Dan Graham’s Work Tales
Every month music-labels owner and library music expert Dan Graham shares a detailed report of his business. The reports, or Work Tales, are a window on the latest trends of the industry packed with precious tips for anyone who is considering making a career in the field as either writer or owner. Use the navigation below to read trough the various entries and come back on this page next month for a new exciting episode of Dan Graham’s Work Tales!
JANUARY WORK TALES
More tiring stories of how great I am in my WORLD OF BIZNISS
As a pre-show catchup, this is the repetitive serial story of what I get up to each month in my work running trailer music labels Gothic Storm, Gothic Storm’s Toolworks and Gothic Hybrid, and various other library music catalogues - Lovely Music, Minim, Songcraft, Library Of The Human Soul and Future Pop (although Michael runs that).
Every month I say - wow it’s going well, and we got music in some trailers and then I give the same advice to composers about trying to be more better and less worse.
Luckily my readership and I can never remember what I wrote last time so it probably reads fairly fresh despite being more or less the same blog every month.
So now that’s warmed you up, on with the drama…
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TRAILER NEWS
Stuff in trailers! January confirmations included Richard Jewell, Pixar’s Onward, Star Wars Rise of Skywalker, Ford vs Ferrari, Top Gun Maverick, plus a couple of Chinese films and HBO and FX TV promos. Not a bad haul to post to the Facebrag page so that we can keep up with the Joneses. Although some of the biggest sounding placements are actually small sound design things, some of the smallest-looking are actually big custom music payouts for the composers, so you never really know what you’re looking at when you see our placements.
Mid-month we temporarily approached zero in our US bank account, and yet had an all-time high of cash owed to us in unpaid invoices from the major studios (quarter of a million $!). But then a chunk came through before any problems so you know, so what.
In January we started some very interesting new trailer album concepts, looking forward to hearing how they turn out in the next couple of months.
We’re now starting planning for our next LA trip in February where we hope to come home with a stash of new inside trailer knowledge and opportunities.
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NEW RELEASES
January saw the release of our Trailerized Classical album - classical music done in a trailer style. Hard to argue with that really, just beautiful melodies played with live strings recorded in Vienna then pumped up to full blockbuster trailer size. It’s what Bach would have wanted, I’m sure.
I have a good feeling about this album but then again sometimes things I’m not sure about also do well, and things I am sure about don’t, things I’m not sure about don’t and things I am do. It’s entirely random and I have no idea what I’m doing. When you build up your own company there’s no one who can stop you except the market, and the market is telling me ‘you’ve done alright so far, go ahead and knock yourself out’.
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GENERAL BUSINESS PICTURE
Hard to imagine how it could be better. Well ok I can imagine everything being twice as good or 500x as good thanks to a bizarre succession of hit albums and incredible luck with every track we release landing on a major movie trailer, TV theme tune or major ad campaign.
Also I can imagine myself coming up with some genius idea that makes billions. Why not!
So yes maybe I need to stop being pleased with everything slowly growing as well as expected and channel some kind of wild optimism and greed. Find more megalomaniac ambition. Turn our composers into overnight millionaires too, that would be popular.
Until then, great to see our newer labels continue to grow as expected, the library market seems healthy and not doomed, and not wanting to tempt fate, all looks alright at the moment.
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NEW SUB PUBLISHERS!
Last month’s blog trailed the likelihood of signing to new sub publishers in certain key territories. That’s done! Expect a proper announcement when everyone’s ready for the big push!
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NEW EMPLOYEES!
Two previous freelancers are becoming part-time employees next week: Roy Goulbourn on marketing and metadata, and Andy Proudfoot on various large admin things. Welcome aboard if you’re reading!
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NEW LABEL!
Our Michael Coates (whose wide range of responsibilities in royalty accounting and admin has now been defined into the job name of “Chief Administrative Officer”) has been the brains behind our Future Pop label and is working on a new label to be launched before too long!
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BIG COSTS AHEAD
As well as new employee costs, we’re increasing premium live album productions for Gothic Storm with live strings and choir, from roughly 1 album every 3 months to 1 per month. It’s going to be pricey so if income doesn’t rise to cover it, we’ll quietly drop that innovation!
We’re also increasing advances for those writers who do the most for us. Again, subject to quietly apologising and stopping that if new income doesn’t rise to cover it!
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US TV DEALS
One consequence of our shifting agent deals is that we’re back promoting our 3 Gothic trailer labels directly and exclusively in the USA now instead of a shared deal we previously did (us promoting to trailers directly while an agent promoted them to TV). That previous set-up started causing confusion amongst clients about who to ask for licensing.
So, being direct and exclusive for the USA has given us a new opportunity of reaching out to TV networks to set up our own blanket and pre-approved pricing deals, which will help get more of our trailer music on TV and earning broadcast royalties. Deals were done in January with FX networks and CBS, with other discussions underway.
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4 SHIT THINGS ABOUT YOUR MUSIC
Oops, sorry to strike you to your imposter syndrome core. I don’t mean *YOUR* music, you’re amazing. But here’s 4 reasons why I reject tracks or ask for changes:
1. Shit sounds
2. Shit mix
3. Shit master
4. Shit music
In more detail:
Shit sounds: samples that sound like cheap samples. Thin pathetic factory sounds. Crappy out of phase piano samples. Out of date drum, guitar and synth sounds that probably sounded just as bad when they weren’t out of date. Solo string samples with gigantic awful fake legato transitions that you think sound expressive and real. Ordinary boring string and piano sounds with no special character.
Shit mix:
Random parts of the mix way too loud, such as hi hats, piano, cello. Low and mid mess of sounds interfering with each other.
Shit master:
Distorted and over compressed, full of pumping booms and impossible to know what’s going on enough to know whether it’s good or bad.
Shit music:
Feel-good grooves that feel bad (clunky and lacking finesse and nuances of accenting and timing). Too many overlapping ideas. No gaps for dialogue to come though (have nice melodies but have long gaps between them so people can speak between bits, or have nice melodies with very slow notes you can talk over without getting confused). Disappointing melodies and chord sequences that don’t do what you were hoping they would. Or melodies and chord sequences that do only what you thought they would instead of something better and unexpected.
So: great music is just music with all its shitness removed.
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DAILY MAYHEM
Every day is a struggle against time. I try to chip away at my to do list while giving quickly typo’d replies to urgent messages and emails requiring decisions.
I write album briefs, give price quotes to studios for using our music, send out reminders about invoices owed and various deal negotiations under discussion, approve and give feedback for music and artwork in progress, fire off emails looking for new opportunities, train freelancers and employees in new tasks, organise recordings, explain the same things over and over to new composers, research the market to help inspire new album concepts and keep correcting course if we hit problems or potential risks.
Plus I somehow manage to waste a lot of time reading the news, Facebook and chit chatting, which gives me hope I can catch up when behind just by wasting less time.
How do I keep up? I don’t! I get some of the most urgent things done while some things slip through the net.
I’m also spending 2-4hrs a day on our Arctic fantasy midlife crisis vanity script* which is amazing fun but feels a bit like fiddling while Rome burns, I admit.
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*OUR ARCTIC FANTASY MIDLIFE CRISIS VANITY SCRIPT
I set the target of us finishing the first draft of me and Sophie’s musical fantasy adventure movie script by the end of January and guess what - we did it! Just another 20 drafts to write, finish writing and recording all the songs and we’re ready to try to sell it to an unsuspecting film industry. I’m secretly hopeful, thanks to the great songs, characters and story. In my unhumble opinion.
In February we’re off to Finish Lapland with a plan to meet a Sámi script consultant about the culturally sensitive use of Sámi cultural details in the script. This is our 4th winter trip to the Arctic (Iceland, Svalbard, Tromsø now Inari) while working on this project to help give us a better feel for the landscape. We’ve mushed huskies over mountains, watched the aurora, slipped over in ice caves, taken excursions to frozen fjords and rode snowmobiles over a glacier.
Hopefully it’s made the descriptions of the Arctic light and landscapes more vivid at least!
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JANUARY SUMMARY THEN
So, January 2020 was another month like other months. More steady progress, more music and plans and deals made as usual. Harsh time pressure as usual. Nothing outlandishly good or bad. Unless this is the pre-Coronavirus Apocalypse Golden Age and I and you should all be more grateful for how amazing it is compared to being in Wuhan, or a War Zone and so on.
As Phil Collins once said - ‘oh, think twice, it’s another day for me in paradise’. And as his buddy Bono concurred: ’tonight thank god it’s you instead of me’.
Soul-searching stuff from our 1980s moral leaders, as relevant today as then.
End of Year Edition
I ’ve gestated an enormous Yule blog for your festive consumption. Brace yourself, it’s a long one!
TL:DR: things went pretty well in 2019 which I partly do and partly don’t appreciate, plus some ‘success tips’.
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DECEMBER HIGHLIGHTS:
This blog, being year-end is all about the year before and year ahead. But first a summary of our December highlights:
* Trailer placements! Black Widow, Frozen II, 1917, Doctor Sleep, A Promising Young Woman and others
* TV placements! God knows, literally thousands of TV and advertising things around the world
* Happy composers! I got a lot messages in December from composers seeing a nice increase in broadcast royalties from the newer labels. Phew, my income predictions are still not lies and I don’t have to do a runner from angry composers yet
* Deals negotiated! Not signed yet so better not speak too soon, but interesting deals looking likely with 2 large sub publishers and 1 large US TV network
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2019 WINS & FAILS - HOW DID I LIVE UP TO MY GOALS FROM A YEAR AGO?
One year ago in my December 2018 Work Tales I mentioned some plans for 2019. I’ll paste them here and let’s see how I did:
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“#1 Compose music 4hrs a day instead of 2018’s average of 2hrs/day”
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FAIL! It was more like 2hrs a day still. God knows how I can get up to 4hrs while still running everything well and without working all day and night. Better efficiency and delegation, that’s how! I’ll try.
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“#2 Get more done via efficiency methods, delegation, and less reading the news and Facebook”
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FAIL! I don’t think I managed to be more efficient in 2019 and I still found myself rooted to the spot too often for my liking, reading about BREXIT, SpaceX, Tesla and people saying this and that on the old FB.
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“#3 No more library albums expansion! We released 123 in 2018 and that’s enough, so just the same again planned for 2019.”
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WIN! We managed to avoid expanding after a 9 year run of doing more albums per year every year. Well, we released 130 albums in 2019 so a slight increase over 2018’s 123 albums but not by much.
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“#4 Continued quality increase in our albums by asking for more changes and rejecting more tracks”
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WIN! Sorry composers but I kept tightening the thumbscrew and rejected more tracks than ever, and focused more on only inviting those writers onto albums that I think are the very best. Doing this does reduce the chances of discovering great wildcard writers and ideas but it also helps keep the quality reliably high.
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“#5 Release MovieMusic, an iPhone app allowing some of our music to be used in home made iPhone videos”
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ALMOST! It’s just been approved for the App Store but with Christmas upon us it’s best to release this in the New Year.
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“#6 Eat more healthy food, get more sleep”
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FAIL! Ok there’s no meat or dairy, and some salad gets in there between the beer, crisps, vegan pizza and chinese food but the diet needs work. Also - usually getting around 7hrs sleep and I probably need a bit more than that.
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“#7 Produce less Kontakt software (it’s fun but time-consuming and a fairly low income)”
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WIN! I finally gave up on Kontakt software when the main scripter decided to give up and I just felt too busy to find another to take over. Sad reality is that although it was getting good reviews and it earned reasonable money, it’s less fun and less money than other things I’m doing and sorry I’m just a good-time Charlie in it for the fun and money.
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“#8 Write an animation movie script by the end of 2019, with my wife Sophie”
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FAIL! Well, the first draft got up to page 70 out of maybe 110 before I finally had to pause to catch up with urgent work things. Considering I’d never looked at a script before that’s not bad going. Easy for me to say but I think these first 70 pages are looking good, although it’s a musical and so far, the songs are better than the script.
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HIGHLIGHTS OF OUR 2019:
OUR MUSIC IN NASA VIDEOS - after a year waiting for the deal to go through in 2018, Emmy Award winner Chris Chamberland at the Kennedy Space Center FLA produced some amazing NASA videos featuring our Gothic Storm Music.
GOODBYE BMG HELLO WARNER CHAPPELL? - in January 2020 Warner Chappell will (hopefully!) take over as our agent in a number of important territories. Contract agreed and drafted but not signed yet (!) BMG were doing a good job but our wish to keep things more independent with different independent agents in different countries clashed with their goal of representing catalogues like ours worldwide wherever they open new offices. So, here’s to a fantastic longer-term new partnership with Warner Chappell - a great team with an excellent reputation!
OVERALL SALES UP OVER 30% - We’ve had a few years in a row now of over 30% per year growth - roughy doubling our sales every 2 years and this trend has continued in 2019. Eventually it will slow down but signs are good for 2020.
NEWER LABELS SALES UP 80% - The newer labels (Library Of The Human Soul, Lovely Music and Minim) saw combined sales increase 80% over 2018. This is all expected since they are still fairly new and you expect very high growth for the first few years. It’s still good to see that the niche ideas behind the labels, album concepts and quality are all seeing success in the market.
WE WENT CARBON NEGATIVE - We donated enough money to a global charity who plant and save forests and build solar power infrastructure to be able to say that we took more carbon out of the atmosphere than we put in (according to their government certified carbon credit certification).
WE DONATED TO SOME CHARITIES - Ok it’s not a fortune but the company donated £3,600 in 2019, split equally between 2 homeless charities and one animal protection (anti-hunting) charity.
TRAILER PLACEMENTS UP - On average we had nearly 1 cue per day in a trailer in 2019 ranging from big custom tracks, to trailer library music, to sound design. By comparison before 2013 we had zero, and the average was around 8 per YEAR until about 2016. Things have changed at an amazing rate since then. In 2019 we did approx. three times more quotes (where we quote prices, like plumbers do) than 2018 so we’re still growing at a rapid pace. Why? Amazing music and sounds, amazing composers, working directly with great people that we’ve got to know at the trailer houses and visiting them regularly, listening carefully to what they want and always doing our best to deliver it.
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THINGS THAT WENT WRONG IN 2019:
MORE JOBS BUT A LOWER *RATIO* OF CUSTOM PLACEMENTS - In 2018 about 1 in 3 trailer custom jobs we did led to a trailer placement. In 2019 although we did more actual jobs, the hit rate dropped to 1 in 6. Partly this was caused by doing more high profile jobs which are higher paid but more competitive: 2018 included more lower price games trailers where we were the only music company working on it, while 2019 had more big budget theatrical trailers with many companies pitching.
I was concerned though that part of the problem was the way I ran the custom team - opening it out to a lot of pitches to encourage interesting wild card options and to give people a chance who I wouldn’t have thought of. In the end though we had more pitches per job than we needed and because the best writers were getting demotivated by the lower chance of success, some jobs received no pitches from the best writers, so the system had to change.
From now only 3 writers are invited to each job and they are given a demo fee so they’ll always be paid something for their time. It’s the end of an era - more of a custom elite than custom team, but hopefully some jobs that need more varied options will still give everyone a chance from time to time.
I don’t know how this will work out being a new plan, but I hope it will result in the best writers feeling more encouraged and improve our hit-rate above 1 in 6.
INFRINGEMENT CLAIM - they come up from time to time but whereas in the past they’ve been pretty laughable, this time our track was too close for comfort to another. It was definitely unintentional on the part of the writer, and I have to take the blame for not checking properly. Thankfully we were able to talk it over with the other party and agree a solution but you can be sure that I’ll be more careful to check more from now, this was a very bad day and could have been worse. In response I wrote and shared a FB post a couple of weeks ago, warning composers to avoid sounding too close to a guide track - yes it was triggered by this recent personal shock so I was speaking from bitter experience!
4 MONTHS BEHIND ON COMPOSER DEMOS - We get a lot of demos and I had this plan to listen to them all personally. But I can’t keep up. I’m 4 months behind now and that’s too long for composers to wait.
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WHAT 2019 *FELT* LIKE
2019 felt like an acceleration, a whirlwind of stuff to do. I just got my head down and did a lot and didn’t come up for air much. This didn’t give me as much time as I’d like for long term strategic thinking but at least in the Christmas break I’ve had a couple of weeks to get my strategy head back on.
I can’t say 2019 was fun or not fun really. It’s certainly exciting to rush to get a lot of very interesting things done, and I admit I get a boost from negotiations that go well, good deals struck, working with great people, visiting our clients in LA and solving complicated problems.
Seeing the success growing also gives me a bit of a sense of security though it can’t ward off unexpected problems, conflict, illness and death so it only goes so far. So there are boosts but I’ve felt too busy to see anything as overall good or bad. I just did a lot, and it got done. Exciting, but no cascade of euphoric rainbows.
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WHAT 30% PER YEAR BUSINESS SALES GROWTH FEELS LIKE
By 30% per year sales growth I mean the overall company income, not profit, and not my personal salary - I’ve always re-invested profits, so my personal salary froze at a moderate level for 10 years 2008 to 2018.
I have a graph of annual business income since 2004 when it was something like £5,000. Every year it was a bit more - annual jumps ranging from 10% to 80%. First it was growth in my composer royalties, then publishing income starting to kick in from 2014, with software sales adding more, the the new labels adding more, then a big upswing in trailer placements then trailer custom work.
Finally 2019 was a turning point: new income rose faster than new costs for the first time ever.
