Menu
What's new
By:
Filters

How much was your biggest PRO royalty check?

StevenMcDonald said:
I also can't help but judge people a little bit the few times I've visited the Taxi forum and seen so many posts like "So far I've made $0 and spent $600 in membership and submissions. But thanks for everything Taxi! You're the best!", but I'm trying to be better about that. For some people, it really is a helpful service for getting better at producing and making industry contacts. I just would never think about spending money to submit music myself.

Trying to live off of PRO royalties alone is definitely not for everyone - the reality of it is that cable placements, the ones with the most demand, pay pretty terribly compared to Network placements. But there's not a lot of room in Network. And even when you do get a good placement, that 9-12 month wait for cue sheets to be processed and royalties to be paid is brutal. But once you've done it for a couple years and have a consistent source of placements, royalties do grow, and it's nice knowing that a check is coming every quarter. But the unfortunate truth is that it does take a LOT of music to really see substantial results from royalties alone. I've been writing 5 tracks a week (sometimes less, very rarely more) for 2 and a half years now, so I'm in the range of about 625 tracks written and submitted to a library. I'm fully aware that it's a quantity over quality approach most of the time, but if that's what it takes to build a royalty stream and allow me more time to write stuff I want to, then I'll absolutely do it. Besides, writing so much music has made me incredibly efficient in my workflow and well versed in a TON of genres that I never thought I'd work in before getting into library work.

Even at this point, I still can't live off my royalties alone. I won't go into details, but royalties currently make up about 70% of my music income. The rest is coming from freelance gigs on indie games and short films. I've also gotten quite a bit of trailer music into a library at the beginning of this year, and I'm just now starting to work with another trailer company. So hopefully that stuff will start bringing in some not-so-delayed sync fee income.

My main point is - yes, doing library work for PRO royalties is slow and a lot of work. But it's not just a total miserable musical sweatshop experience. :) I often find myself enjoying writing in the many different genres that come with reality TV work. I've learned a lot, and the relatively steady quarterly income from it allows me to spend time getting really good at what I truly want to end up doing.
Click to expand...

nice post Steven seems like you have a good strategy there.

Danny
 
I write library music. I have done for a long time. I make my living from very healthy PRO payments.
And no, I'm far to English and polite to mention amounts ;)
 
the biggest check I've gotten... it was just a normal sized check. Like a normal payroll check. It fit in one of those 4 1/8" x 9 1/2" envelopes. I always wanted those ENORMOUS checks you see golfers hold up after winning a tournament.
 
$7,500. I actually thought that wasn't bad. But then I always set my sights low, because as I grew more experienced I realized I really wasn't that great at making music lol!
 
It was huuuuuuggggeee.

Because my music is great music. It really is. It relies on notes - and I have the best notes, you know. I use the best notes in my music. It is really amazing just how great those notes are. And I tell you what. I talked to people - lots of people actually - and they all think what I said. It has a lot of appeal. It's really just all there and what it is.
 
mverta said:
My biggest would have to be the one that allowed me to quit my day jobs. It wasn't very big, comparatively, to what I'd earn later on, but at the time, it was a fortune in gold, worth infinitely more than the paper it was printed on.
Click to expand...

Just goes to show - it's not how big it is, its what you do with it...

(I'll just keep telling myself that.....)
 
Desire Inspires said:
You think so? There are a lot of people out there with a longer list of songs on their catalogs.
Click to expand...

I have a very long list of songs on my PRO sheet but most of them don't do as much as I'd like.

Or anything for most of them :)

There's an awful lot of cinema and TV broadcast minutes out there with Hans' name on it. Can't imagine there'd be anyone with more than that on this forum.

And can't imagine if they did they'd jump in and tell us anyway :)
 
autopilot said:
I have a very long list of songs on my PRO sheet but most of them don't do as much as I'd like.

Or anything for most of them :)

There's an awful lot of cinema and TV broadcast minutes out there with Hans' name on it. Can't imagine there'd be anyone with more than that on this forum.

And can't imagine if they did they'd jump in and tell us anyway :)
Click to expand...

Probably not, but someone can let us know how their catalog has been helping them over the years. There are a few guys and gals here who are very prolific.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom