikes me as the idea of getting out of your own way you know and and just like you said putting one foot in front of the other with a with a point of focus you have a direction that you're that you've decided to travel in and you don't worry about that destination you just keep moving in that direction slowly but surely they say how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time right that's really really cool okay so something I'm really curious about obviously which is why I wanted to have this chat with you is this whole licensing thing so now let me ask you when you're obviously you're at a point now where I imagine correct me if I'm wrong but I imagine you're making most of your income through sync license deals right is that correct yeah yeah okay so does that does that affect your songwriting like do you still just sit down and get creative and express yourself purely and naturally or or do you sit down with a real focus that sort of guides you know what you're going to write about what chord progressions are going to be appropriate what instrumentation maybe the producer helps with that I'm not sure how involved you are with you know do we put piano here do we put a ukulele in there or what not this does this does this goal of getting licensed does that inform all of your decisions for the most part when you're generating it it absolutely informed my decisions and it informed it's been informing my my songwriting for ten years and here here's what's interesting you know most people um when they first hear this concept of you know thinking about something to have in mind when they go into the studio to write they most people will feel initially like there's some some form of selling out that comes along with that and that there's something inauthentic about it and what's interesting and I think what's really important is we have to kind of figure out what the goal is if you want to express yourself you can do anything you want right well if you want to express yourself but you also want to fulfill someone else's vision at the same time then you need to keep in mind what their vision is you know if you're hon Zimmer or John Williams and you're scoring these master beautiful movies that they score they're not just going to sit down and write a score they're going to sit with director they're going to look go to what's called spotting sessions the director is going to say here's the hill here's the footage this is the scene where we need something and he he's gonna take notes and the directors going to say we need tension here in a year and still be the incredible authentic person that they are but they're definitely going to try to support the vision so if you want to license your music if that if that's the goal you're licensing your music to someone else's picture you're licensing it to a film you're license to a television show you're lighting it to an ad and so a director is telling a story and so you have to think about what that story is but what's interesting to me is that most of the greatest stories that have ever been told are stories that are not just personal but they're universal so when I started being informed by inspiring stories that other people were telling whether it was a TV show or film or an ad I started to find aspects of myself that I so much wanted to write about but never would have thought about because when most songwriters sit down at the piano or the guitar they write about heartache they write of breakups they write about love that was lost or loved that was found or love that was almost found but kind of fell apart and every single record every artist you've ever loved if you go to their first record this is what it's about this is what we all do and it's nice because it's everybody's most intense feelings is the person that they loved or the person that got away all that stuff but when you really think about your life every single day from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep if you're honest with yourself the thing you're really thinking about is not that person but it's all of the big questions you have about it fulfilling your potential about trying to make the most of time about being overwhelmed that time is so short and so frail about the destination you're hoping to arrive to about the changes you're hoping to make about the moments that you're trying to overcome a challenge and that's what all of these stories are about every movie every ad every TV show every film is about those moments if new is in a scene it's to underscore a moment like that so what winds up happening is you actually tap into your bigger story and instead of writing about this guy that you broke up with you actually start to you're tapping into something even more authentic which is what am I doing here and where am I going and songs in shows there's a really consistent amount of themes that get asked for and they're usually about these big pictures and if anyone's listening in their songwriter I would encourage you to have a song about home to have a song about together and pull tonic kind of together to have a song about change to have a song about brand new I feel brand new have a song about starting over or on my way or tic taking off and I get asked for songs like this all the time and what I started realizing early on I looked over a year of being asked for things and I found 10 consistent things that people asked me for all the time and so I started saying to myself how can I write these songs and tell my story with a big picture of hook so it's like in the verse it is you're still telling your story and then in the choruses count on me the chorus is we're good together the chorus is let your colors shine the chorus is best day of my life the chorus is I'm going to make that change and all of a sudden now a director says oh that's brilliant that's exactly what