So, that means I can try to invest more in things I haven’t done much of before, testing marketing and advertising ideas to raise better awareness. More advances for writers. More charity donations. Extra hiring of freelancers & part-time employees to take on these extra tasks. Plus, having enough in the bank to cover the next 4 months’ costs instead of the next 2 - a bit of extra security to offset unexpected problems.
As for what it feels like: a bit of relief from not worrying about worst case business scenarios. Then, a slight empty existential feeling of meaninglessness and questionable priorities because I got into music for making music not 30% per year sales growth. But a mild feeling of validation (‘I thought that if I did A, B would happen. I did A and B did happen, so I was right. Ta-da!’).
It makes it seem more worthwhile when I consider that it’s more income for the composers who deserve it. Also, knowing that some can be used to help people who need it (family, charities) adds some worth to it all.
On a primitive level then, the emotional soup of “30% growth”-ness feels mainly neutral, with mutually-balancing aromas of mild meaningfulness and mild meaninglessness. Nothing as dramatic as joy or despair.
Maybe 30% per year sales growth doesn’t feel like anything. Month to month you can’t see the difference because you have ups and downs during the year. All it amounts to is some graphs looking healthy, and a bit more rainy-day cash in the bank than the same time last year. Nevertheless let me offer this marginally positive appraisal of my life’s work as a publisher so far: ‘more sales is better than less sales!’
Maybe what I need is 10,000% per year sales growth. That would be more noticeable. 🤔
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SUCCESS TIPS FOR YOU:
Maybe slow growth over 16 years isn’t exactly ‘success’ - I’m hardly a billionaire. But here’s a few things that I think have helped me create a long period of steady business growth:
- TO DO LIST: I’d be lost without it. When I get ideas I add them, it gets longer and longer and I’m never short of stuff to do when I can’t remember what I’m meant to be doing
- REFLECTION: Way beyond these blogs I’m constantly writing notes and talking into the voice memos app about what I’m doing, not doing, should be doing, shouldn’t be doing. Writing a constant stream of thoughts will always turn up a few realisations about new ideas, better ways of doing things, or urgent things you should have done and must do immediately before a disaster happens
- LISTEN TO THE CLIENTS: If you’re a composer that could be publishers, or TV editors. Listening could mean meetings, emails, messaging, or talking to them at industry events. Or it could mean reading interviews or blog posts. What you do always gets better by listening to the people who you’re trying to pitch to and understanding what will help them. After or during listening, also make a LOT of notes because you will forget a lot of details if you don’t
- KEEP THINKING LONG TERM: Maybe for some people they do best by just doing what they’re doing well, but personally I’ve found that by analysing what’s working well, and making financial forecasts based on what would happen if you do this or that, has made a big difference. Yes you can’t be 100% sure how anything will turn out and you have to flexibly adapt to unexpected events and opportunities but having fairly reasonable theories and multiple-year predictions is a lot better than just repeating the same mistakes and having no plan
- HAVE CONCRETE TARGETS: That could mean how much money you’ll earn over the next year or next 5 years. Or how many albums you’ll write. Or who you will write for. Or how many hours a day you’ll work on this or that, and what time of the day you’ll do it. Setting a target immediately gets you thinking backwards about how you can achieve it. The target creates the plan. Once you have a plan you can develop habits which get easier to keep the longer you do them.
- FIND GOOD PARTNERSHIPS: That could be people you work for, hire or work with. But, things go a lot better with the tail wind of great talent blowing you upwards to greater achievements.
- IMAGINE HOW THINGS WILL BE, NOT HOW THEY ARE: If things aren’t going as well as you’d like now, you cannot reason that ‘this is how you’ve ended up because that’s what you deserve’. That kind of thinking keeps you stuck in a rut because the only outcome is not thinking it’s worth trying to do better. By visualising instead how much better things will be in 2, 5, 10 years you get your mindset in a position of working backwards on creating the concrete plan that makes it possible. By visualising I mean, imagine yourself getting on well with your family and friends, nice holidays and house and that guitar or modular synth or whatever you would like.
- CONTROL YOUR TIME: Left to my own devices I am the worst time waster on earth. I am like an ADHD kid on acid, no perception of time, wanting to play and only do the next exciting thing I’ve just thought of. So I battle against myself constantly, setting constant alarms and reminders on my phone, writing daily task targets, half hour task targets, trying to get things done well, but quickly against the clock. If you do this enough, you buy back a huge amount of time, get a lot more done, and the noticeable faster progress encourages you to try harder. It’s a positive spiral. I’m still not great with time, but fighting this constant battle has been part of why things have gone pretty well for me.
- HAVE GRATITUDE: I probably don’t do it enough, and those composers who I reject after they’ve made a ton of effort won’t agree, but I try to show gratitude and thanks to everyone who does a good job.
I try to thank employees, composers, freelancers and clients with genuine gratitude for their time, great work and trust. I send Christmas champagne or whisky to those who’ve had the biggest impact on my work and life. I send messages and emails, I make extra effort to help them in return, and you’ll notice that our trailer placement announcements on Facebook always congratulate the writers, and we don’t take credit. Although I’m sure they’re lovely people, some other trailer companies seem to stick to being humbled by their own success in their announcements. Not that it’s cynical because I really am thankful and am not plotting to buy loyalty with a bit of praise and whisky, but it surely counts as a ‘success tip’ since it seems more likely to get good than bad results.
- TAKE RISKS: Yes risks can go wrong, but everything I ever did that led to some success meant risking time and money while not knowing how it would turn out. Composing music took a few years with no income before it took off. Setting up my first library label lost money for 4 years before it made a profit. Setting up niche labels like Toolworks for sound design and Minim were theories about what seemed like good ideas rather than guaranteed successes. Our Library Of The Human Soul catalogue needed a £200k investment where £40k of that was loans from friends, without 100% knowing that there would be a demand for it. It’s now earned £150k back, is growing fast and 6 years after we began will finally be in profit during 2020 and forever after, so that worked out well in the end, phew 😅. But yeh... keep taking risks, I’d be nowhere without them!
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GOALS FOR 2020:
My biggest goal in 2020 is to do everything business-wise better than ever, but finally actually make room for 4hrs/day of creative work (music and scriptwriting) without working evenings and weekends, via better efficiency and delegation.
This all sounds like a tough ask - but I’ll do my best!
LIST OF 2020 GOALS:
* Keep looking for ways to improve quality
* Better efficiency (do track approvals while walking the dog, do tasks quickly to timed targets, highly structured work day)
* Be less open to chit chat (sorry in advance for my rude brevity!)
* More delegation (freelancer & employee tasks!)
* Help more! Use the extra income to try to find ways to help composers, family members, friends and charities a bit more
* No more listening to EVERY composer demo (sorry, I want to listen but I’m going to have to ask someone to screen them and only send me the best 1 in 10 or so because I’m getting further and further behind)
* Find ways to raise awareness of Library Of The Human Soul via advertising, publicity videos and our MovieMusic app
* Write an expanded updated version of my book “A Composer’s Guide To Library Music” and release it as a physical book this time.
* Finish our musical fantasy “Raven Princess” film script and song demos and start trying to sell it to someone!
2020 TARGETS:
* Release 150 albums across our 8 labels - an increase from approx. 130 in 2019
* Devices off and in bed by midnight every night - I need more, better sleep
* Sales up another 30% - we managed 30% the last few years so why not aim for the same? This growth should be fuelled by an expected growth in income for all the library labels, based on the rapid increase in production 3-4 years ago, as well as an additional rise in trailer income triggered by releasing albums that follow ever more closely the suggestions and needs of the clients.
* Finish the first draft of our “Raven Princess” musical script by end of January and finish the song demos by end of April. Then, sell it to someone before the end of 2020 for $1 million.
* Improve the ratio of custom placements from 1 in 6 to 1 in 4 via better music, via encouraging the best composers more (elitism!).
* Release a physical hardback second edition of my book “A Composer’s Guide To Library Music” (currently e-book only) in September 2020
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HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Well, there you go. Another year of things going pretty well for the business, signs of success for the year ahead, with me as ungrateful as ever for my good fortune but with a vague Christmas-Day-Scrooge-like redeeming wish to help people.
Happy New Year to you all then. I hope you get your own great plans together and make them happen in 2020!
NOVEMBER WORK TALES:
In which I say all the same things in the same way every month, giving the impression of life as an endless Groundhog Month.
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WHAT’S NEW?
Most things are pretty similar every month. Work-wise, every day I get up, answer emails, listen to composer demos, works in progress, write new briefs, got to the studio, deal with problems (usually minor admin errors, tax or accounts issues), get new albums ready for launch, artwork: send briefs, approve final designs, manage custom work, talk to clients about ongoing and future work, waste time reading the news and Facebook, do some fun creative stuff for a couple of hours (working on a movie script), walk/run 7 miles a day with our tireless husky dog while listening to audiobooks (Jeeves and Wooster or business books or Masterclass), do price quotes for the studios and try to do a bit of thinking about strategy. I’m also (shh) working on a thing for Sophie’s Christmas present.
As ever I have more to do than I have time for, including me not answering a lot of emails and needing a few reminders.
Every day seems the same.
So what’s actually NEW?
Well, finances are more stable than they have been in the past thanks to income rising a bit faster than costs. We’re not exactly free from all concerns but I’d say stable, meaning a slight relaxing of constraints has been possible - spending more money on advances, promotion, recordings, freelancers and so on.
We have a set of novel series of albums on some labels coming up which naturally invites an increase in production, because each series once started demands fast completion so we have a full set in each series. I’m being vague here because we have some good new ideas that I don’t want people to copy 🙂
In terms of me not keeping up with work and emails, one thing that’s gradually happened is me just getting used to it and not being stressed about it any more. Every day I do what I can and if something slightly lower priority doesn’t get done or emails aren’t replied to I just let it go and think, hopefully I’ll do it tomorrow, or next week. It’s probably healthy and means I’m not likely to get burnt out. I’ve been burnt out a few times in the past, just strung up, stressed, getting no sleep and unable to make decisions after overwork. For some reason I’m doing more now while not feeling any stress about what I’m not doing. Maybe it’s more selfishness, or a better mental attitude. Or maybe it’s that 7 miles of walking and running a day I’m doing with that bloody tireless dog that’s making me more fit and healthy, against my will.
We’re also switching sub-publishers in a lot of territories soon. That’s new and could affect income up or down, hopefully up since that’s part of the reason for switching! Another reason was to avoid having one sub publisher control too many of our territories - overall we felt that having one over-dominant partner could reduce our independence.
So, they are a few kind of new things - more stable finances, some novel series’ of albums, me being less stressed and us switching sub publishers. Admittedly this is pretty boring stuff I have to admit.
I’ll try to think of some dazzling new schemes to excite and amaze, I don’t want to let down my audience.
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TRAILER NEWS
All seems to be going well on the trailer side: we are on course for giving three times as many quotes in 2019 than 2018 (where we quote a price to a movie studio, and 2/3rds of the time it leads to a confirmed use).
Other trailer thing: NDA means I can’t go into details but we’re in a transition where for a reason I can’t mention we’re now quoting much higher prices to a major client for a certain specific category of music. So far I’ve heard only silent tumbleweed in response to our raised quotes. It’s a worry. The new prices are high-ish but fair, but their response could either lead to a sigh of relief or losing a major client. Yikes.
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STAYING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE LAW
I try to help people including companies similar to us but who are a bit newer and have more to learn. There’s one thing I can’t do though legally and that’s give a rival company our price list. This is because the US gov could see this as ‘price fixing’ where a company might intend to maintain high prices by encouraging competitors to keep quoting high.
I just mention this because I’ve been asked twice this week and I’d love to help but I’d rather stay out of the California State Penitentiary.
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COMPOSER QUEUE
Thanks to having a special email address for new composer submissions, that means me getting more demos since I started that.
Thanks to me insisting on listening to them all (not giving the job to someone else) and being busy it means a current 3 month delay between submissions and me listening. I’m just finishing August now, moving on to early September soon!
Thanks to me being so busy I only reply to approx 1 in 10 submissions - only those where I want to invite the composer to do something for us.
I can’t reply to the other 9 - I just can’t justify the time trying to give feedback because of the complications involved, including:
Occasionally it sounds a bit amateurish and there’s no good way to say that without being constructive and explaining why. Doing that could both sound insulting and require an hour listening and coming up with examples and suggestions. I can’t justify the time needed for that.
Often it sounds perfectly good but to me, not quite good enough without me being able to put my finger on why. It might tick all the right boxes but give me a weird emotional feeling, perhaps me picking up on something in the composer’s mood or health or subconscious. Or mine! There’s no way of expressing that in a helpful way.
Often it sounds good, just not better than anything we already have. I suppose I could express this opinion but it’s only an opinion, and I can only realistically devote about 10 mins per day to listening to demos to keep up, and writing this and dealing with follow up emails would then mean getting further behind with demo listening.
I *could* pay someone to listen to demos but I like the idea of being the gatekeeper so that to some extent all of our music will on some level reflect my taste. Maybe I could employ someone very polite to write rejection emails and just filter demos down to the absolute best for me to listen to. It’s a thought - I guess that would reduce the waiting list but it might mean some intriguing music I would have liked being screened out and that would be a shame.
Well, this is why there’s a delay and I don’t reply to 9 in 10. I can imagine some composers wishing they could get some helpful feedback but it’s not easy to see how I can do that without doing even less of the things I wish I had time to do but don’t!
In my defence - I think I probably listen to more demos than most company owners!
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PLUCKY REVENGE STORY
Starting a library music company with very slow initial growth (because it was a side-line) and then eventually focusing on growth (new catalogues, rapidly ramping up production while increasing quality) has taken me through interesting times.
I had to experience the initial embarrassment of having no idea how it worked, having to ask stupid noob questions about what metadata is and trying to convince big successful companies who had better things to worry about to represent our music.
When you’re small, big companies can help you but you can’t really help them except as a remote future prospect, and this shows people’s true colours.
We met lovely people who gave us time and help (e.g. Peter and Barbara at Beatbox in Australia and Paul at Music and Images (rebranded to Music Director then BMG Netherlands and Germany). We also met others who knew we were small and made us feel that way - ignoring emails and polite requests for fixing problems, cancelling meetings, not bothering to release our music a year after it was released and using their power to try to pressure us into signing deals that benefitted them more than us. We even met one publisher character who bragged about ways he was squeezing composers to keep more money, as if that was a straightforward business win.
You don’t forget, obviously. You bide your time, quietly avoid these people and hope that one day you might even get to work against them!
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I’M THE BAD GUY?
My sour grapes against big ignorant companies could be levelled at me too. I get a lot of new composer emails that I never reply to (if I don’t see an immediate role for the music they’ve sent), and I will often say I’m busy if a new composer wants a meeting. So you know maybe I’m just as bad. My excuse is a ridiculous shortage of time. I have so many worthwhile things I desperately want to do but can’t find time for, so how can I devote significant time to mentoring hundreds of composers?
And that’s probably big ignorant companies’ excuse too: too busy to deal with lower priorities!
And thus, spurned composers will bide their time, quietly avoid me and hope that one day they might even get to work against me!
Bah, I prefer being the plucky hero character of the previous section, not the baddie who gets revenged upon in this bit.
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MASTERCLASS IN TRAILER FAMILY ADVENTURE MUSIC:
If you're a composer wondering what the state of the art is in sample realism, and what you need to do to be the best - here's your target: “Glorious Adventure Themes” - all on YouTube (spotify and apple links in the description):
https://youtu.be/6etUfE4jeYA
This is one of my favourite albums from Gothic Storm - such amazing work from David & Rene. It does have live strings blended with sampled strings which helps but it's pretty hard to tell everything else is samples, and the arrangements are beautiful.
The live strings help add 2% but the sampled strings sounded very very similar before the live strings were added.
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THE SCRIPT WE’RE WORKING ON
We made good progress with this fantasy adventure musical script I’m doing with my wife Sophie. We’re now on page 70 of the 1st draft of the script out of a planned approx. 110 pages. Also we have all the songs written and with piano and voice demos, with half of them having rough orchestral demos. None of the project is ready to share properly with anyone yet.
There’s plenty to be done: finish draft 1 then re-write it a few times to sharpen up the characters, dialogue and whatever details seem like they need improving.
Then finishing the song demos, adding live instruments so they sound like great productions.
I’d like to say there’s only a few months’ work left but the sad truth is that we had the initial ideas about 8 years ago and different versions of the songs and story have been knocking around since then so I’d hate to make predictions that I’ll only miss. That said, progress has definitely been more significant in November than any other month since we started.
Why? For once, I’ve been sticking to working on it 2-3 hours every day so it’s moving forwards instead of being forgotten about.
Some of the best progress has come about when I haven’t been in the mood but forced myself to get on with it, then ideas started flowing. Moral of that story is: although sometimes creativity doesn’t flow, often it’s just a case of forcing yourself to get started!
This project began just as an album of songs with the story as a concept behind it. I think it was roughly a year ago when we thought we should turn it into a script. Since then it’s taken on a strange inevitability. It’s not like I ever thought ‘I want to be a scriptwriter!’ or ‘I want to write a script and sell it!’
It was just that this cool story, characters and songs had come alive and they needed a script to go with them. That sheer internal momentum has driven us to do something we never intended to do and yet it seems like the most natural thing we’ve done creatively, and actually seems to be requiring all of our various skills but more so, in a way that’s never been so integrated. It’s very hard but a lot of fun!
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MOVIEMUSIC APP
We’re finally launching a music-for-videos iPhone app soon called ‘MovieMusic’ with 2000+ emotional tracks recorded with live strings on a half million dollar budget over 5 years. The music is from our Library Of The Human Soul catalogue.
