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	Production Music Libraries
	Writing for Film and TV SONGS FOR FILM & TV MUSIC SUPERVISION 101 PRODUCTION MUSIC LIBRARIES SONGWRITING DEALS FOR FILMS RESOURCES INTERVIEW: DANNY ELFMAN INTERVIEW: ALAN SILVESTRI			Production Music Libraries By John Braheny Songwriters and composers don't always recognize that income isn't just generated by their own performances of their songs or other artists recording their songs. There's a world of opportunities beyond having radio hits. Production music libraries can pay your rent if you get enough uses of your music going at once. Here's how it works. Problem for video, TV, film producers: They need music for their small budget productions and find that hiring a composer to create an original score is too expensive. If they need songs, it's also too expensive to use songs and recordings that have already been successful. They also donšt have time to deal with calls from hundreds of composers and songwriters who'd like to submit material. Others who use music are producers of multi-media projects, video games, commercials, and radio "bumpers" between programs. Problem for unknown writers: They don't have the clout to get their songs into big budget productions and don't have the time to constantly research all the new low-budget shows that may be in production and in need of underscore music or songs. It would involve contacting hundreds of little production companies and establishing relationships with their busy music staffers, only to find that they frequently change jobs. (Though if you can keep up with them, they usually end up in similar jobs because theirrelationships with writers are extremely valuable to the visual producers who hire them. Solution: Production music libraries. These companies secure the rights (more about that later) to songs and instrumental underscore compositions submitted to them that they feel they can place in audio-visual productions. They then assemble and reproduce "libraries" of these collections on CD's and send them to all the production companies. They're indexed by musical style, mood, instrumentation, length, tempo, male, female or group vocal and any other attributes that allow an audio-visual producer to target the type of music they need. They find the piece, use it, and fill out a "cue sheet" for the appropriate performing rights organization (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC) that includes information on how the song is used, how long, name of the piece, composer(s) and owner of the copyright. Some of the bigger libraries hire their own in-house composers to create music for them but will occasionally look outside for songs. They will have also have lists of independent composers they've worked with in the past to fill in if their staff composers get overworked or if they can't provide an unique style their clients are looking for. That's where you have your best opportunity. How good does it have to be? Since they can only use "master quality" recordings for film and television, they have to be excellent. If you're submitting instrumental pieces, they should be well arranged. Stay away from using stock sounds that come packaged with your keyboard. Try to create fresh sounds. Generating a mood is important. They'll use pieces with strong melodic themes but will also use underscoring that just enhances a mood. It's also a good idea to produce mixes with and without lead instruments. Songs are used in many different ways. Sometimes the lyric is important. Sometimes it's irrelevant, and your song will be barely audible in a bar scene behind a conversation. It may be more important that the style is authentic. As an exercise, tape TV shows (Try a drama and a comedy.) with just an audio recorder, play them back and make lists of all the "cues" (pieces of music used) with info about mood, number of instruments, style, length, use of songs vs. underscore, and how many are under dialog. Are they using different mixes of the same track for different cues? There are actually cases of entire shows being scored using a single five-minute piece of music that's dissected and used in different configurations for each cue: only drums and bass in one, just the string pad of part of the piece in another, etc. Use this information as a guide to the cues you'll submit as demos. If you're used to creating songs and you want to compose underscore, your knowledge of conventional pop song structure won't help you as much as your understanding of harmony and grooves. Never lose sight of the fact that you and your music aren't the stars here, the film is, so think of how your music would sound with dialog and sound effects over it and how appropriately you can serve the needs of the visual producer. How you get paid Royalties for use of songs and instrumental music in audio-visual media comes in two different ways. There may be a "synch fee" (synchronization fee for music that is used in "timed relationship" to a visual medium) that is negotiated by the library company up front. The other income is received on "the back end" through your performing rights organization based on the information in the cue sheet and how many times your music appears in the production and how many times the production is aired. If your music is used in a television show that later goes into syndication, you get paid again. If your music is used in a film that is shown on television in the U.S. or in theaters outside the U.S. youšll get paid. Royalties aren't paid for music used in theaters in the U.S. (No, it's not fair but that's another story.) In addition to royalties paid for the composition, there is also an up-front fee paid for use of the master recording you submit. Itšs called a "master use" fee. For the master recording, a license must be granted to the audio-visual producer that states that you control all the rights to the performances on the recording. Each musician or singer who contributes a performance to your recording has a copyright interest in their performance and you must make some kind of arrangement with them so that, if the recording is used for something (beyond demo purposes) for which you get paid, they will be compensated. Cover yourself with a release agreement with your musicians spelling out what they'll get. You won't have to show these releases to the Production Music Library or the audio-visual producer but you'll have to "warrant" in the contract that you've done it so your singer doesn't sue them when she hears herself on that t.v. show. Frequently, the license with the audio-visual producer will combine both the "synch fee" for the use of the composition and the "master use fee" and for the purpose of compensating musicians youšd consider the "master use fee" to be half the total. What's the deal? Though each Production Music Library has its own contract, the general points are: They'll want to own all the publishing on the pieces they choose to represent. They ask for this because it's very expensive for them to produce, distribute and update their libraries and they want to be able to use your music forever. They also defend this position by saying that, often, a song gets popularized by its appearance in a production and other uses may result for which they should be compensated. Some companies restrict their involvement to only audio-visual uses, so you can also use it on your own CD or pitch it to recording artists without their benefiting from uses that they did not generate. Obviously, this is a better deal for you. Advances. Some companies will offer you an advance of $100 to $1000 depending, as always, on how badly they want your music which, in turn, is determined by how much they project that they'll earn for its use. Other companies resist giving advances at all. Royalty percentages vary with each company. Some offer their music "royalty free" which means, either the client never pays a synch fee and the "back end" performance royalties are all the composer and library receive, or the library does an outright buyout of all the rights to the music and that's the last money the composer sees. Here are sites with lists of production music libraries: http://www.cftech.com/BrainBank/COMMUNICATIONS/MusLibSrc.html http://www.musicyellowpages.com/prodlibg.htm ...or just search under "Production Music Libraries." Note: This article by John Braheny first appeared in his SongSense column in Music Biz Magazine, a great source of music business educational information.

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