I needed right so um I absolutely inform everything I do by wanting to tell a bigger story but at this point I really become inspired by it and I'm grateful to it because it's very difficult every single day to come up with something to write about on your own but if you have a goal in mind and now you you can you can the truth is if you're a good artist you should be able to paint something or write something that somebody gives you a prompt to write about yeah and it shouldn't only be like a freestyle thing and when I was a kid I read that book The Fountainhead and it's about two architects and one architect only wants to build what he wants to build and the other architect who you initially hate in the book is building things that other people want him to build and the one who builds what other people wanted to build kind of finds his way of making his own his own art as well mm and it makes money and the other guy is starving yeah um no that's really really cool there's there's a couple of things you said there that I wanted to comment on first thing is I don't believe in selling out this this whole sort of artsy fartsy you know if I'm not starving I'm not a true artist kind of thing I I think that's for the birds as far as I'm concerned what we you know what we talked a lot about on tech news incidentally there's two to main conference topics of conversation there's music production and music marketing that's that's kind of what we discuss here at Tech News and as far as the music marketing is concerned I mean yeah we're artists yeah we like to create we are creatives but at the same time we want to figure out how can we pay our rent and how can we put food in the fridge and still do our art and if somebody pays me to play a piece of music or to write a piece of music that doesn't mean I'm selling out that means I'm cleverly figuring out how to get people to pay me and support myself while doing art right and the other thing that I find interesting is that when when you as you discuss you're talking about writing within the the confines of the storyline that a particular show or movie or whatnot may be interested in having you know having content produced for and and and to me that makes me think of I can't remember who it was but there's a there's a modern-day composer oh shoot I wish I could remember his name but anyway he said that he is at his most creative under the strictest limitations you know so if he was given you know the criteria of okay you can only use three chords and you know you you know and I want you to write about this he would be at his most creative because he has to figure out how can I pack as much of myself into this piece under these strict limitations it makes me think of blues music you know blues music traditionally is three chords in the truth you know one four and five and a blue scale right and yet there's been years and years and years of hundreds and thousands of blues players that all have their own different field there's a different soul and and sense of creativity yet they're all operating more or less under that looks those same sort of strict limitations and I think that's very cool yeah absolutely and I mean if you think about you know artists who are just starting out might have this idea in mind but when when an artist does get a record deal there's 15 people in the room at all times weighing in on what that single needs to sound like there is no music you've ever heard or I've ever heard which was which was marketed by somebody else right which which had a big push behind it that didn't have input from a whole team okay so initially sure you're going to start out with your authenticity and somebody's going to take notice of that right that's how you're going to get your foot in the door but eventually people are going to come along and help you hone that and help you find a way for everybody else to also hear it and it's the same thing with anyone you look up to even in any other arena like if you think about a basketball player who's phenomenal I mean the game is so limited in terms of what they can do and so the moves are the same but what they bring to it is makes all of the difference I mean all of the difference but it's exactly I mean they're so limited you can't go out of ounce here and you have to stand from here and you have to you know this is a free point this is an out of bounds and yet it's there it's their skill it's their talent their heart it's their charisma and next thing you know like they're a star but they're doing exactly the same thing and the millimeters of the jump are even the same but it's how they jump and it's who they are and what they bring to it so why on earth would an artist you know all of us gonna be above all of that you know like oh I write music so I don't need to worry about I mean right now you know Sara Bareilles is she just brought us nominated for like a few Tony's for writing this musical she wrote a Broadway musical and you know that's an incredible opportunity for a songwriter and she started out you know waiting tables in LA and playing at clubs that I used to play at there's no doubt that there was a team of producers on that project who very much informed the music that she wrote for that show but I absolutely believe that it's her heart and it's her soul and it's her gift that is what's made that Tony nomination because she listened to what they wanted and she conveyed it but through her and that's all that really matters so I think it's it's high time that people get out of their own way as you said and start to figure out like what if I could actually buy a house mmm you know from doing music wouldn't that be the most awesome thing so how how can I do that yeah and I think for a lot of people it's uh it seems like a pipe dream it seems like oh unless I get that big major label contract that I'm playing on