It will be quite amazing music for personal use only but will get minimal promotion because it’s experimental for various reasons: we don’t want to cheapen the brand by making this, it could interfere with our agent’s work (although they have given approval) as well as lead to licensing problems if professional users don’t read the warnings and use it without a proper license.
On the other hand it could make a ton of money and be a gateway that leads to a ton of professional sales. So who knows. We’ll see!
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TIPS FOR GREAT TRAILER TRACKS!
Real trailer tracks will vary a lot in style according to the movie and brief (drama? horror? adventure? animation?) but here's some frequently requested changes I ask for:
Cutting edge production:
* No way around it, yours has to sound like the best in the world, as good or better than any tracks on blockbuster trailers
* Modern productions require a lot of up front sound design power - big fat rich sounds without distortion or boom
All samples must sound real:
* After so many years hearing live and sampled orchestras, I need to have no idea even with my trained ears that your samples are samples if we aren't doing any live recordings. Total realism is needed!
Gaps!
* Editors love gaps. One of my most common requests is to add more gaps, especially earlier in a track. Create an atmosphere then pause! This way the editor can insert dialog, and make the gap bigger to add more, or cut to a different track
* The number of gaps might depend on the track but aim for 4 to 7
Build!
* Early on you can get some power with slams and pauses (depending on the type of album). Then you have to build, build and then keep building And then... build!
* I'm constantly saying in feedback: this gets to 60% of what's needed.... keep building!
* Don't go back down in power for a while, or meander around a plateau. Go up, and up, and up, and up!
Duration
* The best track length is usually about 2:30 but see what the brief says
OCTOBER 2019 WORK TALES
More illusory meaningfulness, frozen in words for re-animation in your brain, like dried noodles in hot water.
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TRAILER NEWS
I found out that lots of our tracks have been used on NASA videos this year - a very cool follow-on from the licensing deal we signed with them last year. Thanks again Chris at NASA. Search YouTube for “Gothic Storm NASAKennedy” to find a lot of them.
A few nice trailer placements included Birds of Prey, Maleficent, IT Chapter 2, Wu Tang, The Climbers, The Goldfinch, 6 Underground and See (Apple TV+ show).
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SPLITS FOR ME, MYSELF & I
One of my increasingly rare compositions was placed in a promo for HBO (for ‘Moonlight Sonata’) which is nice. That gives an exotic 3-way fee split: 25% to our US company Harmony Music Libraries Inc. of California, 50% to me as a writer (whose copyrights are owned by one of my 2 UK companies Music For Film Ltd which happens to also own all our non-trailer labels AND Harmony Music Libraries Inc. of California) and 25% to my other UK company Gothic Storm Ltd. which is represented by Harmony Music Libraries Inc. which is owned by Music For Film Ltd which is owned by me.
So thanks HBO, that’s 1 for me, 1 for me, and 2 for me. This bizarre setup is an accounting consequence of the spaghetti-like way the 3 companies are legally entwined.
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CARBON NEGATIVE
Yes we’ve raised the virtue-signalling stakes - from October we’re not carbon neutral but NEGATIVE - meaning that Gothic Storm is now taking more carbon from the air than we add. Actually really we’re just buying carbon credits from a company that works around the world to save rainforests and install renewable energy. It’s not the same as our planes sucking the exhaust back in on our LA sales flights but it’s better than doing nothing!
Why are we doing this? Because Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion made me feel worried about all our sales flights to LA. So well done Greta and XR!
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HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT!
I’d like to make a huge announcement! But I won’t, because the contract isn’t signed yet so it might never happen.
We also have something else secret and amazing going on where talking about it could only cause problems.
So that’s two huge meaningful silences.
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NO MORE SADNESS
A couple of months ago I was elated to start a new depressing label called “Sea Of Sadness”. I got as far as registering the domain name before I released that I was better off keeping all these sad tracks as underscores on the trailer label Gothic Storm’s Toolworks.
So that was the end of that bright idea. Sometimes my theories still seem good a few weeks later and get done, some fall by the wayside and some get wrapped up into other plans like this.
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COMPOSER TIP CORNER: WHAT "ROYALTIES" MEANS!
I've noticed a tendency of some writers to incorrectly use the word 'royalties' to mean 'broadcast royalties' (otherwise known as performance royalties), as paid to composers by Performing Rights Organisations such as BMI, ASCAP, PRS etc.
In fact the word just means any income paid to composers when their music is licensed or broadcast.
So it does include performance (broadcast) royalties but it also includes sync (synchronization) royalties - which is your share of sync fees paid by end users such as TV production companies, movie studios or brands (e.g. Sony, Nike etc) to your publisher.
It also includes mechanical royalties - your share of publishing royalties paid by studios and TV networks to your publisher in return for your music being used in a streaming video or Blu Ray.
It also includes advances - money paid to some writers by publishing companies as a kind of loan, an upfront advance on future sync and mechanical income to be recouped from your future royalties until your balance is cleared and you start getting paid.
One reason I'm saying this is that my book has a graph showing average royalties to expect over a 10 year period.
Since sync/mech income can make up anything from 25% to 75% of your income, if you think my graph only refers to performance (broadcast) royalties you will think it's way too optimistic.
If you understand it correctly, that it adds together ALL royalty income, it's more realistic!
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IGNORE BITTER PARTING WORDS:
I’ve been told things by employers, business partners, publishers, sub-publishers and other working partnerships that I’m parting ways with, like: you’ll never make a living out of music, you’ll never succeed without me and my inside knowledge, you should stick to composing, you’re crazy to choose loyalty over the massive future wealth we’re offering you, you should stick to releasing 10 albums per year, you’ll see a big drop in placements if you try to sell direct instead of being sub published and so on.
All real things said to me, roughly.
It’s just their agendas talking though. Or maybe even their opinion. But often, I’ve proven such bleak prophecies wrong.
We’re all just weird self-interested emotional humans talking crap, so it’s nothing personal. The important thing is doing good work and being passionate and intelligent about it, and ploughing your merry furrow according to your own long term goals, not someone else’s which might be fine for them but not something you should go along with unless it’s aligned to your path.
You do *you* as it says on the t-shirts.
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THE WORRYING DELUGE OF GOOD NEWS
Business-wise things are going well by my historically modest standards. More trailer placements than ever, more quotes, custom work, the newer labels on a roll. Graphs all going up. Suddenly we’re the biggest trailer music label in the world by number of albums and rapidly becoming one of the most successful after 10 years of being a small, lesser known company. We even got reasonably good (very informal) company sale offer this year but it makes no sense to sell when sales are still going up 30% per year and you’re having fun.
So what though? Is anything actually any better for me or my life or our composers?
I certainly remain frustrated about my lack of time to write my own music, constantly trying to work out how I can squeeze in composing time with so much listening, feedback, admin and sales work. And it’s getting harder and harder to take any time off because when I do I’ll get sudden urgent things that only I can deal with.
As for our composers, some are doing well and some less so but I think their fortunes are generally rising with ours, on average.
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HOW COULD I BE MORE EVIL?
Some writers are concerned that some publishers will rip them off, so that made me think, from my inside perspective of knowing how the money flows, what could I do to rip writers off? Not because I want to, but to figure out what other publishers could get up to if they had greedy tendencies.
Well, I suppose we could take our chances with fraud by claiming we earned less than we did, but if writers called an audit we’d be in trouble.
One thing we could legitimately do is say that because we’re based in the UK, when our US company (acting like our US sub-publisher which we happen to own) earns trailer sync fees it should keep 50% of gross then give 50% to the UK company - leaving the writers on half they currently get - 25%.
Many non-US library companies do actually do this, so watch out for that one! We even did this ourselves for the first year running our US office in 2016 because it was losing a lot of money, and it was the same for writers as our previous deal when we had a US sub publisher (2010 to 2015). However once we were in profit it was clear that we needed to compete with other major trailer companies to keep the best writers, so we switched to 50% of gross sync fees to writers for US trailers.
Back to evil schemes: I suppose we could get away with switching our deals to 25% or 0% to writers now that we have more cash coming in - we could use the extra cash to pay buy-out fees instead of sync splits as some US library companies do. This would eat up a lot of our cash in the short term but would massively enrich us in the long term. Personally I’d never want to do this because it would be using a composer’s lack of money as leverage to rip them off in the long run as I see it. Better to make them feel part of our success by making sure they get paid whenever we do. We *could* always offer writers a choice though, if they want to sell their futures down the road for short term cash in the pocket.
Hmm what else? I suppose I could run costs down - super cheap stock artwork, no live strings, stop spending a fortune on flights and hotels making sales visits, and then use the extra cash to take a giant pay packet. Still, that would be pretty short term thinking so more stupid than evil.
Another thing - this year a company made some good income after I recommended them to some people but only because I thought they were doing a good job. They offered me a commission after their sales surged, as a thank you, but I turned it down. Not because I’m a saint, but because it would undermine the value of my recommendations and make me seem like I was self-interested all along and it was a scam. So, my vanity over my image managed to overtake my greed this time. Or maybe I’m just not evil enough. Or maybe I should have asked how much they had in mind before taking the moral high ground.
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HOW COULD I BE LESS EVIL?
It’s been a long term aim to pay advances to writers, especially really great writers early in their careers who don’t have big royalties to live on. We’re slowly ramping this up now but there isn’t enough cash to do this for everyone on every album (we’re releasing 150 albums per year) so it has to be selective towards a small number of our best, most regular and exclusive writers. Hopefully as sales expand we can keep expanding this to everyone who needs it. So yes, paying bigger advances would be less evil, although they are only loans in a way so maybe we’re not quite in good and evil country on this topic.
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AGE AND THE HIERARCHY
I’m 48 now. Every year I’m heading closer to oldness. I have a lot of experience of youngness whereas increasing oldness remains forever novel, each year having its own flavour. I’m maturing, like fine whiskey and old cheddar.
Perhaps elders are the ‘system’, performing an important function of creating and maintaining the hierarchical systems within which industries and institutions can operate.
Younger people bring the energy and innovation that keeps it fresh and vital, questioning barriers, looking for new ways, forever starting from first principles of what could be and should be instead of repeating what was and is.
So, I’m slowly evolving, from an elemental force to a conduit. I was the water, now I’m the plumbing. Eventually I’ll be the scaffolding, then the moss, rust, ivy and landfill.
Hmm I really need to write more music, so I can be the cool water in the pipes, not the rusty old shit.
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SPY SPAM?
This month I got some mysterious emails asking whether I would be willing to offer a blanket deal for music for a media company which is aligned against the Chinese government, who run stories that are critical of human rights abuses. There was something very odd about the wording which wasn’t asking for a license but whether I would be willing to work with them, and I just thought: maybe this is some kind of branch of Chinese intelligence trying to assess whether foreign companies will work against them or not. Or maybe it was legit, or a hoax. Either way I ignored it, erring on the side of cowardly caution. What would you have done?
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WHAT GIVES ME THE RIGHT?
I have a lot of ’inspiration’ - ideas for new albums, software, presenting things in a new way, art work just like so, tracks needed like this and not some other way. God knows where half of it comes from and whether my ideas are good or business just happens to be going alright because I’m only 40% a total idiot and the other 60% is lucky guesses that keep it all running.
I’ve had to make decisions faster and faster as I’ve gone along due to a lack of time to think about it, giving me a weird automatic belief that if I think it, it’s probably right.
That must be how Trump ended up a monster.
I gave *myself* this right. I started a company, made a lot of decisions and then kept going and that’s that. Who knows whether I’m right or wrong or half-right but it’s my job to decide and I’ve decided to keep carving through the indeterminate forest of possibility-trees with the blunt scythe of my opinion and that’s how it has to be until I’m impeached and carted off by a FAKE NEWS LIBERAL WITCH HUNT.
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THAT SCRIPT I’M WRITING
You might call it my vanity project - a fantasy animation musical script I’m writing with Sophie (doesn’t have to be animation - could be a CGI-heavy movie, clay stop motion, musical theatre or muppets). But you’d be forgiven for not knowing yet how good the music, songs, story and characters are. Well that’s my opinion at the moment, currently on a hillock of hope between valleys of despair. At the moment the focus has switched away from the song recordings to the first draft of the script, because we’re having to change the songs as the story evolves, so we might as well get the script more fixed for now then come back to the songs.
It’s good working with Sophie (my wife). Broadly I’m doing the initial outlines and drafts while she re-writes it and also is writing almost all of the main character’s dialogue because she has a much better grasp of her plucky, loyal, caring, honest character than I do. Worryingly, I’m much better at capturing the essence of the villains (!)
Don’t tell anyone but here’s the lyrics for the Taggy Man Song 😉
If you can be bothered, try reading the words and playing the chords, it’ll give a strong sense of what it’s meant to sound like.
Sorry don’t have time to strip out the chords from the lyrics:
Verse 1:
You can en-(F#m)slave little (C#) beasts with little (F#m) treats (E7)
You can en-(Am)slave bigger (E) beasts with bigger (Am) treats (G7)
And if the (Cm) treats stop (G) working and your (Cm) slaves (Ab) down (Fm) —tools—
You in-(G)duce your biggest (G+5) fools to im-(G7) pose your ruthless (soft, Bdim7) rules
And then (G) influence them to kill or threaten (G7) enemies with (Cm) wolves! (G Cm E7)
Verse 2:
I was a (Am) solitary (E) boy, no friends or (Am) toys (G7)
Betrayed and (Cm) ratted out so (G) much I made (Cm) choice: (Bb7)
I’d be the (Ebm) cleverest on the (Bb) scene, lay traps en-(F#m)act my clever (C#) schemes
You see out-(Am)siders can see (E) weaknesses, while (Cm) fools are half as-(G)leep
I trained the (Ebm) rats to dance for (Bb) snacks and then the (F#m) cats and then the (C#) bats
Who stole me (Am) gold to bribe the (E) soldiers who dug (Cm) mines to find me (G) diamonds and
(Cm) Jewels (Ab) it (Fm) seems...
Are (G) popular with (G+5) giants who intro-(G7)duced me to their (Bdim7/G#) cli—ents (clients clients overlapping with different voices: giants and hissing demons)
Fire (G) demons who eat (G7) diamonds like they’re (Cm) sweets (G Cm E7)
Fire demons, dinner time!
INST. DANCE (same chords as Verse 2, end on C#7 not E7)
Bridge:
(F#) If 10 gorgeous (F#maj7/F) witches all came (C#m6) flocking to my (B) door
I’d (Cdim) say too (F#/C#) late I (Cdim) hate you (B) snitching (Bm/D) witches (F#/C#) now I’m (G#/C) rich I (B) only (F#/A#) trust my (F#m/A) self G# F#m/A G# C#sus4 C#.
“What are you all staring at?”
Well (Am) now I have the (E) cloak and Alma-(Am) nac (G7)
And if you (Cm) dare attempt to (G) thwart me watch your (Cm) back (Bb7)
With my (Ebm) cloak held to the (Bb) sky I shall (F#m) invite the River of (C#) Time
To burn a (Am) hole down to the (E) demons, feed them (Cm) diamonds from the (G) mines
Then send them (Ebm) screaming to the (Bb) Ancestors, de-(F#m)stroy the After-(C#)life
And with (Am) no one in my (E) way become the (Cm) highest of the (G) high,
The God of (Cm) A- (Ab) -all (Fm) Time
From the (G) demons to the (G+5) diamonds, from the (G7) shaman to the (Bdim7/G#) ravens, (ravens, ravens, brave little birdies)
And the (G) earth and the giants and the magic and the science and the (G7) and the moon and the sky and the bats rats and cats will all be (Cm) mine, (G Cm G) (Cm) mine, (G) mine, (Cm) mine!
Come River of Time, I command you with my cloak!
SEPTEMBER WORK TALES
Short one this month, due to lack of free time!
I spent the month preparing for a trip to LA, then going to LA, meeting trailer houses and our sub publishers at the PMC (Production Music Conference).
Our sub publishers told us about problems in some countries (boo, lower sales), and success in other countries (yay, higher sales). They told us that clients prefer our newer music, or our older music, or this label or that label (short version: good work, keep doing what you’re doing).
We set out to fix various problems by switching sub publishers in certain territories, but we haven’t made our minds up yet. Lots of pros and cons. All options are both good and a compromise and therefore wisdom, time and some psychic powers will be needed.
Trailer house visits all seemed cool to me - urgent problems solved, cool new opportunities found and exciting new projects explained!
We had a few cool trailer placements and all that. All good as far as I can tell.
So... it’s back to the UK now, back to business but also... moving studio to a new building first week of October so no time to spare!
Over and out, thanks for reading! Hopefully the next instalment will be a return to the TL;DR extended verbiage format.
AUGUST WORK TALES
“Cogito ergo blog”
More episodic blurts from the human brain of Gothic Storm CEO Dan Graham.
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TRAILER NEWS
Placements! In August we had confirmations of music and sound design in the Spider-Man Far From Home campaign, plus a ton of sound design in the main IT Chapter 2 trailer & also 5 cues in a horror trailer “Countdown” - plus some smaller stuff!
Custom work:
We did a few things, but it was a bit quieter in August. Seasonal lull maybe? We’re going back out to LA late September so we’ll investigate and hopefully come back with new opportunities.
Quotes:
Last month I mentioned that July was a record month for quotes (where we quote a price to a studio if they want to use our music or sound design in a trailer, and approx. 66% of the time it gets used).
