Music For Money

Moby’s decision to license tracks from Play for use in commercials helped the album sell better, and made him a lot of money.Photo: Bill Ebbesen

Composing for adverts and music libraries can be rewarding, challenging and creative — and did we mention that you get paid?

The year is 1999. Moby has released the album Play to critical acclaim, only to go and do something unforgivable in the eyes of music critics: he has licensed the music for use in adverts. How dare he?

As an educator and musician who’s watched endlessly talented people fail to cement a career in music, you’ll have to forgive me for starting by simply addressing the ridiculous notion that music and commerce cannot creatively coexist. In a world where music is basically free to the consumer, the only way we can survive is by exploiting other sources of income apart from direct sales. Currently, one main avenue is in commercial composing and sync licensing. It’s widely known that record labels make a significant portion of their income from the sync sector, but you don’t need to be signed to a major to do so.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that writing music for commercials can’t be creatively inspiring, either. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some amazingly talented film‑makers, many of whom are creating adverts that are more likely to pop up at Cannes than on TV. For instance, I’ve written music to gamechanging fundraising adverts, highlighting heart disease and poverty. I’ve also made music for museum spaces, aeroplanes and world record attempts. Commercial composers are just that: composers.

Music For Commerce

Let’s begin by identifying two different disciplines. There’s commercial composing, which is the art of writing to picture, and there’s sync licensing, which is the licensing of pre‑made music to be ‘synchronised’ with another form of media.

Commercial composition requires a more businesslike approach. You are forging direct relationships with directors and advertising agencies and providing a service for them whereby a fee is paid to cover your time and the licensing cost. The skill set needed is multi‑faceted. You have to be a great communicator, learning how to get vital information from your clients. You have to be adept at running a business in order to stay relevant and financially stable. And you have to produce fantastic music under significant time constraints and expectations. People are surprised when I say I often have to produce a ‘radio‑ready’ demo, from scratch, in under eight hours. Not easy.

Sync licensing and production library music are slightly different. You aren’t writing to picture. Sometimes sync licensing can be a way of exploiting old music, but often new music is written to a brief: an overview of an ‘album’ concept that an agency may want to deliver. As a basic example, you may get the brief for a ’70s psychedelic rock album with a deadline months away. You’ll submit multiple ideas, and often enter into a dialogue with multiple revisions before tracks are accepted. Albums in this format tend to go out to TV, from which you will be primarily paid through royalty collection societies such as PRS and MCPS in the UK. This happens as and when your music gets played out in the public domain, so the income you receive will be related to the amount of usage your music gets.

Production music agencies that are affiliated with collection societies such as MCPS tend to operate standard fee structures as a consequence, but there are also online library sites out there that have no such expectations or affiliations and can charge as they choose to. They may, for example, buy out all the rights to your music for a flat fee.

Copyright, Licensing & Royalties

Royalties are the payments generated from the usage of your music, with the three main types of royalty being mechanical, public performance and sheet music:

• Mechanical royalties are generated from the reproduction of music in digital and physical formats such as CD sales, streams and sync uses.
• Performance royalties are incurred any time a song is played in public, whether by live musicians or playback of a recording in a public space.
• Sheet music royalties come from sales of printed or downloadable sheet...