stages in front of 60,000 people and you know I'm the next Beyonce or whatever that that it's a pipe dream I think a lot of people a lot of musicians although they may not want to admit that that that's the thought in the back of their mind that causes them to that prevents them rather from taking the steps needed so I really I really like this I find this conversation rather inspiring I appreciate it oh you're so sweet I find you inspire honestly I watched your video and just like your presence is very um there's like a default level of happiness that you exude and that I think people can feel that oh good it's another thing to my my lovely lady her name's Carol channeling her and I write and record and perform together and we just call ourselves des and Carol and and so we're and we're both fairly nude when it comes to songwriting I mean I've played music all my life but and I've written some songs peppered throughout the years and whatnot and and for her she's really only over the last few years three or four years sort of gotten into picking up an instrument and writing songs and doing things outside of you know singing in the church choir and whatnot so um so songwriting is a topic of conversation that we're really interested in and the other thing that we're trying to do now along with some of our musical endeavors is we've started a podcast called fearless creative and so it's possible that perhaps we could have another conversation in the future on in that context yeah because I like your style and I like the things you have to say on the subject of creativity and sort of being fearless and and and just putting yourself out there on that on that point and along this whole music licensing conversation how did how did this get started for you like I was I was doing a little reading up on you of Cour I like to sort of educate myself a little bit and and I understand in the beginning there was a lot of sort of cold calling and and just the hard raw gritty door knock and almost you know that kind of that kind of salesmanship how did that get started and and sort of what was the progression to where you're at now in terms of I imagine now you have relationships with people that you can then revisit and so it's perhaps a little easier would you would you agree oh yeah no definitely once a relationship is fostered it's definitely easier you know when I very first started I had an agent who is making those calls for me I think the article you're referring to there was an article in the LA Weekly I think it came out in 2000 uh when was that 2012 I don't know I'm not entirely sure okay so that was then and then um Billboard magazine wrote this article about me in 2013 when I had had some success you know but more success and and then Variety magazine was nice steps to write this article about me this past August you know it's talking about you know where it all led to and whatever but my I should first give credit before I started pitching my own music I had agents pitching my music and that's really how it started but early before that it actually started before that because what happened before that was I came out to LA I took meetings you know everybody in LA wants to have a meeting it's so funny you'll have people in LA who have done nothing actually really tangibly nothing for two years but they'll always think something's about to happen because I have a good meeting good meeting I'm very meeting great meeting and though people take meetings with like people in the industry and then you're like well what happened I don't know I had a good meeting so when it first came out I was having all these good meetings you know with record label people and they would they would find something you know I guess there was something potential there was enough potential in what I would send that they would have a meeting with me and then they would all say to me so you know your music sounds like it's really um it's really perfect for TV and film and this meant and I would say okay and I kind of like look at them and in 2008 I met with president of Atlantic Records Craig Kalman and he said to me oh I really loved this one song you did and I think it could be like a soundtrack and maybe you should meet with a music supervisor that I know and you could help write the soundtrack to this new movie that's coming out and then I could put it out as your record and so I had a meeting with her and I started realizing that I was going to do what we talked about before where I was going to go to the studio and be informed by story lines and so I started being calculated about it and creating music that came from that place and I had an agent from 2007 to 2009 who was pitching my music and he was pitching these songs that I would write from that point of view already where I would send him songs that I thought could be good for picture and he was my first agent who was doing licensing and there's tons of sync licensing agents and he got me on the Mac you know he sent my music out and it worked people people bought it and so my first few licenses were American Airlines and champion sportswear and Kodak and lots of TV and some Christmas movies and an NBC promo and it was it was it was really a fun couple years and then he left and this is when it all changed he went to a publishing company and I worked I went to another agent and they did a nice job and they got me some a couple commercials at a couple shows and I was sitting every day waiting for them to call and I would make music so that part I wasn't waiting and I would send them music and I would try to be a squeaky wheel and say how can I get you to pitch me more and they would say we're pitching you as much as we can but we have a huge roster you know we have 300 artists and every artist has 20 songs so there's thousands of songs and so we're doing our best to pitch you as often