In August, our quotes were more than DOUBLE the number we had in July.
For comparison, that means August had more quotes than THE WHOLE OF 2017. Not sure we can keep that up, but it’s nice to have a good month!
I don’t say these things to brag, it’s all anxiety where I worry sometimes that things are getting worse if they go quiet for a week. Checking the numbers usually reminds me things are looking ok!
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2018-19: GOTHIC STORM'S BIG CUSTOM SHIFT
A year ago custom trailer music was only 5% of our income. That’s risen to 50% in the last year - meaning that we’re now as much a custom trailer music house as a library label.
We’ve helped trailer houses to finish with some wonderful custom music and overlays in these major campaigns and more in the last year:
Jumanji The Next Level (theatrical teaser)
Lion King (TV spot)
Dumbo (2 different spots)
How To Train Your Dragon 3 (2 different theatrical trailers)
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MANY PIE GUY
In these blogs I give information away about how I got from A to B with my plans. I don’t feel particularly threatened by anyone wanting to copy my strategies. Good luck to you!
My openness isn’t for everyone though. It’s not quite extreme - I take steps to avoid the worst dangers of total transparency - but I can imagine some people being annoyed about me giving the game away with career advice and so on.
What’s your approach? Do you feel like your area of work is a limited resource, a finite pie that you have to guard from hungry competitors? Or a big bakery where you can make as many pies as you like, and as long as your pies are great you’ll find customers?
I’m definitely the second, an optimistic guy of many pies. Bake it and they will come.
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FUTURE MISERY
In August I got great pitch from a composer of an album concept of beautiful sad music. Thing is, it didn’t fit any of our labels - Minim is too minimal, Lovely Music expects upbeat happy music, the 3 Gothic labels are too trailer focused.
So I thought - time for a new label! After a couple of minutes staring into space I had the basic concept - call it “Sea Of Sadness”, have all artwork as sad images with water, catalogue code SOS, market it both to trailers and TV, have every track in all 12 keys and a cover a range from dark and ominous to sad to reflective to tense while keeping it quite cinematic so it will always work on trailers - not too TV.
Amazingly the SeaOfSadness.com domain was free so I registered that and got to work on the logo and inviting writers.
Always seeking novelty, it’s great for me to do something with big consequences quickly. I start to go stir crazy just doing the same things but ever so slightly better every month. Yes that’s reality and I accept it, but something like this helps keep me excited, even if the music itself will be bloody depressing.
The flip side of that though is that although current me is excited about creating big consequences quickly, future me is the beast of burden who has to make it all happen. Soz, future me!
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STILL POOR
After 15 years of business growth I’m still stuck with stretched budgets and just enough cash to cover the next 2 month’s ($80,000 per month!) costs.
The reason is just ever-rising costs. We’re releasing more great music than ever which means more freelancers, fees, salaries, music distribution server space, accountants, lawyers, software development, mastering, recording, performers, promotion and art work. Not to mention ever-higher composer royalties (you’re welcome!) and UK and US tax (you’re welcome Your Majesty, and Uncle Sam).
Ever optimistic, I continue to believe that in 18 months we’ll finally see income rise faster than costs. I’ve been saying that for 10 years.
If that day comes, it will be time to decide whether to be a more composer-friendly publisher, ready to expand advances, or a Tesla Model 3 owner 🤔.
Better work twice as hard so I can be both.
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GOTTA HUSTLE
When I think back, I’ve hardly been offered any great opportunities in my composer or publisher career, especially early on when I needed help rather than being able to help anyone.
Pretty much anything worthwhile has come about through me reaching out and making some kind of proposal - getting my band signed to a management company then record label, pitching the music I composed, getting distribution for my labels, doing sales, even now getting custom work. It never ends - always looking for a hint of an opportunity that I can convert into a chance to land a job. I’ve never yet been able to sit back and let the opportunities roll in. And thank god because then I’d be dancing to other people’s tunes instead of directing things how I want them to go.
The important message is... people’s lack of interest in you is no measure of what you’re worth, because no one is interested in anyone until you can get their attention, show them what you can do and persuade them to give you a shot to be useful to them.
It doesn’t matter how good you are, no one owes you anything and the hustling never ends!
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MONETIZE YOUR MUSIC?
Some info on monetising music for independent composers.
If you’re an independent composer (no publisher or label) and you’re getting a lot of plays on YouTube, AND you’re not monetising it, it’s probably time to start.
Although it’s not much per track our Gothic Storm labels bring in about $50,000 per year now from a combination of YouTube and streaming sites like Spotify (we split 50/50 with writers).
We get about the same from YouTube (advertising revenue from unlicensed uses) as we get from streaming (mainly Spotify and Apple).
Ok if no one knows who you are you can only earn pennies but well, the more you’re heard the more you’ll earn and as Spotify and Apple Music grow, the money gets bigger every year because of the bigger audience.
YouTube:
This income comes from ContentID - YouTube’s automatic tune recognition system which spots your music, adds advertising and then generates revenue. To do this you need a content ID partner.
A big player in this market is AdRev, although they will only accept individuals on a case-by-case basis, looking for artists who already have a large following.
You can apply to AdRev here: https://cid.adrev.net/
EMVN (Epic music Vietnam) also run a contentID system which has the advantage that they will accept all individuals, plus they will offer an 80% split (instead of 70%) if you use this code that they gave me for our group: COMPGUIDE80. They also have an online management system allowing you to release claims and waitlist channels.
Contact EMVN here: https://www.facebook.com/emvn.co/
Spotify and Apple:
For distributing our music on streaming platforms we use Ditto which we found to be reasonably priced and usually works well despite a few technical hitches here and there.
Check out Ditto here: www.dittomusic.com
Disclaimer: we use EMVN and Ditto but this isn’t an endorsement and I’m not getting any bribes for mentioning them!
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MY PUBLISHING SCAM
I have this music publishing scam going. I convince composers to send me amazing music. Then I convince agents around the world to promote it, and I convince editors to use it in videos and pay for it. My sales spin - get this - is that because the music is amazing it makes their videos look better!
Then because all the music is excellent, excellent new composers want to send new music and video editors start to look out for more of our music because it’s reliable. Then, when existing composers get royalties they send more amazing music. Meanwhile I spend the money that’s earned on paying people to help administrate it, and on amazing artwork to add to the glamour. And I even cream off some for myself thank you very much! I call it my ‘salary’ 😉
Admittedly it’s a lot of work but wow, I keep getting away with it! Hehehe.
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THOUGHTS ON AI MUSIC
People sometimes worry that AI will replace human composers, especially for library music.
I think that by the time AI can truly be better than human composers (20 years away?), so many other jobs will already have been replaced by AI that it will only be one part of a giant shift to AI - commissioning of music, commissioning of film and TV directors, music supervision, video editing, maybe even directing, scriptwriting and actors.
Meanwhile, AI will be doing everything else: driving, car building, marketing, manufacturing, all jobs in society, mining gold from asteroids, generating free energy from space solar panels.
At this point humans have become obsolete to the economy, in danger of AI just killing everyone. Or if humans do control it, we will only be consumers living in permanent retirement, given free money for a life of recreation.
At this point AI composers won’t really matter. You can just compose your own music and sell it on vinyl to anti-AI purists who prefer the amateurish authenticity of human music.
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CONTENT PROVIDER
Some bad news is that we made a few hundred vinyl LPs in 2015 of our Gothic Storm Dragons & Kings Album but we still have about 400 copies unsold. Recently the distribution warehouse told me I need to sell them now or they’ll post them to me (please nooooo!) so I ran a promotion on Facebook - just £5 each now (70% off!). I even spent £200 on boosted Facebook ads.
We sold 5 copies, so that was more money down the drain. The rest of them will be sent to the recycling centre, melted down, a sad echo of my old band’s glory days as landfill content providers.
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MORE LIFE COACHING YOU DIDN’T ASK FOR
Are you a composer at an early stage in your career, or things not going great and you’re not sure if it will ever work out?
In the absence of a genius strategy, just keep trying different things and variations on your approach, then do more of the things that work well. That’s how evolution got us here, and it works for careers too! Variation & selection.
My career as a songwriter had some successes here and there in my 20s but I was back unemployed age 29-33 with zero money and it was looking bleak.
So, I just wrote a list of things to try: games music, commercial songwriting, library music, film music, TV music. Just do everything I could for one or some or all of them until something worked out.
I literally had zero money, no industry contacts, shitty PC hand built from cheap parts, pirate software, living in a low rent flat surrounded by booze shops and betting shops.
I thought - if I do EVERYTHING that it’s possible for me to do and I still get nowhere I’ll give up eventually, but I worked hard at writing a load of music, learning new skills, sending out thousands of professional looking emails and demos, and in the end a small number of opportunities opened up, they led to more opportunities, clients came back for more and it kept building.
If you can look yourself in the mirror and say you did everything you possibly could, you tried every possible method and variation and nothing worked well... at least you can move on, knowing you tried your best. There can be no regrets if you really threw everything into it and at least temporarily made your life a slave to finding the life you really want.
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NEW vs ESTABLISHED WRITERS
I sometimes find amazing composers fairly early in their careers who are nowhere near as successful as they should be given the high quality of their music.
It makes me want to try to put this cosmic misalignment right and do my best to get them that success, and it’s great to work with talented composers who are excited about the possibilities.
Problem is, library music is so slow that by the time I’ve helped them to achieve some success (after a few years)… it will never feel to them like I waved a magic wand… it will only seem like a very belated pay cheque from the bank of the universe after a ton of badly paid hard work… which is what it is!
In library music, success comes so slowly that it’s hard to appreciate.
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SEPTEMBER PLANS
Back to LA in September to see what’s up in trailer world and how we can do more and better. Also going to the PMC to meet a lot of our worldwide sub publishers. The big agenda for that is CHANGE - I think we might be looking at some switches of sub publishers in the months ahead, with the aim of improving income from around the world.
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OUCH, FACE
In non-music over-sharing news this month, I had shingles (old person’s illness, which seems fair now I’m 48) that made part of one eyebrow slightly swell up and hurt a bit.
Luckily some early antiviral medication confused its DNA, reversed its expansion plans and my mild suffering was prematurely curtailed before my face was able to break out into a swarm of seeping pustules.
Glory be.
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END OF BLOG
JULY WORK TALES
Where I repeat the same things every month about my ‘music publisher’ avatar in the sheeple simulation.
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TRAILER NEWS
We had some nice placements in July - a custom overlay (new orchestral and sound design elements added to a classic 60s song according the client's brief) in the main theatrical Jumanji trailer (that was a big one!), 2 library music tracks in the Lion King campaign, and a Game Of Thrones trailer.
We did a lot of new custom pitches in July so touch wood on those.
Our ratio of successful placements per pitch for custom work this year is lower than 2018 but this is because we are doing a lot more pitches for major movie campaigns with a lot of companies and trailer houses competing, compared to last year where a lot were for smaller, less well-paid games trailers - where only our team were pitching.
So, it’s lower ratio of placements but bigger wins when we get them and better income overall.
July 2019 was a record month for quotes (where we give a price to the movie studio, and approx. 66% of quotes lead to placements). We gave the most trailer quotes in any month since we began in 2010.
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STATE OF THE TRAILER INDUSTRY
I hear negative stories that circulate amongst writers about the trailer industry turning to shit in a variety of ways. Mainly the worries are over too many new writers and new companies undercutting everyone and bringing down prices.
I’ll give my thoughts on these as things stand now. I reserve the right to change my mind if I do see any signs of it turning to shit though!
1. TOO MANY NEW WRITERS?
Writers are like a pyramid of talent - a tiny number of amazing writers and a huge number of good to ok writers. There is always room for one more near the top. And, it doesn’t matter how many thousands of just ok writers enter the market, they will never compete with those at the top and therefore they will have no impact on prices.
It’s very easy to hear the difference between a production by an amazing writer, even on a bad day, than the best music by someone who’s only good. Any 10 seconds by an amazing writer will have orchestral realism, clarity of arrangement, a sense of direction, emotional power and beautiful sounds. Any 10 seconds by a good writer will sound more like samples, a more cluttered arrangement with clashes, a lack of direction, unclear emotions and just good sounds. They sound nothing like each other.
Believing that a thousand new writers will lower prices at the top is like saying that a billion YouTube videos will lower the box office takings of a new Marvel film. Of course it won’t, they are completely removed from each other and not in competition.
2. TOO MANY NEW LABELS?
Like the pyramid of writers it’s the same with labels. Yes a brilliant new niche label could establish a reputation amongst those more curious music supervisors who like to investigate anything new. But an average new label with only good music will be listened to once if lucky then mostly ignored.
A thousand labels could join the market but unless they are all amazing they can’t have any competitive impact on those at the top.
The trailer industry is a quality and reputation game, it is not a commodity like raw copper where one track is worth the same as any other.
I’ve spoken to major studio executives and they don’t want to lower prices if it means any hint of limiting choices for the best trailer editors. Their billion dollar box office revenues depend on the music being the best and it’s just not worth upsetting the amazing vibe of a new trailer just to save a few thousand dollars.
It’s different with their lower rung releases like Blu Rays, behind the scenes, etc. Yes here they will aim to push down the price and accept less than the best music to save a few dollars. But not on the big theatrical campaigns where the power of the trailer is worth millions.
3. CUSTOM DECLINE?
Ok the custom trailer market has changed. Previously a small number of successful composers monopolised the opportunities and got demo fees or kill fees whether or not their track was used.
Now it’s more likely for many music companies to pitch music on-spec (no demo fee), meaning that writers have to pitch endless custom tracks knowing an ever smaller number of pitches will ever get placed.
Firstly I need to say that without this change we wouldn’t have been able to break into this area. When trailer houses have great trusted relationships, why would they give a newcomer money to make demos when they have no idea how good it will be? We could only get a foot in the door by demonstrating what we could do at no risk to them.
So yes we’re one of the newer companies making things tougher for the elite composers. For our newer writers though, it’s an opportunity they never would have had, the best have earned some great money, and most custom pitches can be adapted for trailer albums, so it’s generally working well for them - on spec, no fee.
Not all of our custom writers are new. We also have some great established custom composers still doing well within our system - their better tracks tend to go to the top in the client’s choices. So, the extra competition sometimes just proves how good the best are rather than taking away their placements.
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TRIPLED
As of July, in the current financial year our US trailer income 2018/19 has been 3.3x higher than the previous year.
A lot of the growth has been from our custom work, but we have also seen a big increase in our trailer library music and sound design being used too.
Looking ahead I’m not sure such rapid growth can continue but we’ll see.
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WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN?
Touch wood, we’re taking our seat at the table with the biggest trailer music companies now. We’re still not as successful as some others I could mention, so we still have room to grow and improve.
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WHY ARE WE DOING BETTER?
There were some important steps.
Dropping our US agent and selling direct in the USA from 2016 with our man Michael Coates moving to LA to run his one-man sales office helped plant seeds and saw immediate increases.
In 2017 we had someone else running the LA office for 6 months which wasn’t really long enough to judge the results.
A breakthrough came in October 2017 when as an experiment I tried doing LA sales myself from the UK - spending what we would have spent on an employee’s salary instead on me and Sophie (the co-owner and my wife) making regular visits, plus working late in the UK sometimes, while also paying someone in LA part time to handle fast-reaction work where I’d be asleep.
I intended this as a 6 month experiment but it got fast results so I’ve stuck with it. Making so many more regular visits meant suddenly doing a lot of quality custom jobs, building closer personal relationships with a small number of music supervisors and hearing a lot more inside information about what editors need.
Of course just visiting isn’t much on its own - we also have needed good listening and note-making skills to spot gems of information others might miss, quickly prove how much better we can help than competitors, and have a lot of amazing music and writers to make it all happen.
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HOW CAN WE IMPROVE OUR MUSIC?
We need to keep improving the quality of our new releases, as well as the relevance - meaning making more music that the trailer houses actually need and not just the cool stuff that sounds nice in my head - though I hope to keep doing some of that too 🙂
How do we improve quality? One method is to try to draw out higher standards from existing writers with excellent feedback and encouragement, but I have to be honest - you often get better results by rejecting a lot of tracks, dropping weaker writers and finding better writers. Not much heart and loyalty in that I know but at least some writers do make big improvements and have stayed part of the team, growing with us.
Also many times I’ve dropped ‘weaker’ writers who have gone on to big things with other companies, so what do I know anyway.
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WHAT IF OUR RAPID GROWTH CONTINUES?
Although our trailer placements can’t triple every year, I haven’t given much thought to what I would do if growth continues higher than expected.
Maybe it would need expanding the LA office with staff to deal with the extra admin. Maybe I’d have to delegate more of my management roles - train someone else to do some of what I do to make handling more work possible.
It would be a nice problem to have. Maybe we’ve reached peak Gothic. Who knows.
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WHAT IF SALES COLLAPSE?
Worst case scenario is that I or our composers make a series of stupid errors that upset all the trailer houses and movie studios and no one wants to work with us, resulting in a collapse of sales.
Ah well what can you do. Luck giveth, stupidity taketh away.
I am not above stupid errors but I will do my best to avoid them.
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NEW DIRECTIONS
We have some bold new ideas suggested by music supervisors - two new series in development which might just make trailer editor’s lives a lot easier!
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OUR NON-TRAILER LABELS
July is a quiet month for general library music news. From mid-August to mid-October we’ll get all our statements from around the world and figure out if everything is still growing as expected or there’s a mystery problem. Let’s hope for no mystery problems!
