Today, we answered these questions:
• Is it largely a waste of time trying to license tracks if you don’t have instrumental versions, alt mixes and stem files?
• Is it worthwhile trying to hit up music supervisors through LinkedIn?
• Should you only send your strongest material to licensing opportunities?
• How can you master your songs for an affordable price?
• What’s the form you need to register groups of songs – published or unpublished – with the U.S. Copyright Office?
• If you’re 100% focused on licensing, do you really need to release your sound recordings?
• Is having your music on Spotify compatible with licensing?
• Is it expected that stem files sound crappy compared to the full mix?
• Should stem files contain silence when an instrument doesn’t play the full song or should you crop and edit the track to take out the silence?
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Resources mentioned during the live session:
- Interview with Justin Tessier of The Blue Stones.
- Step-By-Step Guide on How to License Groups of Work.
- Video Comparing Online Mastering Services vs Ozone vs Working with a Real Mastering Engineer.
- The Ozone plugin by iZotope.
- LANDR’s online mastering services.
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Have a question for me?
Thank you! I’ve learned a lot from your content and am currently building my excel spreadsheet for all of my songs! I’ve got some more music library research to do as well as some mixing but I’m getting closer to submitting material. Thanks for everything you do!
My pleasure! Thanks for your kind words Kelly. Don’t hesitate to reach out if there’s something I can help you with 🙂
thanks for sharing that link that compares mastering services – very informative! amazing how much different the products sounded.
Indeed! My favorite passage was how Ozone and LANDR compared 😉
Thank you Joyce!
Your articles are always useful. Even if you think you know a bit there’s always something new to learn from you!
By the way, I went through all the interview and I found it a little disheartening when you mentioned that a few years ago we needed hundreds of songs to get results while nowadays some people say it takes thousands… 🙂 I still like to believe that it might be a long, winding road but not that far away ;-)))
Ah! Yes, I understand how you feel but I wouldn’t worry too much about that if I were you.
In my opinion, there is no “right” way to do things.
The theory is that the more songs you have, the more opportunities you have to make a sale, because you have more products to place.
In practice, however, the more musicians I work with, the more I see different ways of doing things and being successful.
For example, Chuck has a fairly small catalogue of 37 songs and makes money licensing the instrumental versions of his songs in non-exclusive libraries. He started years ago and is still doing it.
Proof that you don’t need thousands or even hundreds of songs to make it worth your while 😉
Hang in there and keep up the good work, Danilo!
SUPER helpful Joyce. don’t know how i’m just discovering your work but wow. incredibly helpful. thank you for all the content you’re putting together, glad you’re kicking my ass into finally doing this x)
That’s so great to hear!
If you haven’t already, consider signing up for the free library of resources.
It’s packed full of helpful information in a checklist format that’s easy to read and apply 😉