as we can and I started scratching my head and thinking you know if they're if they're getting me things and they're pitching me once in a while and people are actually using it right when they finally hear it at Kellogg's they buy it I thought maybe I should just do what they do you know what do they do it's not like they have to go get a um you know masters to be a licensing agent why can't I do it so I started asking the questions who would I need to reach out to well I would need to figure out how to make relationships with the people who choose music for TV shows movies advertising trailers I said well I have a computer I'm going to start making lists I'm going to start making notes and I'm going to start being my most politely persistent self and reaching out to people and I you know I had a little bit of an advantage because I had the confidence because I knew that the music had already been well received through other agents so I thought you know the music works so maybe if I just put my heart into this - and it wasn't easy and everybody would say to me how do you do that aren't you scared don't you feel like you're annoying them when you call them or when you send them an email they don't know you and of course I'd be lying if I said oh I'm totally confident you know I was but I just I said to myself you know every person is an equal human being under God right under the universe we're all the same and so if I'm just a nice person and I don't do like a salesy thing if I just say like three lines in an email and I say something very personally like I honestly love the work that you're doing and by the way I would because I wouldn't reach out to just anyone I would reach out to the people who shows were in sync with what I did and whose shows inspired me or who shows didn't do what I did but I just would what I wanted to beyond them so it was it was actually very sincere and I would say like three sentences I really sincerely love what it is that you do I know you get thousands of emails so I really appreciate even if you've read this far um you know my name is Kathy and I write music and if you ever would consider it here's one song and I would send a song like a link not an actual mp3 because people hate that yeah link to a song and I would not say and here's four paragraphs about me I wouldn't say I've been on already legally no Legally Blonde - and Kodak in American ale I wouldn't say any of that because it's not impressive because the only thing that's impressive is a person and the quality of the work will speak for itself and so filling up people's inboxes with pages of your own like by oh I think it's very in its inauthentic and it's but if I were to meet you at a party I would not go over to you and just start telling you all about myself because it could but I say do you like where are you from and I would say Oh tell me about your girlfriend and how long you've been together and how did you meet and then I would say what do you do and you told me when I would say oh me too and that would be about it until you asked me well have you ever done anything I've heard of and I say yeah a couple things and you'd slowly like pull it out of me so I would never like just like do that and I now as a person who runs the licensing agency in addition to writing my own music and pitching my music I license further artists I get submissions every day and people just some people are so kind and sweet and thoughtful some people's music is terrible and then there's a lot of people whose music is terrible and they send me emails that are so impersonal that I don't even want to read it because I can just tell it's like a blast so I would send people emails and slowly not quickly but slowly but surely people started writing back and at first they would say things like thanks and that's it and then they would say things like just downloaded the song pretty nice and then slowly I get emails like wow that's absurd that's a pleasant surprise I really liked the song um who represents you and I would say well I do yeah Nick would say well do you know all the business side like one of the main pieces of licensing in addition to the creative side is you need to be able to support business meaning do you know that the song is clearable or is there a co-writer who has a publishing deal and even though it's such a great song there's no way that publisher is going to clear the song for six thousand dollars for a TV show mmm so you have to be able to supply all the information and know ahead of time what the pitfalls are going to be which is another way of asking the right question and saying so who should I write music with if you can help it you should write music with indie artists who don't have publishers who are going to create a hurdle for you to clear so if you have an artist and there's there's a tremendous amount of talent in the indie world yeah um you can find somebody who you're co-writer or you can write it on your own but I ha I highly recommend even if you're phenomenal to get over yourself and have a co-writer because even if the person changes one chord to have a sounding board is like having an editor and it makes all of the difference so I I am Co writers who I adore and they I feel like they've helped me everything I've done it's a team effort um and so I would say yes you can clear the song and actually you can clear it today there is no red tape there is no label there's no publishers hmm they would say oh that's interesting and somebody once told me if you want to be successful don't look for opportunities but look for problems that you can solve absolutely a hundred percent agree with that in fact I mean you there's a number of things as you were talking like oh yes this and oh yes that and I don't know if I'll remember them all but but one of the things I love is the attitude and the approach that you