My heavy focus on trailers might make it seem like I’m neglecting everything else but no, the good work continues - constant amazing new music planned and released and touch wood, steady non-trailer growth even though it remains fairly early days for the newer non-trailer labels.
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MY PET PROJECT THING
Work rumbles on with our spec “Raven Princess” musical animation script. I’ve been lost in script plot hell for months. You wouldn’t believe the hundreds of pages I’ve written playing whack-a-mole with plot fixes that cause new plot problems.
This first attempt at co-writing a script has totally made me understand why you see so many bad plot moments in films! You can remove SO MUCH stress just by having a plot flaw that you kind of gloss over. Or by having characters stand there and explain the plot so you don’t have to spend forever looking for ways to hide it in plausible ways.
Writing a script is an exercise in contrivance. You are constantly manipulating events so that something amazing and extraordinary can happen in a way that makes sense, while trying to cover your tracks to hide all the plumbing that guided the action in that direction.
The two opposing enemies are plot flaws and over-complication. It’s easy to make it simple but leave it full of questions about why they did this and not something else. Too much of this though and it would be a distraction to the watcher.
On the other hand it’s easy to make everything logically watertight if it’s full of complicated details and explanations, but this would be too taxing and boring to watch.
The solution is iterative problem solving aiming at elegance where the story seems simple, manages to result in a series of amazing moments and isn’t full of plot flaws. I’ll let you know if I ever get to that point!
Maybe it’s just me and my over complicated brain biting off more than it can chew with an elaborate cosmology of magical physics, spirits, the afterlife, demons, magic rivers of light and sky diamonds.
ANYWAY yeh.
BRAAAAAMMM back to the trailers…
JUNE WORK TALES
This month’s tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
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WHAT I’D LIKE TO DO
- Spend half of each day writing music.
- Listen to amazing music and give support and inspiration to writers.
- Get tons of tracks placed in endless cool things.
- Clients write me endless praise for our new music
- Clients write hoping to book us in for their next project when we can fit them in.
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WHAT I ACTUALLY DO
- Spend most days doing no music.
- Listen to a mix of amazing music and problematic music where I give a lot of change requests and rejections.
- We **do** get some tracks placed in some cool things.
- Clients usually give no response when we bring out a new album (once in a while I might get ‘send as mp3s’ or some other short reply).
- I ask them if they can book us in on their next project (and they sometimes do!).
Plus:
Spreadsheets. Worrying about money in and money out this month, next few months and next year or two. Fixing many small and some big problems. Chasing composers for missing details or audio files. Apologising to agents for having to withdraw tracks for some copyright infringement risk. Writing briefs. Trying to diplomatically explain to writers why I didn’t think they were good enough to be invited on some album. Converting audio files. Renaming audio files. Drafting legal agreements. Researching options for decisions (software/services/promotional items etc.).
Also, wasting time on Facebook and reading news stories about space, science and technology.
Ah well, I kind of enjoy most of admit I must admit.
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WE’RE KIND OF A BIG DEAL
Gothic Storm now has 153 trailer albums on our 3 “Gothic” trailer labels: 88 music and 65 sound design.
This means we are the BIGGEST TRAILER LIBRARY IN THE WORLD (by number of albums)! Hooray!
Importantly we’re also one of the best - especially if you value live strings on every track like you get with Gothic Storm, or if you’re an editor and need a ton of amazing sound design like you get with Gothic Storm’s Toolworks.
And... there’s an ever-increasing focus on quality and relevance - making album concepts that trailer editors actually want rather than adding fodder to the decaying pile of ‘epic action trailer music’ in the world.
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TRAILER NEWS
June saw some great quote requests (where the studio asks ‘how much if we use this?’). Statistically I’ve found that two-thirds of quotes lead to confirmations (placements in a trailer).
We had some good confirmations too: Toy Story 4, Ma and promos for HBO’s Euphoria and Watchmen.
We also had a direct intervention from an A-list actor who I’d better not mention. A trailerization we did of a song was all set for approval for a trailer when a star of the movie gave word back that the song wasn’t well known enough. Cue a week of our composer doing a similar job with 3 different songs until just as we began the 4th song, our celeb gave word back that no, the first one was the best so stick with that. Still, I guess the 2 new versions had to be done to help the first version to be chosen, no work is wasted!
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MID-TERM TRAILER RESULTS:
We’re halfway through 2019. Mid-term results:
- we’ve worked on slightly more custom trailer projects than the first half of 2018.
- we’ve had approx. double the number of quote requests (where they ask how much it will cost of they use it)
- we’ve had approx. double the number of confirmed placements compared to the first half of last year.
- we’re still getting more quotes for sound design than music (which you would expect since every trailer uses maybe 50 sound design cues for every music cue) but we’re seeing a trend towards a bigger proportion of our music being used this year compared to last
So far so good then. Fingers crossed the rest of the year will go ok!
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NDA RESTRICTED THING ABOUT OUR ****** *******
I’m very pleased to announce that from October our ***** with ***** will be amended to remove ******* and ******* ******** so that we can now ****** **** ****. This means that people like ****** ****** ***** can’t ****** ******* ****** ****** ******** ********* bullshit!
Exciting times!
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THE DISAPPEARING HORIZON OF HOME AND DRY
For the last few years I’ve thought ‘things are growing well. In 18 months we’ll be home and dry with company income finally covering costs properly with some to spare for more advances, extra marketing and other projects’. And yet it still hasn’t happened. The problem is that our costs are rising as fast as our sales income. We’re still fairly small really but we’re spending about $60k per month and rising on salaries, royalties to writers, tax, sales trips and freelancer and recording costs. And so, however well it seems to be going, we’re only ever 2 months away from running out of money and halting production for a while.
When will this spiral of madness end? When I’m dead maybe!
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MY GAMBLING DECADE
From 2010, once I had a bit of writer royalties coming in, I started gambling. Or investing as some call it.
My biggest gambles were £10k on starting Gothic Storm (2010), £50k on starting a US company (2016) and £200k from 2014 to 2019 on the Library Of The Human Soul project (thousands of tracks with live strings, each capturing one emotion).
The first two have gone well. Library Of The Human Soul is still deep in debt but it’s made £60k back and growing fast, so that should break even in 3 years.
Overall then, even though I didn’t know it when putting down the bets, with hindsight they were a good idea. I admit, part of me thought maybe I have no idea what I’m doing and I’m throwing all my savings away.
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WHAT CAN YOU LEARN?
To get anywhere, you need to take gambles and hope that you more or less know what you’re doing and your plans will go well. Your luck may vary!
The difference between a sane investment and a pure gamble is that with a sane investment the odds are pretty good, you kind of have an idea what you’re doing and you can somewhat control the outcome. Like farmers planting seeds - yes, birds could eat them or frost and drought could destroy them, but you wouldn’t get far without planting them and no one thinks farmers are crazy gambling addicts for planting seeds.
It’s all risk-taking to some degree. But then, NOT investing time or money runs a higher risk of you getting nowhere than doing so, so a bit of educated gambling is a safer bet than playing it safe.
Someone put that on a business book cover, it’s self-help dynamite.
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IN THE MOVIES!
Our The Library Of The Human Soul project is thousands of short emotional pieces of music with live strings designed to seamlessly blend together to create film scores. It took 5 years and the main (live recordings) part of it is finished now:
www.libraryofthehumansoul.com
I heard some great news in June that a US-produced comedy feature film with some good press interest will be using a lot of our Library Of The Human Soul tracks. Which has led to a new enthusiasm....
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TEMP-TATION
Getting the Library Of The Human Soul in a film is cool but also the editor told me how great it has been for temp tracks, and that one statement has opened up what could be a new adventure.
With temp tracks the editor adds temporary music from elsewhere that roughly fits to help with the editing and to help give emotional depth when showing off their edits. So then, this editor on the comedy film suggested to me that I should promote the library to other editors for use in film temp tracks.
This is an amazing idea. The cinematic sound and organisation by emotions indeed does make it uniquely perfect for temp scores.
Although we’d get no license fees for this, there is a possibility that some of the music could stay in the score, or that editors and producers who get to know the collection will go on to use it in their other projects such as documentaries or advertising.
This plan has led me down a very interesting path of researching film and TV show editors, reaching out to some, growing a whole new network, learning about a whole new world and it’s making me contemplate learning AVID Media Composer so I can get a bit more inside their world making some videos and editing with our music. Maybe I’d make tutorial videos or something practical.
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BEING AN OPPORTUNIST
I suppose a key to most projects of mine that have gone well is always having my ear open to an opportunity. Once in a while someone says something that sounds like a giant window into the future opening up in which a huge plan looks obvious, I write it down and get on with it. That process has worked for me over and over. Part of it is being tuned to be receptive to opportunities, part of it is an optimistic belief that any good plan could go well, part of it is making the plan (a to do list of bullet points) and then of course a big part is the hours executing the plan and being determined even if you get resistance.
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IT’S GREAT TO FEEL TERRIBLE!
Yesterday for the first time in a couple of years I had a familiar old nagging terrible feeling and I wondered what it was. I realised it was a feeling of awkwardness, social embarrassment and feeling like I was an idiot who knew nothing. And I realised this was coming from reaching out to senior film editors on LinkedIn who don’t know me, trying to interest them in something they didn’t ask for.
And I thought ‘wow this is so great!’, because it’s a feeling I ALWAYS had when trying to break into anything new like being in a band, trying to get a record deal, a composer, publisher, then movie trailer music sales, and it’s a sign that you’re trying to do something new and worthwhile instead of treading water in your comfort zone.
It’s probably the same thing as ‘imposter syndrome’ but for me if you really are outside a community wanting to get in you will naturally feel awkward and embarrassed about not knowing any of the etiquette and all the blunders you can and will make. It’s more like ‘outsider syndrome’ but it’s not a syndrome it’s just being an outsider and not wanting to be a big idiot.
I could spend the rest of my working days in my comfort zone, repeating myself but where’s the excitement in that? It’s a path to boredom and ruts.
I think you have to keep refreshing things and moving forward, taking everything you’ve learned and built and your reputation, and use it for something new.
To do that you need to stay curious and keep being an outsider. There’s always new networks to blunder into.
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OUR MUSICAL ANIMATION SCRIPT
Hmm, again work has slowed even more if that’s possible on our musical animation script (‘our’ being me and my wife Sophie). Still, some progress has been made.
I’ve spent maybe 200 hours in total on just the plot. I can only say that getting this plot together has been extremely complicated.
It’s a very similar experience to launching complicated business plans - it has the same demand of needing your entire maximum brain power to make creative leaps and solve seeming logistic impossibilities with elegant, efficient ideas.
The goal is for the story to follow naturally from the way the imaginary universe works.
But, we have all these great set-pieces we want to be in there which therefore means ad hoc retrofitting the plot (and therefore the laws of the universe) to make these events happen. Which has a huge danger of either causing big plot flaws or the plot (and laws of the universe!) seeming very contrived.
The goal is a clear, clean, elegant plot which seems natural, while also giving rise to all these amazing dramatic events (let’s just say, Sky Diamond, River Of Time, Guide Stars, Diamond Tunnel, Evil Mayoress, The Taggy Man, The Raven Princess, her wolves, Sabrina the River Spirit, The River Gateway, The Ice Castle, the shaman witch, the Afterlife, the Waterwheel of The Universe, a Cloak Made Of Sky, demons, giants, soldiers, rats, bats and cats.)
And so... we have to nail the plot and the outline before going back to the script and the songs.
Although all the songs are written and some songs have a fairly finished demo version now, I realised this month that big plot changes would waste a lot of time if we’d already recorded all the songs with lyrics, orchestral mockups and sections which would then have to be dropped, so I realised that we now need to get the plot and outline 99% fixed before going back to the songs.
The thing that really drives me forward with this project is the quality of the songs. Yes I know I could be just blowing my own trumpet but I think we have a brilliant set of songs in terms of their melodies, words, concepts and eventual orchestral/cinematic sound, and every time I go back and listen I think ‘man, this is too good not to spend a few thousand hours of my life finishing!’
With enough discipline and getting back to a regular 3 hours a day working on this I think we could have something great by the end of the year.
Then, I can finally say to all of my network of film editors and movie studio people, ‘ta-dah! Here’s my ulterior motive! All these years you thought I was trying to sell you music, actually I was a closet scriptwriter delusionist! PLZ READ MY SCRIPT AND GIVE IT TO SPIELBERG! IT’S FROZEN MEETS MIYAZAKI!’
MAY WORK TALES
May’s been great. Initial worries were resolved by a great LA trip at the end of the month. Nice trailer placements too: Lion King, Aladdin and more. Can’t complain!
HOLLYWOOD NEWS
We went back to Hollywood to meet our trailer house and studio clients.
It was the usual mind blowing influx of new information which will result in major new directions in the months ahead.
Interpret this as you will but my major takeaway was that predictable action trailer music is out of fashion and unexpected creativity, freshness and uniqueness is in. For example one major trailer house music supervisor told me ‘if I see another epic action album I just put it on the server and never listen to it’.
Yup, from now on your music will only be listened to if the album has a fresh novel concept that grabs their attention.
Our new Melodic Dawn album is a good example: uplifting epic music with live strings in one way but with a unique twist of exceptional quality control being focused on great melodies before any idea could be cleared for further development. The unique twist makes it rise above the noise and has allowed my favourite ever album to be listened to.
That said: something great but generic might still be the perfect track for a given trailer which pops up in a music search, but from now it’s best to be special!
AWARD WINNERS
We had music and sound design in so many campaigns last year we surely had lots of things in many Golden Trailer Award winners (the ceremony of which we attended while in LA). I know we definitely had a heap of sound design in a winning trailer for the horror film Us edited by the in-house team at Universal but it’s probably a lot more. I did ask the trailer houses gently if we were in their nominated trailers but it could take them an hour to work through cue sheets trying to figure out who did what so I really didn’t want to hassle them!
Usually all we know is that we had something in some movie campaign with no idea what trailer it was or who made it so let’s just crown ourselves big winners anyway 🙂
HOLLYWOOD PROGRESS
It really was a fantastic trip. We could feel the way doors were being opened further, being trusted more, brought in at an earlier and higher level on projects. Important new connections.
I can only say that our ‘secret’ is a lot of great music, careful selection of great composers, a long time in the game (9 years), building up good long term relationships based on trust and respect, investing hundreds of thousands in expensive productions and a lot of listening carefully and reading between the lines in conversations.
Of course we’ve made mistakes along the way and still make them all the time but it’s pretty clear to me that we’re in a sweet spot, firing on four cylinders with everything going well and getting better.
Touch wood 😉
STOOPID BEER MUGS
May’s blunder of the month was spending $700 on fancy wooden carved Gothic Storm beer mugs to give to clients. We had no time so had them shipped to LA from the Ukraine. They looked good in the photos, but they are HUGE and the logo is HUGE and they look a combination of ugly and ridiculous so we couldn’t give them to anyone.
We took a couple home but left 18 at the hotel. I’m fired!
ME AND MY BIG BOOK
As some may know I wrote a book about library music “A Composer’s Guide To Library Music’. It’s sold something like 800 copies, not bad for a niche e-book without much promotion.
Some people have asked whether there will be a physical version but no, I’m too busy to look into it, plus I like the idea of it being a little book of trade secrets, only known by word of mouth. I don’t want to turn it into a bigger thing that could turn the already rising tide of great writers into a stampede, or sell false promises leading wannabes to give up their jobs and lose their houses, or think library music is a get rich quick scheme.
So, maybe it’s nice to keep it small. I even find the fact that it’s still selling about 12 copies per week slightly worrying in case it’s getting too widespread. And I’m pretty sure for every copy sold there might be one or two PDF shares with friends.
Naughty pirates!
IT’S ALL OVER
Earlier in May I had a couple of paranoid scares. For one thing I noticed we’d had less custom music requests in April and early May than Feb/March and I thought - ‘that’s it, we’ve gone out of fashion, it’s all over’.
My nerves calmed when some new jobs came in.
Plus I noticed that April and May were also quiet last year so it’s probably to do with timings of when they work on what campaign relative to summer blockbusters etc.
Another scare was when I sent out emails to arrange meetings in LA. Just a week before going all I had was one meeting booked and a few apologies about being away on vacation. I thought - ‘that’s it, we’ve gone out of fashion, it’s all over’.
Then I got loads of replies, a full schedule of meetings set up and finally a wonderfully encouraging trip to LA. Phew.
REJECTING TRACKS
I know one of the hardest things for writers is tracks being rejected, especially after a few revisions. The problem for me and other publishers is that our reputations of course are built on everything sounding amazing. Once we have a few amazing submissions for an album, it is often those others that have the most revisions requested that still just don’t sound as good as the best who got it right first time.
They are therefore the most likely to be rejected. Which leaves some composers thinking ‘I did everything you asked for and you still rejected me, you are impossible to work for!’
Sometimes it’s just the wrong style or an ambiguous brief (my fault!), but a common problem is tracks from good writers that tick all the boxes, do everything they should, sound professional, but just aren’t as exciting when you listen to them next to the best tracks.
Something being correct and professional but not exciting is difficult to give revision notes for because there’s nothing obvious wrong with it. Much easier to reject and say ‘sorry it’s not really in the style we need’ (coward response!). The honest version is: ‘this is what I asked for but it doesn’t make me feel as excited as the other tracks so I don’t want it.’
That’s the truth but it sounds hopelessly subjective and unhelpful and it’s pretty hard to come back from that. Probably the only honest response to me from a rejected writer is ‘fuck you, I’ll give it to a better publisher who appreciates my work and then go on to amazing career success while having a grudge against you forever and one day I’ll get even with you, you prick’.
