How to License Your Music

In this short video we explain how to license your music and show you the basics.

Music licensing is basically like renting your music to other people. You keep all the copyrights but you allow other people to use your property (i.e. your songs). It’s mainly a pursuit for songwriters and composers so you can license your songs or instrumentals to other recording artists or you can make your songs and instrumentals available for licensing on TV shows, commercials, films and games and that’s what we call sync licensing.

Why would you want to license your music in the first place? Well licensing music is something you can do from home and at your own pace but there’s also another big reason to get into music licensing is that compared to other money making options available to indie musicians, licensing can be extremely lucrative and can generate recurring revenue.

In the video we show you exactly how lucrative music licensing can be, especially compared to music streaming, for example on Spotify or Apple Music. You can make far more money licensing your music than you ever could by streaming your songs to your fans on Spotify.

Are you an independent musician looking to make more money? Licensing your music is one of the best ways to generate an income from music, even if it’s early in your career. It’s also great for those looking to make music a second career or pursuing music in retirement because it can be done on your own time.

Check out this video to learn:

What is Music Licensing?

• How to create passive income with your music
• Metadata, keywords and tagging
• Strategies to maximize your success

How to License Your Music

Okay so now that we hopefully have got you excited about music licensing now what do you actually need to get started? One thing you need is the music, but you only need three or four tracks to get started. There’s this big myth around music licensing that you need hundreds or thousands of tracks to license your music and that’s simply not true. One of our students whom you will meet in the video has been able to make significant income from his small catalog of only 37 songs.

The other thing you need to get started is you need to register the songs you are going to license with a P.R.O., or a Performing Rights Organization before you submit your music for licensing to make sure you can collect your royalties. The PRO you choose will depend on which country you live in, but in the U.S. we have ASCAP, BMI and SESAC.

You also need to be able to export high-quality files like WAV files so when a music library asks you for high-quality files you’re able to deliver those. You also need to be able to provide metadata like keywords and other data to identify your tracks and make them stand out in search results – so that people will find your music and that your songs will be appealing to music libraries. We know from experience all different sorts of music gets licensed – so long as the production quality is up to industry standards.

The next thing you need is the right mindset for music licensing and the courage to send your music out to the world, and the determination to keep going even if you get turned down because you will get turned down. You also need the patience to do the boring stuff like emailing and researching but that is really how you stand out from the competition.

The last thing that you need in order to license your music is a plan so you can take matters into your own hands and make sure people hear your music – and that is where our webinars and online training comes in. We will teach you how to license your music so you will not have to depend on someone else to do it for you. We give you all the tools to get the work done yourself no matter what genre you write in or what your personal situation is – so even if you have kids and a full-time job we have a system for you and a framework that you can really tailor to your specific situation.

The cool thing about licensing via music libraries is that once you do the prep work and research and get your metadata in place, you will have done the hard work required for sync licensing and you will be set up to start to generate recurring revenue from your music. Contrast that with all the work you need to do to set up a single gig that you will only play once. That is the beauty and attraction of music licensing.