took in terms of okay well I'm seeing that this agent is doing a particular job the recognition that they were doing that same job for 300 other people and and the the obvious also recognition that if they were doing that job just for you you would probably be getting in front of a whole lot more people and just by the pure numbers game of it all statistically speaking it would stand to reason that you would get a whole lot more business out of it and then taking that upon yourself to figure that out I think that's very very cool when it comes to someone who's just perhaps learning about the whole world of zinc licensing and wanting to get into it do you recommend that they just get themselves an agent or use a service you know like crucial music or any of these other organizations that that do sink licensing and shopping of music around hey I mean the honest truth is that most of the people I know who are extremely successful have an agent okay uh the people who I mean who pee I know people who are making no joke two to three million dollars a year doing sink licensing and they have phenomenal agents most people don't do what I do they don't also do the agent part on their own and it's because it's a tremendous amount of time and work that goes into that and they would rather but all of that extra time and effort into making more songs more songs more songs I think in today's market it's a little bit different when I started doing this cold calling and emailing and going to people's offices first of all I also live in LA which makes it easier to get in the car and try to set up a meeting and all those kind of things but aside from that when I started doing this in 2009 there were less people now right now sync licensing has become in fact I just heard from somebody that at South by Southwest this past year which was only a couple months ago there was a panel on how to license your music to advertising it was the most attended panel so you know when you have 50 other events going on it's out by every day and that's the most attendant you know that that's a that's the trend so in today's market I think what's happened is people have become a little bit desensitized so what's coming into their inbox and they delete a lot of things and they go to their relationships they go to the people who they already know who send them music who pitch them music because it's so inundated so it doesn't it doesn't mean that they won't listen and I think if you're persistent and polite and personable and the music is good you're going to get through eventually so you could but what I would say is the best possible way right now at this in 2016 I would find a person who has great relationships and a small roster I look for somebody who has credibility but not fancy people on their roster who are going to take up most of their time if you see that somebody has a roster and there's like three famous people on it even though that might make you more inclined to want to work with them what that means is that most of their day even when they're not pitching music they're going to be listening they're going to be taking calls from people who want to just proactively call them and license the music of those famous people and that takes a lot of time and they don't have teams of 40 people nobody has that kind of money anymore and then the sync licensing world you're making a percentage of the sync fee so even though I as an artist can walk away making a nice chunk it's not something where you know these in-house teams are more than four people working on this okay so if you have four people you want four people who just have a good knack at doing this and a small roster and then I would do is I would become the most squeaky wheel on their roster I would say what every week I would say to them what song do you need what songs you need in fact I can give you a great example because I started doing this three years ago and I brought on an artist there called the high fields it's a husband and wife they're absolutely wonderful human beings they're just so humble and they work so hard and they're so enjoyable to be around they're a pleasant just sweet people and when I first met them they had four songs and I'll I said these are phenomenal fantastic they had both been in bands prior to being together and they had decided to work together so they had tons of music as was the case before they worked yet and they only had a few songs well since we started working together every single week whether they're sick whether this vacation if it's Christmas it doesn't matter they say what do you need what briefs have come in what calls have you gotten what shows you're working on and they've written probably 85 86 100 songs and - what's happened is the quality of their work has gotten better and better and I then have a new reason to send them out every week so even you know typically how it works on the licensing end is that I'll get about four to six emails a day hi we're working on a documentary I'm just telling you what happening Yesha working a documentary we need something really empowering for the end-tidal hi we're working on an ad and it so it's about travel for the summer we need something about summertime hi we're working on a TV show we need something for the the scene where the father is taking the daughter to college it's like a smorgasbord and so then what I do is I spend about 45 minutes per email like that and I look through my my catalog of artists music as well as my own and I make a folder that I get I put a link to and I say here's four songs that might really work for you and they say great so that takes a big chunk of my day because if I give four to six of those a day that's between four and six hours of work okay then what I also do is when I have downtime as I'm trying to continuously make more relationships right so I'm reaching