Jeez man, tone down the anger.
THE RIVER OF MUSIC
As it gets cheaper to produce world class music some people worry about this driving sync fees and royalties down and so much competition making it harder and harder for anyone to succeed.
Myself I see this as a great opportunity for companies with great music to say to clients ‘don’t waste forever listening to that endless river of crappy noise, trust us, we’re reliably great!’
The bigger the competition the better you must be, but do that and you’ll be fine.
FINALLY
Overall, great month, great progress, re-invigorated with tons of cool plans ahead.
APRIL WORK TALES
More loose threads from the unravelling tapestry of my music publishing fever-dream.
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OUR VEGAS HIT & RUN FEEDBACK HEIST
In early April me & co-owner Sophie went to Las Vegas for just ONE DAY of sub publisher meetings - quite something to fly in Sunday and back Tuesday from Manchester but it was better than I thought - a few airline Proseccos helped with power naps to offset the time zone madness, and the pleasant meetings and a sunny afternoon off gave me the impression of having a nice break away rather than an insane flight plus meetings hell.
At Vegas it was the NAB conference where a lot of our sub publishers (agents who promote our music in different countries) go so it’s a chance to catch up on industry murmurings about current threats and opportunities.
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STUFF I LEARNED IN VEGAS:
China: things are looking very promising there. Literally thanks in part to Trump’s pressure they are becoming much more strict about preventing copyright infringement. This is giving a big boost library music companies as big Chinese companies start to pay top dollar for great music. That’s a big market waking up!
Worldwide: I got great feedback about our labels - our sub publishers are very happy with the high quality, high quantity, great sleeve designs (thanks Darin!) and strong separate identity of each label. They literally had nothing bad to say which in a way is terrible for someone like me always looking for improvements. I’ll have to find faults on my own, I know what they are 😉
Our sub-publishers left me with a few great ideas for new albums based on their input about what has been popular from us, their other labels, and what their clients ask for.
As for the overall market conditions, they left me with the impression that all is currently good for them: fewer worries and threats than they’ve mentioned in previous years - all good news for us and our writers.
The main worry they had was the growth and consolidation of a few very large multinational library companies setting up offices in their country and starting to take market share and acquire a lot of smaller labels to fuel growth. Writers: as long as your original publisher makes good decisions about how best to distribute your music around the world, this shouldn’t be a direct threat to individual library composers. Which is to say, if their sub-publishers aren’t doing very well they can probably switch to others who can do better.
As for what type of music is popular with our sub publishers, I’m none the wiser. Some told me they like classic things like emotional piano and strings while others said clients want totally fresh new cutting edge sounds.
Likewise their favourite albums from us were all different depending on their clients - some want hard-edged electro rock, some want peaceful beautiful uplifting music. Everyone wants everything as long as it always sounds amazing. Production quality is the most important thing and then after that it’s variety - a good range from classic and timeless to retro to modern to futuristic!
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GROWING PAINS
After 10 years of some struggles, things are now expanding well on all fronts (touch wood) - more great music coming out than ever, more demand for our music than ever. My publishing work has grown so gradually over 10 years that the change has been invisible day to day and yet I’ve had to rapidly change my attitude from being a part-timer to running something quite big and expanding, delegating roles, finding systems that avoid errors and make everything more efficient while also attempting to constantly increase quality.
The quality seems good and always improving, we’re pushing for more public sales lately (Spotify promotion), I’m always getting stricter about what is accepted for albums to keep pushing quality up, getting out to meet clients about as often as would be sensible. I guess I just have to keep an ear out for opportunities and good ideas, from myself, clients, sub publishers and composers so that I can keep things improving forever until we finally reach the library music singularity - a white hole of epic amazingness that illuminates the universe with brassy braaams, awesome sub drops and the Platonic Form of corporate ukuleles.
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CUSTOM GLORY?
We have a special team of composers who are our best at trailer music writing called the ‘custom team’ and we pitch (and place!) custom music on trailers. It’s our elite but a curse as much as a blessing for members: with multiple writers pitching for every job, also in competition with writers from other music companies, and the trailer houses in competition with each other to get studio approval, that’s a very high chance of not getting placed: only roughly 1 in 40 pitches leads to a placement.
Would I do it? Hmmm… maybe. It’s like buying a lottery ticket with 40-1 odds of getting a good win - not **terrible**. And you can cheat by doing amazing music so I’d give it a go and test my ego until I’d failed 100 times.
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OUR TRAILER LIBRARY STATS
In 2018 60% of all our trailer quotes (where we are asked to give a price for potential use) led to a placement.
That’s not bad, I expected it to be more like 50/50. There’s no rhyme or reason to successful quotes - the same prices to the same studios sometimes hit, sometimes miss, so not being used must be to do with creative decisions - unless we sometimes fell foul of random budget-cutting purges of anything not super cheap. I don’t know.
Here’s another:
In the first 4 months of 2019 we’ve given 3x the number of quotes to studios that we gave in the first 4 months of 2018. Sounds promising!
And another:
Our Hollywood trailer income is approx. 45% custom music, 30% sound design, and 15% library music. Internationally it’s the opposite: music is much bigger than sound design or custom.
And another:
Our US company which we own which handles trailer licensing has in the last 12 months earned double the income of the year before, which was already double the year before that. Nice to grow, but it can’t double forever!
And yet:
We’re still not getting as many placements as some big competitors. We’ve caught up a lot but we’re not there yet. Good to have room to grow though - it’ll be a sad day when we hit our peak and start shrinking, it’s happened to the best of them!
Plus:
Maybe I’ve tempted fate by being too optimistic in this post. Hang on while I touch wood, turn around three times and remind fate that this paragraph is a disclaimer which I think should release the curse and allow continued growth, not sure, I’m not a scientist.
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REALLY COLOSSAL MONKEY WHORE
Should I always want perpetual growth? It’s good for composers if it means more income per track but not if it’s just more royalties spread thinner amongst more writers and more tracks. And how about me in the straightjacket of thinking I always have to beat last month, or last half year or last year’s results like a corporate dancing monkey whore with the worst boss in the world - myself, never saying ‘well done’ just ‘do better next time, monkey! Your fancy competitors like REALLY COLOSSAL GHOSTMACHINE are scoffing at that **non-theatrical** placement! Your writers are starving while they wait for you to rescue them from poverty’.
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MORE NERD FODDER:
In April we did an analysis of which albums and tracks have been the most successful to help inform us what’s doing better. It was notable that over the last 2 years, our earliest albums (6 to 9 years old) earned a lot more money internationally than more recent albums, which I would interpret as ‘expect a very slow build for income growth’. It’s not that old albums are just more popular - new albums are showing similar earnings levels relative to time on the market as old albums did - it’s just that there’s a long build which clearly lasts for a long time. Good news for composers who are young, patient, already rich or aren’t going to die in the next few years.
I also did an international survey of key words used to search for our music, giving insights into what the clients are thinking when they seek our music in different countries. There were no great surprises: lots of searches for piano, drone, Christmas, building. I was surprised however to see FUNK high in the lists and we only have one funk album [Lovely Music - Criminal Funk by Mike Holt] . Consider more on the TO DO list.
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OUR RAVEN PRINCESS PROJECT
Me and Sophie continued work on the script and song demos for our on-spec fantasy animation script. Progress has been slow but steady. A 20-page script outline has been through a few revisions and we’re almost ready to start the first actual script draft.
4 out of 12 songs have a fairly detailed orchestral demo with guide vocals by me and Sophie. It’s taken about 5 years to get to this point however so I think I need to speed up just a bit to hit my end of September deadline for ‘script plus reasonable demo of the songs’. Hmm…
Secret link to latest work in progress 🤫
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END OF THE KONTAKT ERA
April saw the last Dronar module released, “Distorchestra” - end of an era, end of me being a Kontakt developer. It was nice while it lasted but our scripter of many years finally left the project and I can’t justify the time to find someone else and design new products when I have so much going on.
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MOVIEMUSIC APP
Since 2014 I’ve had various versions of an iPhone app in development designed for amateurs to use our Library Of The Human Soul music in non-profit videos. I’ve pulled the plug 4 times on different developers due to development seeming too slow. Looks like I should have stuck with it given that pulling the plug to speed it up has still taken 5 years. Anyway I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again... looks like we’re actually getting there soon. Beta is working well at least!
The music is 128kb/s mp3s with a non-profit only restriction so that if any professionals like it they can come to us or our agents for a real license.
It could end up a platform for our other labels, and maybe 3rd party labels, and/or be adapted for our professional clients to search through while on the toilet. It could be a beautiful soundtrack to video editors pooping. Sometimes to think big, we have to think poop.
MARCH WORK TALES
Back once again with my ill behaviour, with my ill behaviour.
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I had February off from blithering about my JOB, but I hereby return from the dead and cancel my plan to cancel my work tales.
I interpreted your lack of begging for my return as your silent, grieving, stoic acceptance rather than a lack of demand.
Deeply touched, I’M BACK.
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UPDATE ON MARCH STUFF
Our spring royalties went out to writers in March. Trailer royalties were high but there weren’t HUGE amounts from the newer labels yet apart from a few lucky writers because it takes 3 years for initial income to come and early figures are a bit random.
See below “GROWTH” - in the latest incoming royalties from around the world the newer labels are still growing well, all in line with expectations so we should see a nice build for everyone who’s written a lot in the next 2-3 years.
The market for library music is still holding up well, still good income for composers who have a lot of good tracks, no obvious clouds of doom on the horizon (apart from the flood of new talent - see below!).
Trailer stuff is going well - nice new placements coming in for our music and sound design (Twilight Zone trailer was a highlight!) with a steady increase in quotes and lots of likely placements in the pipeline.
I can always improve so I’m doing my best to keep working out the best strategy for new sales, concepts for new albums and looking for new ways to keep the clients happy.
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GROWTH
According to the latest results:
- Library Of The Human Soul label has seen 50% income growth from the year before.
- Minim: 110% growth
- Lovely Music: 40%
- Gothic Storm: 30%
- Meanwhile our USA company which both promotes Gothic Storm and manages custom trailer work saw 175% growth over the year before.
The main cause of all this growth is having more music out there, meaning that income per album isn’t changing much. The exception is movie trailers (library and custom) where growth is much faster than the release of new music, helped by proactive sales and building good working relationships with clients.
What these % values mean in $ I’ll have to leave to your imagination but no doubt, growth is good for us, writers and freelancers.
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CHARITY
We’ve just started a new plan of the 3 full time employees nominating a charity each for Gothic Storm to donate £100 to each of them every month.
We’ve gone for Crisis (UK homeless charity), Lifeshare (Manchester homeless charity) and the League Against Cruel Sports (charity trying to stop things like dog fighting and fox hunts).
Maybe £300 per month isn’t much but it’s something!
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COCK-UPS
Apologies if you’re not familiar with the British phrase “cock-ups”. It means “fuck-ups” but it’s more polite.
March had the usual range of things going wrong. Can’t bring myself to tell you what, but thankfully nothing was the end of the world.
A fair amount of work every month just goes into stuff that doesn’t go right, working out what went wrong, why, putting it right and trying not to let it happen again.
For example, someone misses a digit from a bank account number or CAE/IPI number or zip code and things go awry. Clients change their systems for payments without telling us. Someone asks for permission for something but in an ambiguous way causing a misunderstanding, leading to a cock-up.
Endless cock-ups. Minor usually, thankfully, due to most people including us changing their procedures every time there’s a cock-up, until cock-up aversions are written into our rule books and every cock-up is a new type of cock-up.
Since statistically there are many more small ways to cock up than major ways, we are spared monumental 50-year cock-ups for 49 years at a time, on average.
The dream is to spot incoming cock-ups and avert them before they happen, like a Cock-Up Minority Report using my pre-cog-like ‘dawning realisation of stupidity’ faculty.
It’s an aspiration.
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THE FLOOD OF TALENT
Recently to help make the process more straightforward for new composers to send in demos I updated our websites with instructions where to send them.
I did expect a lot of demos but… there was over 100 on day one and plenty more come through every day, with me well behind and still only checking out demos from early February.
They are coming in faster than I am checking them which means I’ll have to devote more of each day to listening to demos, or get someone else to listen or just get more and more behind. I think I’ll probably just get more and more behind.
The striking thing is that most of them are good enough to be on good albums. But, even at our fast rate of production we don’t have the capacity to take on every good new writer and give them tons of opportunities.
I’m more of a yes than a no man so I’m inviting a lot of these new composers on board anyway. This then means every new album that goes live now gets filled with great tracks super fast, leaving our slower composers caught napping.
You have to wonder, where is it all leading? I can’t have a roster of 10,000 composers where every album is like a stampede that fills up in half an hour.
Perhaps all I can do is try to have ever higher standards, really try to develop my ability to tell the difference between great and amazing, and then try to only add those new composers that are amazing. And, keep getting more strict about what tracks are approved on albums.
If all other library publishers are seeing something similar I guess we are witnessing an amazingness inflation. Fantastic for the end users - the clients are getting lots of fantastic new music to choose from. But what about those merely ‘great’ composers, whose work is 90% great but not 98% great? I can see some pretty competitive headwinds out there replacing former champions with new super-champions.
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WHAT GIVES ME THE RIGHT TO DECIDE?
A related issue to ‘amazingness’ is - according to whom? I’m the self-appointed gatekeeper of new writers for our labels. I decide what’s amazing or great or good, or medium or bad.
In my defence I have many years’ experience of listening to thousands of tracks per year and asking for changes and have pretty trained ears, but admittedly I also just have my personal taste and opinions where someone else with the same ability and experience might disagree. At least there are hundreds of other great library labels out there for great music that I don’t like, so I suppose I don’t need to beat myself up too much about that.
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MY DEFINITION OF BAD, GOOD, GREAT & AMAZING
What I would call ‘bad’ demos are weird off-kilter stuff that sounds confused, amateurish or simplistic in a bad way. I don’t really get many ‘bad’ demos - maybe 10% are bad. I suppose it’s the equivalent of someone sending a novel to a publisher with terrible spelling and the sentences and story not making sense. Maybe these people are avant garde geniuses and I’m part of the problem of restricting culture and humanity from evolving, who knows.
‘Good’ stuff can be fairly well put together but a few flaws like - a bit repetitive, not very emotional or expressive, not much finesse or detail in automation or performance, samples that sounds like samples, a bit out of date, obvious chords and simplistic melodic motifs. I get a lot of ‘good’ demos - they are the most common type, maybe 60% are ‘good’.
‘Great’ stuff is very well produced, showing many years’ experience of writing, producing and mixing, great sounds, very realistic sounding samples with nice flourishes. I get a fair amount of these. Maybe 25% are great.
‘Amazing’ demos have all the ‘great’ qualities plus unexpected, highly imaginative elements, sounds that take you by surprise, highly expressive orchestral colours, unexpected developments that are better than what you were expecting, beautiful yearning melodies, catchy hooks that sound like hit songs, music that feels like it has extra dimensions, a real personality and soul, which is also highly expressive and emotional so that you feel strongly excited or moved while listening. Maybe 5% of demos are amazing.
The future is amazing, so if you’re a composer, be amazing!
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END OF THE KONTAKT ERA: R.I.P. DRONAR
In April we will release our final Dronar software for Kontakt: Distorchestra - built from heavily processed orchestral samples.
Although I didn’t plan to stick with making software forever, after 4 years the scripter decided to leave the Dronar project in March which has brought the plan to an early end. We had new Dronar editions planned and a Master Edition 2 planned, but the complication of trying to get a new scripter up to speed on tens of thousands of lines of code…. Well sadly it’s not going to happen.
It’s been very interesting having a toe in the water of a different industry - music software - and it’s been fun visualising software, developing it, getting it to market and then having some success with it.
If I’m totally honest though - making music software doesn’t earn a quarter of the income of my library music publishing or commercial composing work, and it’s not as fun as the personal music I write, so it’s hard to justify the time it takes.
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RE-LEARNING TO COMPOSE
It took me a few years from 2004 to 2010 to get into a good work ethic of working quickly and efficiently - all my favourite sounds in templates and presets - fast work methods (always working from a to do list and written down ideas, not too much jamming and trial and error which gets you caught up in loops and losing the plot!).
Gradually as the publishing business grew I stopped composing but finally last year I decided to re-start just a couple of hours a day, not on commercial projects but a labour of love thing.
I’m still on that and it’s taking way longer than I ever expected. Partly it’s not spending enough time on it (still got businesses to run!), but a lot of it is me having to start again building my templates of favourite sounds, getting up to date with the best new sample libraries, and just getting in the habit of quickly thinking up ideas then doing them.
Habits are hard to break and I have a multi-year habit of NOT composing music now, which I’m working on breaking.
I’m getting there. Gradually getting more efficient but I’m a long way behind the best super-speed genius composers who write for my library labels.
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MY BIG 2019 CHALLENGE: SCRIPT-WRITING
My big plan for 2019 is to co-write a fantasy animation script with Sophie my wife, and finish recording a set of orchestral songs for that animation. And then... sell the script to a studio or production company by March 2020 and BUY A TESLA MODEL 3. That’s the target! I’m working on the script 2-3 hours each day.
It’s well underway - 4 songs with orchestral demos, the other 8 with rough piano demos; script outline written, main scenes worked out. Who knows how it will work out but we’ll do our best so let’s see.
