Getting your music in libraries is a great first step.

Making sure your tracks are optimized for the library’s search engine is a great second step.

But it’s not enough.

So what do you do to ensure people find your music in libraries and license your tracks?

You identify the people who need to license music and reach out to them directly.

How?

It’s the subject of today’s post….

 

Hagai asked

Hi Joyce,

How are you today?

After completing about 80% of the course I feel I could use your help :

  • I have been accepted to 4 libraries out of 16 I applied for.
  • Songs have been submitted and released on the site’s websites, metadata was updated to all of them according to your recommendations and graphics where designed to promote the hall issue as well.
  • When looking at the stats I see no movement at all.
  • I am attaching a list of the sites I applied for and the status.

Now...I am probably not patient enough but it would be nice if I could know if I am doing something wrong here and what I can do better. This could very well be an issue of the music not being interesting enough but from what I can tell from the stats the music was hardly (if at all ) played.

Your input on this would be great:)

Thanks,
Hagai.

I answered

Hey Hagai,

First off, well done on submitting your music to 16 libraries and thanks for keeping me posted 🙂

Getting in the libraries and setting up the tracks with all the metadata is just the start of this journey.

You’ve already done good work.

Now you have 2 main options:

1- hope that the work you’ve done is enough to stand out from the crowd

2- keep working, for example….

  • by adding new music regularly to each library (showing them you’re active and giving them the opportunity to add you to the “new music” playlist that some of them, like AudioJungle, put on their home page)
  • by focusing on libraries that have a lot of people visiting their website every month (here’s a free tool to help you figure that out)
  • by driving traffic to your artist profile on their website (for example, by reaching out to YouTubers or podcasters directly with a link to your songs on a music library)

If you want to send me a streaming link to one of your tracks on Songtradr, I’ll have a look and let you know if I see anything you could improve.

Sincerely,
Joyce

Hagai had a follow up question

I have a question regarding the suggestion involving the YouTubers and podcasters – Could you elaborate a bit on this?
I really wouldn’t know where to begin with this 🙂

I answered

Easy: you spend time on YouTube, Patreon and Vimeo looking for people you’d like to work with. You watch their vlogs or short films or animations or tutorials or whatever and you reach out to them.

Content creators who post their work on platforms like YouTube, Patreon and Vimeo are usually pretty easy to get in touch with.

If it seems overwhelming at first, you might want to create a spreadsheet or doc where you list all those people you find and track which ones you’ve reached out to, which ones answered, etc.

When you’re first getting started, the key is to reach out to people who are about your level or a bit higher. Aiming for the music supervisor on a big TV show is a bit unrealistic if you don’t yet have credits or a big audience or know someone they trust who can recommend you.

Does that help?

Sincerely,
Joyce

 

Have a question for me?
Let me know in the comments 🙂

Hopefully I can keep a positive record of helpful answers!
Hagai's thank you note