Artists House Vault: Music Libraries

I had the very fortunate experience of working for Alan Ett Creative Group and Opus 1 Music Library for a summer, and while I was there I learned a lot (probably more than I ever wanted to know!) about production music libraries.

Music libraries represent another career opportunity for those who are interested in music but don’t want to be up on the stage and living out of a Winnebago.

Note: Music libraries may not immediately excite all of you, but I would encourage you to watch some of the videos below to help you understand what they are, how they work, and to get you thinking about leveraging your own musical catalog…

Music libraries can be as generic as cliche background tracks you might hear on a PBS documentary, they can be sound-alike songs that save a production’s budget, or they can be as fresh as a custom score. Production music is licensed for all sorts of things: movies, television shows, DVDs, websites, games, and (similar to sound design) all sorts of venues which require background or featured music. Or, as Alan Ett mentions in the video below, those wonderful musical Hallmark cards:

Our next video features Adam Taylor, President of APM music, the largest production music library in the world. Adam talks about how he got to APM and then describes how the company works.

Next, Adam talks about the success of APM and its relationships with composers. This is an important one to watch because Adam describes how musicians get paid in these very artist-friendly relationships:

“Great!” you say, “but how do get my music into a music library?” Here, Adam divulges what APM looks for in their artists:

While Alan Ett and Adam Taylor represent some of the largest libraries around, there are a plethora of independent, smaller, and niche libraries around the world. If you have a deep catalogue of music, you may want to consider looking into getting your work submitted to various music libraries - particularly ones with a niche that fits you. There are also some online variations of this like Rumblefish and YouLicense, which are geared towards getting your music licensed.

If you aren’t interested in submitting your work, you should at least spend some time thinking about how you can leverage your back catalog to create new forms of revenue. You don’t want all of that spent creative energy just collecting dust in a closet!

Stay tuned, more on that thought later!