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THE MORAL OF THIS STORY
No idea. Be amazing, avert cock-ups, have a plan and get on with it!
Last Work Tales
January has been another typical month at Gothic HQ - lots of great new music, new trailer music, busy on personal music projects and more.
Well, this will be my last monthly ‘work tales’ for now. For a couple of years I’ve written about the challenges and strategies in building a library music company, and with no major changes planned any time soon I’m in danger of repeating myself.
So, it’s been great spilling a few beans on the inside view, I hope you’ve enjoyed the updates and if you’re a composer - happy composing!
Dan x
DECEMBER (and 2018!) WORK TALES
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Well then what a year. A lot happened in my little music publisher IDIOVERSE so where do I begin?
Here’s some stuff we did in 2018 as a team (meaning me, composers, freelancers and employees).
- Worked on 43 custom music projects for clients in LA (mainly movie trailers but also games trailers and TV promos), compared to 2 in 2017.
- As an experiment I took over US trailer sales instead of hiring an LA sales rep (my previous experience of doing that didn’t go very well). 2018 USA trailer sales were up 100% over 2017 so it seems to be working out. It has meant lots of US trips (yay!) and late nights on LA time (boo!).
- Spotify streams for Gothic Storm albums rose over 100%
- I wrote a book about library music which people seem to like.
- Released Dronar Master Edition for Kontakt (nice reviews but average sales - neither good nor bad).
- Overall total sales for everything were up 35% compared to 2017
- Our Library Of The Human Soul project recorded its final live strings album (62 albums of 90 tracks recorded in 4 years)
- Signed a deal with NASA for them to use our music in their videos. One made so far but it’s for internal company use only so can’t share!
- Launched 2 new labels (Songcraft and Future Pop)
- Released 123 albums spread across 8 labels (up from 85 in 2017)
- Got back into more composing - made progress on our Raven Princess album (12 songs as rough demos, 2 songs with orchestral mock ups on)
- Took over directly approving all demos and masters on every label again, except Future Pop (Michael’s baby!). That’s a lot of tracks to approve, reject or ask for changes on but at least I get to know who all the best writers are and *kind of* know what’s going on!
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THE SHAPE OF 2019
Touch wood, I imagine 2019 to be like 2018, but with these differences:
- Compose music 4hrs a day instead of 2018’s average of 2hrs/day
- Get more done via efficiency methods, delegation, and less reading the news and Facebook
- No more library albums expansion! We released 123 in 2018 and that’s enough, so just the same again planned for 2019.
- Continued quality increase in our albums by asking for more changes and rejecting more tracks
- Release MovieMusic, an iPhone app allowing some of our music to be used in home made iPhone videos
- Eat more healthy food, get more sleep
- Produce less Kontakt software (it’s fun but time-consuming and a fairly low income)
- Write an animation movie script by the end of 2019, with my wife Sophie
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WAS 2018 FUN?
I started 2018 deciding I’d had enough struggles and 2018 was going to be a year of ‘fun’, composing more music and the company putting out more positive, upbeat music.
I had no bad personal or family problems and have mainly been happy and healthy so that’s a plus. And we got our dog Pushkin who’s been great. And had some nice travels.
It did get stressful at times though. I got burnt out, frustrated at not being able to compose more music and fretted over potential business cash flow problems that never happened. I also found a dead body (from a drug overdose) in the alley behind the studio just before Christmas and the lonely tragic end of a young man cast a gloom over the year end.
Apart from that 2018 has been a year of progress, interesting new challenges and opportunities. Fun though? Maybe no more or less than any year in the end.
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THE EMPTINESS OF SUCCESS
I’m not there yet, but I’m getting closer to a point that I can finally be successful enough to complain about the meaninglessness of success. I’m not impressed by status or money, so I’m not that impressed by what I’ve achieved so far in business, such that it is. I mean, it’s great but I can’t sit around beaming with pride all day because we placed more music in trailers than last year or the year before.
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SO WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN THEN?
I’ve been on a business expansion mission for the last 5 years. Before then I was an idealistic unemployed songwriter (until 15 years ago), an increasingly successful library music writer (until 9 years ago), and then a part-time publishing dabbler releasing library music at a very slow rate (until 5 years ago).
In 2014 it all changed. I decided to attempt business expansion above everything else and it’s gone to plan. In 2013 I only released 1 library album on 1 label. In 2018 it was 123 albums on 8 labels with a whole team on it instead of just me. Sales have grown at a great pace. It’s been a mad 5 year dash of re-investment, expansion, sales, hiring, and delegation. Making it up as I go along. Constantly trying to figure out how to adapt from doing it all myself to hiring people to take over my roles, trying to figure out how you go from simple finances with small amounts going in and out to large complex cash flows with hundreds of albums earning small amounts from around the world, and hundreds of writers needing royalty statements. (In a nutshell the answer is that everything is the same really, it’s just there’s a lot more of it and more co-ordination needed so that different employees and freelancers know what they’re doing).
But the question is so what? What’s it all for? I can partly justify the effort by saying it’s been fun creating opportunities and income for composers, having new experiences and chasing challenges. Plus, if I can slow down the expansion a touch there’s some financial security ahead.
Beyond that though, it’s been a 5-year detour from a composing career and if I don’t find a way to spend more time composing music, my achievement will only have been to swap a successful composing life for being a businessman. It has its thrills, but making spreadsheets and being a king in his counting house marvelling over 35% growth isn’t a match for creating new worlds with musical colours. I’ve become a golden goose laying royalty eggs in a glided cage so let’s hope I can slip out and fly again on the open breeze of creativity.
Not that I want to give up the business side, it’s fun, rewarding and the team work is great. I just would like a better balance where I write more music.
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2019 THEN...
Life is short. I’m blessed to have the life and opportunities I now have, so I hereby promise to myself to make the best of it in 2019 and not waste this chance to make at least some of each day the day I want it to be.
How will you try make 2019 the year you want it to be?
November Work Tales
Latest anthology of owner-cognitions from planet Library Music.
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HOLLYWOOD TRAILER NEWS
Me and my wife Sophie (Gothic Storm co-owners!) did our regular LA visit in November including a night at the Clio Awards in the Dolby Theatre (home of the Oscars) where our music and sound design was PROBABLY sprinkled through a few winners but we can’t really get the exact info without hassling trailer houses and burdening them with admin searches. So let’s just say, we’re PROBABLY award winners, YAY! It all ended drunk on Hollywood Boulevard with some studio animation producers and a mystery ‘video editor’ who turned out to not work for the company he said he did and used a fake name. We should have smelt a rat when he said he’d lost his after-show party ticket, and said he was 37, despite the face of a 57 year-old, with an untrustworthy moustache. We’re lucky to be alive.
In terms of trends, well let’s just say we have our ear to new trends and as ever it’s all changing. Cover versions are out. Standard ‘trailer music’ is old news. Not saying what’s in… working on it now. 🤐
We felt further improvements in our personal relationships with a few clients that we’ve met a few times which adds to the feeling that we’re all in it together, working as a team and building trust.
We came away with several clear requests for new album concepts and custom music for specific upcoming movies. There’s nothing more important than talking in person and listening carefully.
We also felt the shifting positive tide with clients talking about how much they’ve seen our name on cue sheets lately, feedback from editors about how popular some recent releases have been, and being brought in at an earlier level on projects by major clients. Equally we can see for ourselves that the number of quotes we’re getting (where we quote a price IF a track is used) has again showed a sharp increase. It’s all lining up for an interesting 2019.
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THE END GAME?
Now that things have picked up a lot with trailers I’ve got to thinking about what point is ‘best’, the optimum? Do we just keep trying to grow and grow or reach a point where enough is enough? My feeling is that for as long as we only have a fairly small share of overall placements we have a lot of room to grow, so we’ll keep growing!
A point comes where I have to consider though - do I stay fully in charge of trailer music personally and give everything my personal touch, or do I delegate tasks to others for the sake of getting more done, but lose my direct connection with all the clients, music and composers? It’s a tough one. What would you do?
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SPOTIFY SURGE
A few months ago I signed up to an “Artist” account with Spotify and saw that Gothic Storm had 194k streams in the previous 28 days. I also saw how we lagged behind some trailer music companies and ahead of others and so we set to work figuring out how it works and how we can improve. Amazing results - 377k streams in the last 28 days and rising fast!
Spotify/Apple/YouTube together generate 10% and growing of composer royalties for Gothic Storm - more than TV or advertising income from any single European country for example, so it’s something we’re working on!
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BEING AN AUTHOR
I’ve written a book - “A Composer’s Guide To Library Music” which launched in November. Thanks to everyone who bought it and sent thank you messages! For those who didn’t get it - now’s a good time - its full of important advice you won’t find anywhere else:)
Get it here:
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MY DUMB BUSINESS STRATEGY
Things are going pretty well overall. Here’s my system: keep doing a ton of random things for years on end and then do more of the things that get better results and drop the things that didn’t work out. Natural selection of random stuff. I’ve done plenty of random stuff that turned out to be a dead end (philosophy degree, pet portraits, running a demo recording studio, various software ideas), but then other random stuff that went well (composing music, library music, custom trailer music) which I focused on.
For example, as a composer when I eventually discovered that one publisher was earning 4x the royalties of another I switched to them.
So… it’s not very intelligent or theoretical but given enough time it’s one way of improving as you go along. It would probably be a better strategy to get good advice and do research but at least it’s based on results!
There’s more important values than how much your projects earn but often the better paid stuff is more fun and creative anyway. Or maybe if you’re better at certain things you end up getting paid more. I don’t know. Someone expand this into a business book “TRIAL AND ERROR: How I made a living out of doing random stuff then focusing on the stuff that worked out better”. I can just see it piled high in the bargain bin.
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LOYALTY
Maybe all life and business is like this but the library music world has a lot of tension between loyalty and freedom. For example, certain composers who go the extra mile to help me, I will do the same back where I can, as long as they are great. Everyone is different - some composers only have half a toe in the water of library music and can’t bend over backwards to help with crazy deadline stuff. And some understandably want to keep a lot of different publishers on side so can’t get too tied up with one publisher.
I try to give special help to a small number of writers who are both amazing and always helpful at short notice, but I can’t exactly do that for everyone all the time and the quality of what we deliver is always the most important thing.
Well who knows, it’s a complex and ever-changing situation where what’s practical or best for you can conflict with your loyalties. We all want to be somehow well looked-after and part of a team while being free to do what we want when it suits us. Where we fall on that spectrum might be a matter of personality.
Overall I prefer fairly close reliable working relationships but without expecting exclusivity and perfect reliability. So I’m 70% a loyal team person. Some publishers have different people on every project, while other publishers are the other extreme - they want total exclusivity from writers. That’s one way of working and suits some writers but it’s not for me, I don’t want to run a cult. Just a 70% near-cult.
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COMPOSER FRIENDLINESS
As a formerly full time composer, now part-time, I have always wanted to be a ‘composer-friendly’ publisher: give advice and help to new people, try to make decisions in the best interest of composers and maintain the trust of people who’ve been doing it a long time.
So, how am I doing? There are limits: mainly how much money and time can be spent being every composer’s best friend and selfless helper.
In some ways you have to ask: ‘friendly to which composers?’. I could be very friendly to very small number of composers by limiting our album releases to help focus everything on theirs, only promote one or two composers for custom jobs, and use the money saved from a slow production rate to spend as much as possible on advances, more expensive recordings, marketing and advertising.
That wouldn’t be too friendly to anyone else though in that it would remove opportunities from lots of other great composers.
It wouldn’t be too friendly to trailer houses either who always need a wide range of music & sound design which we couldn’t offer if we only released a small number of albums and promoted a small number of writers.
Without many placements we’d have trouble building steady recognition as a name that keeps coming up for the clients.
Not that my way is the right way, I can see that there are many ways of approaching this balance.
Anyway here are some things I try to do to be ‘composer-friendly’:
- I don’t ask for exclusivity apart from previous rare cases when a composer has almost become an employee earning guaranteed advances and doing essential full time technical tasks.
- I aim for fairness, honesty and transparency and if there was ever a conflict between what was best for composers and the company I’d always go with the composers.
- I try to be accessible and answer questions, as well as chip in with info on composer FB groups
- We fund live strings for our Gothic Storm and Library Of The Human Soul labels. Arguably a composer-friendly gesture since it’s a treat for writers who don’t often get that opportunity!
- I wrote a book about library music so that writers don’t hassle me with questions I MEAN for the benefit of composer-kind 😉
- I take it as my personal responsibility to make sure our writers see income and don’t end up with a false promise of long term income, especially highly talented writers in their first few professional years when cash is tight and self belief is under pressure.
- I offer our custom composers 60% of fees on most jobs (better than the usual 50%), and 80% on some lower fee jobs to help make up for less money. And I aim to convert all good custom pitches into library tracks for long term income. And if the client won’t offer it, we give a $500 demo fee out of our own pocket to some custom composers who are asked for a lot of revisions, whether or not it leads to a placement.
- I try to be grateful and encouraging. Sometimes I’m the opposite though, when things don’t work out too well!
These are all small things and I’m no angel (being busy trying to make enough money to live in a nicer house) but I think I’m doing the best I can at the moment on a limited budget and limited time.
Watch this space, I’d love to be more generous with advances etc. and maybe that opportunity is coming as things grow.
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THAT COMPETITION
I ran a competition on FB for composers, with a prize being a book (did I mention my book haha?), software and a chance to join our elite band of composers. There were over 100 amazing entries and a lot of good will although it did invite a bit of suspicion from people accusing me of treating an A&R exercise as a competition and other gripes. Well anyway I thought it was great and I have to say has immediately led to a few opportunities for some of the composers.
We have lots of great composers but I personally think we still have a bit of capacity to keep seeking out a couple more great writers to keep up with demand.
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WHAT DO I DO ALL DAY?
What do I do all day, you may wonder. Well here’s my guess. Roughly my workload (when I’m not on Facebook) might be:
* Trailer library labels 25%
* Non-trailer library labels 20%
* Composing music 20%
* Custom trailer music management 15%
* Gothic Instruments (samples) 10%
* Others (writing, solving random problems, industry conferences, software development) 10%
So each area only takes up a fairly small proportion of my time and yet quite a lot gets done. How dat? Am I magic? No, other people do a lot of the work of course, so it’s only the magic of delegation.
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THE ROAD TO DELEGATION:
Over the last few years as income has risen instead of taking a higher salary I’ve increasingly paid a few talented people to take on various roles and tasks. The hardest step was the first: initially jumping from doing everything myself, to starting to train others - getting over that initial bump where despite being desperate for help, it initially takes more time to train someone than doing it yourself.
It turns out though that with nice, intelligent, hard working specialists they can do everything at least as well as me and often better. Who’d have thought. I’m not special. Or perhaps, plenty of other people are also special 😉
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ZERO CASH!?
2018 had our biggest sales income of any year - £ hundreds of thousands. The second half of 2018 had our biggest ever half-year income. The last 3 months’ income was more than the whole previous year combined… and yet… here we are as usual with a near-empty bank, chasing payments, me on the same moderate salary for 8 years. How comes? Partly it’s unpaid invoices… companies just not paying up on time.
Mainly it’s endless new costs on fees, promotions, sales trips, loan repayments, recordings, salaries, artwork, equipment (naughty iMac Pro!) and software. Every pound in goes back out of our sieve-like bank. Still, this is what investment looks like I suppose - all growth and no profit. What can you do, but I have high hopes for income finally overtaking my ability to spend it in 2019. You never know!
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PROFOUND LIBRARY GURU ADVICE FOR YOU
Keep doing what you’re doing but better, be nice, listen to good advice, ignore bad advice and buy my book!
Thank you very much for reading, you’ve been a wonderful audience.
Enjoy your holidays!
October Work Tales
In which I go on and on about my JOB as if any of it means anything.
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Most months are more or less the same. I say ‘blah blah, we got placements in these movie trailers’ and ‘we released lots of great albums’ and ‘we released our newest best ever Dronar module for Kontakt’ and got a great review in some music technology magazine. And then I’ll say ‘I’m also working on my big concept album ‘The Raven Princess’ and most months I say ‘drat I didn’t have time to do much, made some progress but not much’.
And I’ll say ‘we’re still talking to NASA about a deal for them to use our music but it’s not signed yet’.
Then I’ll say ‘last month I had concerns about cash but things went pretty well after all so all’s fine’.
I should get an AI bot to write these blogs, or just keep running the same one.
I’m like a stuck record on Groundhog Day, in a dream within a dream, in which I'm watching myself watching Inception.
Well ok we have a few minor changes in the Matrix so read on…
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GROUNDHOG DAY
Every work day has seemed the same to me since I was unemployed 15 years ago trying to get a music career started with a terrible PC, monitoring on cheap computer speakers with nothing but cracked software (only joking officer!).
Every day I get up, walk the dog, answer emails, go to the studio, do stuff on my To Do list, watch the news, look at Facebook, listen to music, write more emails, do some music, get confused by something technical (updates, settings, workarounds for workarounds), feel like I need a nap, send more emails, go home, eat, dog walk, TV, sleep.
And yet here I am in the future with a beard and greying hair, with a bloated, out of control EMPIRE (well, small-ish library publishing business). So everything MUST be constantly changing, it’s just too slow to see, like the spinning stars, but even slower.
Anyway.
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SO WHAT WAS REALLY NEW IN OCT THEN?