out to people who kind of we once had that lunch but we haven't followed up so I remind them or there's somebody that we talked about a show two weeks before and I'm wondering what happened and she says oh I'm glad you checked in none of those we worked um we need the director changes mind you have this so I do a lot of that well if an artist keeps checking in with me and sending me a new song every week and even let's say every third week it's phenomenal I will proactively take another three hours out of that day and send that one song and I won't send it as an email blast I will send it to each person and say Jamie you have to hear this song markula and he'll just say cool Thanks and sometimes the lectures say you know what that's exactly the kind of Santa actually needed today I forgot to mention to you and so this particular group the high fields when I met them they had never licensed and I can tell you today we have licensed them to Petco living spaces t-mobile tons of TV Jane the Virgin other shows that you've seen a Disney promo ABC they just did a big spot for pay less and they do they no longer do another job this is all they have to do because the licenses and we can talk about that too but TV licenses can be anywhere between like three and ten grand but an ad license can be anywhere between fifteen and really more so 40 50 even 80 grand Wow so if you're getting three ads a year and a smattering of a few TV things you're you're good to go you're doing okay yeah lawyer at that point you know you make 200 grand a year easy what so I would say my my best advice would be find someone else who already has relationships and if you remember when I told you I started with somebody else have being my agent and I was able to use the time where someone else had relationships and money started coming in and I got 11 licenses in the first year we mentioned what those were and it allowed me to kind of build my confidence build my repertoire and then down the road I had a little bit more name recognition from people and then some people never heard of me but I at least trusted that the music was in a better place yes um but I think you know you can find a great agent already has relationships and you can kill it if you really show up for that agent and don't just sit around yeah one of the things the the morals of this particular story that I that I keep getting over and over again is and I and I also believe that it's one of the sort of primary tenets of business in general but it's all about personal relationships and rapport I mean people do business with people they know trust and like that's almost a cliche phrase now in as far as the business English community is concerned but it's absolutely 100% true and if you are putting your best foot forward and making great relationships with people much like in the first part of our conversation with getting your music produced you know you made relationships with people to co-write with you made relationship with producers engineers etc etc to get the actual recordings together and it's it's really it's those relationships that are the seed that the rest of the success sprouts from and I'm kind of hearing that across the across the board during this conversation which is kind of an interesting thing to point out and the other thing okay so so you mentioned that a good place for a person to start is to find somebody who has contacts and a roster small enough that they'll actually have some time to dedicate to to what you're doing now and then of course the the other thing is is that this person not only do they have relationships but they have an insight into I would I would imagine to giving you a little bit of guidance as to you know what you should be writing about what the quality that's the other thing I wanted to ask you the quality of the submission do people submit demos or today is it better for them to have a fully produced recording this kind of thing and then at is does that have an impact on a the success of getting a sink a license and B the the value of it absolutely and I would say that in today's world you know everybody in their mother has a laptop where they can produce things that sound pretty decent sure so um you're up against a lot of competition in terms of there will be no demos submitted if you're pitching to a TV show or you're pitching to a licensee person who's going to pitch to a TV show she's already getting or he's already getting really high quality things so they're going to hear a demo it's all of us right away uh no because time is of the essence so she has to get these songs and by you know usually I'll get an email that say I need this by 4 o'clock right so if I have 3 hours I don't have time to turn around and say to you it's a great interesting song but I need to hear the production I have no time so I just go great thanks and then I move on to the other song that's already reduced so I don't really get a lot of demos and the truth is that with the beauty of the internet you can go on and I can give you some of these websites to look into for your audience you can go and look at all the songs that have been used in every episode of every show I can tell you how to find that and you can look at all the songs that have been used for the entire campaign of every particular brand that you can think of so it's very easy to know the information of what does this brand like what does this show like what kinds of songs what kinds of production ok and then you sit down and it's it's actually uncanny today how much you can do with your own Pro Tools or with a producer who's pretty handy and a good engineer yeah and you bring that person a reference they don't even have to have the vision you can bring the vision say here's three songs from the show this is the palette this is the kind of soundscape enos that they like this is the kind