The second panel which I attended at Unconvention, focused on making money with music in a business-to-business (B2B) environment. In plain English this means: selling licenses to companies for the use of your music. It was very interesting to hear quite honest statements about financial earnings and the panelists also came up with some useful tips.
The panel consisted of Walter Flapper from Flapper Management, who has the Dutch drum’n'bass sensation Noisia on his roster, Renger Koning (Soundbase Studio) and Dave Haynes from Soundcloud.
Noisia manages to earn a steady flow of income by licensing their music for games and advertising. Most of the time they work with a fixed price, which is about € 6,000 to € 25,000 in their case.
But how do you get such a license deal? As always, it is key to build a good network: you should know the music supervisors and be sure to give a professional impression. It is also a good idea to repackage your tracks: if you have a 3 minutes and an 8 minutes version, you can address different types of supervisors.
We also heard the advice to keep licensing rights and master recording rights in one hand. In the beginning, it is probably the best idea to manage your own publishing (i.e. licensing rights). In a later phase you can work with professional publishers to expand your scope. These people are really professional and it will not be a problem to make quick deals. So after all, you shouldn’t worry too much about keeping master recording and publishing rights together.
Working for other artists can also be a good way to grow your revenues. You can produce for other bands or make remixes. For remixes Noisia gets a fee of a couple of 1000 pounds. It is also good to know that there are a lot of smaller independent game developers. This might be a good opportunity to get your first licensing deals. After that, it can lead you to bigger deals.
A big issue, of course, are the legal aspects of licensing deals. Essentially, you can best learn by doing. It is also a good idea to ask colleagues for advice. Just remember one big rule: always keep a time limit on the contract. Don’t give a way your licensing rights for the rest or your life.
[...] deals with big companies who have a couple of thousand euros in their pockets (as we learned at Unconvention). They prefer that the music of their portfolio is not used and that potential customers like me go [...]
[...] Finally, it is time for the third and last episode of my Unconvention Groningen report. You can read the first parts here and here. [...]