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Need some advice. In this day and age, do those of you who do licensing for your work find it beneficial to engage an agent for finding homes for your pieces? Or do the one stop shops like KillerTracks etc negate the need for having your own marketing agent? Thanks for your expertise and experience.

I'm starting to get into licensing my music to international libraries as well.

As far as I can see, there are too many libraries out there... Only a few are worth your time and fewer pay decent money. There are exclusive libraries, non-exclusive libraries, some pay money upfront, some don't. Some pay for sync events, some don't.

Also, it seems to be VERY HARD to get into the GOOD and worth libraries. If you manage to get your music into some of those, I don't think you'd need an agent for this, since they will do that work for you (for a price, depending on the library). All you need is to shop your music to these libraries, get accepted in as many as possible, and let them place your music for you.

Now, if you do know a good agent who wants you, I'm sure he could get you other great placements, so you could also work with him. The more chances of placements you have, the better.

With the Mexican TV shows I've been writing for, I've been lucky that they sell them all over the world, so for this music all the licensing becomes "automatic".
But I really want to get all that music (that I already have and aired) in those libraries to make even more royalty money from those same tracks. Otherwise they wouldn't be used for any other shows... A waste!

Hey FM. I very much appreciate your details.

labman wrote:Need some advice. In this day and age, do those of you who do licensing for your work find it beneficial to engage an agent for finding homes for your pieces? Or do the one stop shops like KillerTracks etc negate the need for having your own marketing agent? Thanks for your expertise and experience.

The music library IS the agent effectively.

I guess the real problem is competition. Then again the proliferation of channels means many more outlets.

The beauty of technology is that it has empowered anyone to make music

This is also the problem!

If you are talking about placement with a distributer who licenses your music, that is more of a service and it can (I suppose) make money for people. If you are talking about licensing for broadcast (internet or otherwise) then your licensing agent (ASCAP, BMI, etc.) should be your source of information and clearing house for your catalogue.

Things have changed a lot in the last few years. I used to get licensing income from TV, concert halls, and other traditional sources. In the last few years BMI has been paying for downloads from Amazon and other online distribution venues as well as more general sounding sources that are still mysterious to me. I should know more about those sources, but I'm just happy they are being tapped to my benefit and that is because BMI (and presumably ASCAP) are really knuckling down on the online and non-traditional broadcast and distribution outlets.

As far as placement goes, I don't have any suggestions except to try and work with good people who will get your work out there (preferably on TV since that is really where the $$$ is). No easy task, mind you. I can't even begin to tell you how many frogs I've kissed in the past 40 years that I've been actively composing. You just gotta LOVE reptiles to work in this business...

Thanks for the tips