of general direction they go in let's do this yeah we've pushed thumbs through that has fake drums all day long and they sound phenomenal and I mean I happen to work with a producer who's he is a drummer and he's a fantastic drummer that's how he started so the percussion is excellent and I think that actually the drums are one of the most important components for picture because things get cut to the to the to the Train feeling of something moving along and so the drums but but it is incredible what I have heard come out of studios and it's like someone did that on their laptop and it really sounds like a close second i can't even tell ya if that's the case you can't put yourself in a position where you're even leaving a question that you're going to be somewhere in second place you need to have a good production and you need to ask the question what is the production sound like well what am i pitching for let me go listen and if you want I can rattle off a couple websites there's called toon find toon find and if you go on there you can search like all the series of shows ABC NBC Fox and then it actually takes UEFA sewed by episode and then you click on let's say it's a episode three of Grey's Anatomy Season six and you can see all the songs that they used in episode 3 season 6 and you can go to season by season and you'll go okay I really I get the point like you'll start to see that there's like a DJ on every show and they all like each DJ has like a thing that they do for that show there's a there's a sonic brand to the show and this would be this would be the music supervisor that that's their role after that's their role and so you'd say oh okay well why would I ever pitch them this this is what they like so I'm gonna pitch them this there's certain shows that want like a moody sexy haunting you know sound and there's certain shows that want like a hip-hop you know in-your-face sort of like just party sound with so much vibe it's a different show and then for brands you can go I'll give you a couple websites there's a website called splendid instead of splendid splendid and there's a website called TV commercials with an S songs so it's two S's in there TV commercials songs calm okay and it'll list like these are all the commercial songs that were in the Superbowl this past year these are all the songs that target has been using this is a study on Walmart what they like so there are so many people who are interested in this and they've already compiled all the information for you now you can say oh I want a picture iPad you know I want to I want I want let's say you're working with a licensing person but you want to be a squeaky wheel you're gonna go online you're going to listen to what's working and you're going to say Kathy I wrote three songs I think these are perfect for Tropicana do you know anybody at that agency and I'll say actually I do I'll proactively pitch these I don't know when their next campaigns coming along but they should have these in a folder so Christian you can be a squeaky wheel and you can think ahead and think out of the box and it's not a difficult in today's world to know exactly what people want and really they want that they want the same thing like they're always just looking for a replacement of the next of the last song because when it comes to a team effort and if it's a TV show or if it's a brand you have a director and a producer on the TV show making these decisions so the music supervisor knows the director likes this kind of sound and she has a small amount of time because every episode has like ten songs and she's got to get those all done by the next Friday and the next Friday the next Friday she's got 26 episodes so she needs like 260 songs she pretty much knows what he wants so she wants the same thing and with the brand it's even more the case because you have non creative people you have marketing and business people who are sitting in towers in their executive suites who work at brands and crunch numbers and they can't deal with out of the box right in terms of like the music might be out of the box but meaning if it was already focused grouped and tested and it worked they want a song that's very similar to that yeah so if you kind of make your own versions of being inspired by what's already working now you have to write your own melody so you don't get sued and you have to write your own lyrics you don't get sued and you have to write something that feels truly authentic and the vocal has to sound like you mean it right hey but pretty much you can kind of get a sense of what what they want this is fascinating I like I say this is a subject that I've been interested in but didn't have a great deal of experience I have a few friends of mine one friend in particular his name's Brian we're Meyer and he doesn't have his website up yet so I can't link it too but he is that this is what he's getting into and him and I worked together for a number of years and he was using a service called Crucial music which is why it came to my mind I mentioned it earlier and he's got you know a song in an episode of the Ghost Whisperer and The Young and the Restless and now those are those TV shows do you also get when they when they rerun the episode do you get a little a little kickback again 100% yeah okay you get so you get your royalties from being a writer you get royalties from being your own publisher right you get your publishing your writer but what's also or fantastic is that if you do an ad and the ad is SAG Screen Actors Guild okay if you're not a member of the Screen Actors Guild the first three ads that you do if they happen to be sag you will get sag royalties and the reason I'm mentioning it is because sag royalties are about 25 times higher then the then the writers royalties are first for the songwriter whether you're an ass cap or BMI or C sack really you can wind up making twenty to thirty thousand dollars in Sag rolls he's a month whoo okay I like the sound of that that's very interesting yeah why I tell people to pursue ads because an ad is going to run not one time if you're in an episode of The Ghost Whisperer it's going to run and maybe it goes into syndication and maybe that episode gets run a couple more times if you're in an ad they're not spending two million dollars on an ad to run at one time no gonna run that ad about two thousand times a day across country which is why if it's sad and you're getting paid every time it runs you're doing really well now this Screen Actors Guild is that because you're in America and I'm in Canada so are there differences there or if if I if I got a song licensed to a ad for an American company does that qualify still even though I'm in a different country or do you know much about how that works that is a great question in since I've never lived outside of the country I've never asked that question and I don't have any writers who are who I represent who are out of the country so I don't know the answer but I imagine I can't see why because I'll tell you why I can't see why you wouldn't because whenever I have filled out the sag paperwork there isn't a box that says are you Canadian or French or are you live in Germany it just says what's the name of the person and what's their what Writers Association are they with so I would add I would ask somebody else who would know that I don't but a Canadian who's already done this would probably definitely have the answer I can't imagine that you wouldn't get it okay I'm going to investigate that a little or and to see if there is a Canadian equivalent etc etc and if I if I find out some information I'll be sure to attach it to this post that music a calm I believe this is techniques the episode 65 I think so that again I'll confirm that later and if there's an issue we'll correct it but listen Kathy this has been an awesome conversation I appreciate you taking the time but I do want to be respectful of it and my bladder is also letting me know that it might be time to take a little break but listen I really do appreciate it where where can my listeners and viewers locate you and find out more about you or perhaps get in touch with you may be regarding licensing or what not absolutely um you can get in touch with me my email is Kathy my name is Phil to the C so it's C 88 why Kathy at catch the moon music calm and I run an online licensing class and in fact our next one is this coming Monday at 10 a.m. Pacific time I'm also going to be starting one on Sunday evenings for you people who've written to me from britain and all other places where they can't get to me Monday Pacific time in the morning and some people just have a day job they can't do that so I'm teaching Monday morning online but I will soon be teaching Sunday evenings I also teach a class in person in LA and if you email me I can tell you how to become part of this and essentially what I do in this class is drill down on everything we just talked about and go into tremendous detail on what kinds of songs and then we work on the songs and then we talk about all the other ways to strategize about getting yourself licensed people can definitely call me and if you have music that you think is great and you want me to consider it for pitching you can also always send me and again be persistent with me like you know I get tons of people so use me as your first you know example of being politely persistent and remind yourself that I get tons of emails plus I have two kids and a wife right so if you don't hear back from me don't take it personally it just means I saw it and I probably haven't listened to it yet so in a month or three weeks just write back hey I hope you're well check it in um love it absolutely I'll be around and thank you for having me and maybe some of you will you know will connect will connect more yeah and hopefully we can do this again sometime either maybe under this context or under the fearless creative podcast that has not yet gone live that myself and my lovely lady are putting together I think you'd be an excellent person to to chit chat with under that context as well and obviously Kathy Heller comm is where people can go and check out your music and see some videos and catch all your news blurbs and find your Facebook and Twitter links and so on and so forth so I recommend that people that you know connect with Kathy and and you know if this is that's one of the beautiful things about the world we live in is we can just connect with people all over the planet you know and as we talked about earlier I mean that's that's really really what it's all about it's making relationships and developing rapport with people and that's where business arrangements happen that's where where success begins - - to compound upon itself would you agree what can't be said enough and I think being genuine and having the confidence to put one foot in front of the other is how you're going to continue to make those relationships so I encourage everybody to not get bogged down by all the discouragement that's everywhere but if you have something you love to do and like me every hairbrush was a microphone and you just want to be a singer since you're a kid and you want to write music don't let things stop you and keep going because you never know what door is gonna open because you had the courage to take the next step absolutely pick a direction one step at a time Kathy Heller thank you so much for taking the time so nice to meet you yes we'll talk again soon you

Channel: Dezz Asante

Views: 15,179

Rating: 4.9220781 out of 5

Keywords: music licensing, cathy heller, techmuze, dezz asante, how to make money with music, sync licensing

Id: iGmH21TEJZ0

Length: 57min 5sec (3425 seconds)

Published: Mon May 09 2016