Well, we had:
- Some drama at the top which I’ll refer to very vaguely below, fearful of reprisals
- Finished my book, about to launch it
- That’s about it
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DRAMA AT THE TOP
There was quite a drama in October that involved a major business relationship breaking down, re-negotiation, their competitors stepping in, talks re-starting and finally a pretty good resolution but... I can’t give any details because you know, it would jeopardise things and break NDAs and what not. It was quite an earthquake in our firmament where things could have suddenly got a lot worse or a lot better but finally they ended up more or less where they started. Except, we’re in a better long-term position, between you and me 😉
The upshot? Business as usual, nothing to see here!
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OTHER DRAMA AT THE TOP
We got caught up in a situation in October where a composer made a claim that could be seen to be misleading and the HUGE client gave us strong indications of their displeasure which I had to pass on.
Sorry to be vague but here’s the upshot: if you’re writing trailer music:
- NEVER announce any placement without double checking with your publisher, and clearing the wording with them
- NEVER nominate your own trailer work for an award without clearing it with your publisher/trailer house/studio
- NEVER make a claim on social media that isn’t entirely accurate (for example, saying you did a custom composition when it was actually an orchestral overlay over or a version of someone else’s composition)
Big Hollywood studios like to control the marketing, and also film composers and other trailer composers and even music supervisors can get upset if you seem to be diminishing their contribution in any way by claiming too much glory.
What’s the worst that can happen? You being blacklisted, as well as your publisher and the trailer house who made the trailer. Damaged careers! Be a hero, an anonymous humble hero just gently hinting of your greatness in your brags. It makes you seem even bigger that way.
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MY BOOK IS FINISHED!
My library music book is coming out in a few days. Over 60,000 words capturing everything I’ve learned about library music in the last 15 years as a writer and publisher, plus a lot more I learned recently while carrying out my research. It’s the book I wish I’d had 15 years ago!
Pre-order and buy here: http://librarymusicbook.com
The book started as in depth articles about library music for Sound On Sound magazine and at the time it was just driven by an instinct that I felt like I’d spent enough time learning the ropes, there was a lot of composers in the dark and I thought I’d like to explain it all.
A couple of composers have expressed mild concern like ‘careful, there’ll be a deluge of new writers!’. Well, I think the articles have inspired a few people to get into the game and write more and *maybe* that will slightly increase the competition amongst writers but there’s hundreds of library companies and a big market out there so I think there are still plenty of opportunities to go round for the top 10% of really great, highly productive composers.
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AS FOR THE SAME OLD STUFF, here’s the latest update on the usual stuff:
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KONTAKT SOFTWARE
October saw the release of our Dronar World Flutes Module for Kontakt. Don’t be fooled by the title - it’s cinematic complex atmospheres with the wooden and bamboo flutes just adding a sense of human soul and breathing life to the soundscapes.
Next week (6th Nov) we’re releasing our Dronar Rolling Percussion Module - again don’t be fooled and expect a percussion library - this does have a lot of great drum rolls (crashes, snares, gongs) but also some amazing otherworldly pitched atmospheres processed from drum rolls.
Oh also, we got a great 4-page review in Sound On Sound Magazine (biggest music tech magazine in the UK) for the Dronar Master Edition.
And software sales? Not bad but I’d make a lot more writing or publishing music so it’s a case of enthusiasm over economics with my Dronar obsession. So bear that in mind, moaning customers who bitch about us taking all their money with ‘buggy software’ - get a newer computer if you want it to work properly!
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**HOLLYWOOD TRAILER NEWS**
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THE CUSTOM TIDE
October had more major custom jobs - not quite as hectic as last month but still plenty to keep writers busy. We’re at a turning point right now. From 2010 until now in late 2018 the library albums have always earned more than custom work in the US.
In the months ahead though, based on existing invoices owed, custom income will overtake library income in the USA for the first time. It’s not that library income is slowing down, it’s just growing more slowly than custom income.
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PLACEMENT NEWS:
- Major custom placement for Benjamin Squires - his orchestral overlay to a song was used right through the majority of the theatrical How To Train Your Dragon 3 trailer.
- The official launch trailer for Spyro Reignited PS4 was confirmed with custom work by Richard Wilkinson.
- We had an Aquaman TV spot featuring our custom music by Dmitriy Mityukhin plus custom sound design by Alessandro Camnasio.
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THE QUALITY CONTROL NOOSE TIGHTENS
As we go up in the world we’re getting more and more amazing pitches from great writers. There will always be plenty of work for brilliant writers/producers but we’re going to see ever tighter controls over what is released and pitched to studios in the months ahead- anything less than the best can’t go ahead.
In practise this means I’m going to start implementing a policy of ‘provisional approvals’ for some tracks on new albums meaning that at the end of the album I’ll listen through again, and only the best tracks will be on the album.
I’m also going to keep being bluntly honest about why tracks aren’t being accepted so hold onto your hats as I become the hated Simon Cowell of library music.
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LIBRARY EMPIRE
In October we finally spawned our new twin library labels. First was Future Pop - devised, managed and mostly owned by Michael Coates who doubles as our head of finances (royalty and invoice paymaster, man with the dough). Then came Songcraft - all songs with male and female vocals.
We also released lots of great albums. Our newest Gothic Storm album Prestissimo got two trailer quotes (where studios ask for a price if they eventually decide to use it) on its week of release. That’s unusual so hopefully a sign of great things not a flash in the pan.
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OVERPRODUCTION
By the end of October we were up to approx. 110 albums released in 2018, against a target of 100 so we’re officially over-producing with new albums still coming every week.
Quality is higher than ever thanks to careful selection of writers and an efficient quality control process, and agents seem more than happy thanks to the wide variety across 8 different labels, so the main problem with releasing so much is just the short term money outlay. Many of our albums have expensive live strings and those that don’t still need good quality art work and mastering, and freelancers to create the metadata. Each album isn’t THAT expensive but it all adds up so we’re not starting many new albums from now until the start of 2019.
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INFLECTION POINT
You hear that phrase a lot if you’re obsessively read about TESLA like me. “Q4 will be an INFLECTION POINT for Musk” they say - the point in time where everything changes for good forever, when at last dreams become reality and debts become profits.
I’m expecting a mini inflection point in our businesses next year. In 2019, according to my graphs, FINALLY growth in income will overtake growth in costs. That’s because so much of the last 8 years has gone into investing everything into long term growth and we’re aiming to slow down expansion a bit now. Maybe. Unless I get a new expensive wild idea. Hopefully not!
It’s a nice thought. Feeling finally out of the woods after so many years of stretching budgets and juggling. Not having to fret over every penny that goes in and out. Hmm but there lies complacency, resting on our laurels, overconfidence, rot. Well, it would be a nice problem to have. Until then, problems remain, loans, freelancers and bills have to be paid.
So then, like a lottery dream, what would the extra cash go on if we had any... Hmm - more expensive productions? Advances? Enhanced marketing and advertising? I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it - I get a feeling the horizon will keep receding as it approaches.
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RAVEN PRINCESS PROGRESS!
Yay, I’ve been spending about 2-4 hours per day on this baby so making a bit more progress than usual.
I’ve achieved this marvellous feat by FORCING it. Just downing tools and working on it even when there’s other urgent stuff to do. My theory was that doing this would force me to prioritise the most important business tasks and find new efficiencies. It’s working I think! I’ve started finding better ways to do stuff faster and waste less time (mainly a lot of working quick, emails on the train, ignoring unimportant emails/messages and watching the clock). Hope I can keep it up.
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ABOUT THE RAVEN PRINCESS
Maybe you find my references to my labour of love album “The Raven Princess” to be quaint, thinking me a frustrated boss pipe-dreamer working on mid-life crisis naive indulgent garbage. How dare you! Rude. I have a long history as a songwriter and composer you know. My writer income is still my main source income. YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE ME - this project is great - best thing I’ve ever done, and getting better as it takes form.
It’s 12 orchestral songs, possibly the backing to a future musical animation, or a stage musical. Or just an album, we’ll see.
It’s set 300 years ago in the Arctic, a magical story of a girl who can transform into a raven with two wolves on a snowy quest involving an ice castle, invisibility cloak made of stars, spirits and witches, seeking her lost people in a journey that takes her across space and time to the afterlife and back. You know that type of thing.
Just now all 12 songs exist as recordings with me singing a guide vocal to be replaced by Sophie, with a piano backing to be replaced mainly by orchestral sounds.
In October I got the first track “Children Of The Sun” to a rough MIDI orchestral mockup stage. It’s still a guide vocal, lots of tweaks to do, and a lot of the instruments to be replaced by live instruments later.
But shhh between you and me for those who could be bothered to read this far, take a listen to this work in progress:
If you’re wondering where the amazing intro ponticello tremolo and trills strings came from, why ladies and gentlemen, they are from our Dronar Master Edition for Kontakt which you must now buy.
This one song has taken over a month to get from piano guide to an orchestral mockup, very slow. Partly it’s because I’m only working 2 hours a day on it on average. Partly it’s because I’m slowly re-building my orchestral template after a couple of years of hardly composing anything. It’s also a very detailed long track with a lot going on, and it’s taking me some time to get back in the swing of my old efficiency methods which I’m having to re-learn (that is: don’t get stuck in time-wasting trial-and-error ruts! Write ideas about what to do from your imagination while clear-headed then work from your notes).
Anyway this one track has been a real education. In my years away from writing I’ve listened to a lot of great classical and film music as well as giving feedback to our best composers every day and got better ears. Also I haven’t written with this degree of nuance before. I’ve written a lot of trailer tracks but that’s usually about power not nuance. I’ve never had the space to play about with orchestral colours like this, really paint the scene.
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IMAC PRO ‘WORTH THE MONEY’ SHOCK!
I’ve had a feeling of great liberation this month from using my very fast new computer (18 core iMac Pro, 4TB internal PCIe SSD, 64GB RAM). For the first time ever I’m stacking up all my favourite sounds with no track freezing needed - including the beautifully detailed but processor hogging Audio Modeling strings, brass and woodwinds. It’s very freeing to have every one of these sounds unfrozen at a fairly low 252 samples latency, where you can play along and expressively add performances with no lag, freezing, fan noise or audio breakup. At last! The future I always imagined, today, without having to daisychain computers together. £10k was a LOT to spend on this computer but I’ve certainly felt like I’m getting my money’s worth this month.
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NEXT MONTH
November should be interesting. Launching the book then heading back to Hollywood to tease more secrets from the magical movie trailer dream makers.
SEPTEMBER WORK TALES
More uneven high-flying fast-talking wheeler-dealing cries for help from the kaleidoscopic slow lane of my LIBRARY MUSIC empire.
WHAT DO I ACTUALLY DO?
In case you wonder what I actually do all day, well I sometimes wonder myself. What I’m *trying* to do is get new albums and software released with a very high standard of quality control, while congratulating everyone on their amazing work and admiring the smooth well-oiled machine we’ve built. Then downing tools in the afternoon and doing a few hours of composing music.
What I *actually* do is notice some strange anomaly in the morning - an unusual remark in an email perhaps, a casual reference to something that sounds ominous, or a foreign sub-publisher pleased that they got a major placement for one of our catalogues that they don’t actually represent, or an album with more tracks on than I remember, or some money going out that I can’t explain, and endless other strange happenings. Then after a few investigations the onion layers are peeled back on some catastrophe. Then flurries of emails and discussions about how best to solve the crisis in the least bad way. Then tweaking of processes and rules to try to prevent that happening again while we wait for the next meltdown.
Then maybe I’ll send my 10th email to a writer who doesn’t understand something, and just for the sake of Karma I’ll write to someone else asking them to explain something to me for the 10th time because I’m not getting it.
Then I’ll get 10 urgent requests for stems for tracks written 8 years ago that no one has any memories of.
Then I’ll have to give feedback to writers for so many tracks so quickly that I just give up on trying to be positive and tell the truth like ‘sorry, this sounds like a Stylus RMX loop from 2002’, or ‘your library music sounds like library music’ or ‘your samples sound like samples’ or ‘sorry, this has no good qualities’. And so on.
Sorry I’m such a blunt monster but sometimes when you just say what you think instead of trying to be polite, it’s a lot quicker even though it sounds rude and horrible.
The worst thing for me is getting drawn into arranging and producing a track with detailed instructions like “try a drop sound at 1:21”, “could you layer the snare with a flammed metal strike to give the attack more definition”. I don’t have time to be a producer-by-messages.
After a lot of this it’s time to go home.
Typical day. True. Except there’s often some good news or other: a studio finally paid up a year late. We got our music on something cool. Facebook chats with composers about their thoughts on ethics and cats.
DRONAR
In September we got our big software product out, the “DRONAR MASTER EDITION”... a couple of early reviews say it’s great and we saw pretty good first month sales. Now we have to wait and see what the world thinks once the magazine reviews start coming but all is looking good so far, touch wood.
SEISMIC SHIFTS
We have negotiations going on about the way our music is distributed internationally in some major territories right now. It’s complicated and almost all me and Sophie (co-owner) have talked about but the resolution *should* fix some problems, I hope.
CASH FEARS
According to my Excel forecasts we’ll run out of cash in two months unless we get some lucky breaks. That said, since I began 15 years ago I’ve always been 2 months away from running out of cash unless something lucky happened but in this library music lark we have so many tracks in so many countries that it’s actually statistically difficult to NOT get some good luck somewhere fairly often. Maybe it’s time to stop thinking of SALES as ‘good luck’ and instead something a bit more inevitable. Can you imagine the boss of Coca-Cola waking up in a cold sweat thinking ‘what if TOMORROW the whole world stops drinking coke for NO REASON?’.
I’m a big optimist in the long term and yet the short term spooks the hell out of me.
FANTASY BILLIONAIRE
When I was in my 20s writing songs and unemployed I had this thought ‘I need a patron, like renaissance painters had’. I pictured being free to do my artistic songs while a money-leaking fantasy billionaire with ill-defined motives paid my bills. I’m still waiting. Until he comes I’ll have to be my own patron.
TRAILER NEWS
Lots of custom work for future trailers was done. A video game trailer Spyro was confirmed (custom track), The Girl In The Spider’s Web trailer was confirmed. Lots of other maybes. If you’re outside the trailer game it might impress you to hear that we did jobs and quotes for Disney/Marvel, Showtime, Activision, Netflix, Nintendo, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros this month. If you’re inside the game you’ll say ‘yeh who doesn’t, and why no Fox?’.
I know they say LA is fake so call me gullible but I get a real sense of goodwill from our most regular trailer house clients. Maybe they’re the same to everyone but I get a lot of messages of gratitude and situations where they’re going the extra mile to offer us opportunities and squeeze our stuff in. Thanks! We try so hard to always have everything they need at a ridiculous speed and quality, hopefully that’s built up some credit.
OUR NEWER LABELS
Famously (according to Dan Grahams ‘3-year rule’) with library music it takes 3 years to make any money from new music - for composers as well as publishers. Gothic Storm has been going since 2010 so we can see clear patterns but the new labels - Library Of The Human Soul (2014), Lovely Music (2015) and Minim (2017) are a bit young to have much sense of what’s going on. UNTIL NOW! Yes, the first two are finally seeing the first drips from the international library music river of money, for the publisher (thank you) and composers (you’re welcome).
So, what have we learned? Mainly that the biggest territories so far are (largest first): USA, Scandinavia, Australia, Japan, Korea and China. It’s great to see those success stories, but some territories aren’t doing as well as they could. Looking on the bright side, fixing this is high on the to-do list.
Overall the oldest “new” label Library Of The Human Soul is earning the most money but the rate of production was fairly slow at the start and was quickly overtaken by the fast expansion of Lovely Music meaning that Lovely is now earning more than Library Of The Human Soul in some countries. As for patterns... it’s similar to Gothic Storm - the biggest territories are the same for all labels, and income is more correlated with the number of albums we have than any other factor. Meaning - income per album is fairly reliable, and some countries reliably generate more per album than others.
Writer income for the newer catalogues is the usual mix of reliable and random, in that composers with the most tracks are bringing in the most money, but there’s outliers where composers with fewer tracks have one-off successes from time to time.
CONCLUSION? The newer labels all seem to be growing pretty well and the market is staying healthy from where I’m looking. Doomsayers note: AI still hasn’t taken over, the market still isn’t saturated and there still isn’t a ‘race to the bottom’ with prices (these 3 predictions have been the doomsayers’ mantra for the last 15 years - might happen one day but not yet).
Composer takeaway: keep writing great music and hoping for the best - it’s still looking good out there!
MY BOOK ABOUT LIBRARY MUSIC
You may know I wrote a series of articles for Sound On Sound Magazine. I’m now expanding and updating those into a book “A Composer’s Guide To Library Music”. It’s nearly finished, due for a November release as an eBook - starting as a PDF then probably iBooks and Kindle. Maybe a physical version depending on how sales go, we’ll see about that.
Sign up here to be notified when it’s out and get a 20% reduction:
Launch price? Hmm I dunno - how’s $20 (£15) sound for about 180 pages?
OUR MAGNUM OPUS
As for me and Sophie’s concept album about the frozen north and raven princess... drat another month of doing hardly anything. I hate that. Man, I HAVE to pull my finger out and make progress while still keeping everything else running well.
NEW LABELS - FUTURE POP & SONGCRAFT
Future Pop... it’s totally ready to launch. Everything is in place. What are we waiting for? Let’s go! As for Songcraft... it’s ALMOST there - first 5 albums totally done with everything organised except one writer who turned out to not be a member of PRS. Oops! Remember folks - you have to have a PRO (Performing Rights Organisation) if you’re doing library music. We’ll get a website done next week for Songcraft and put the agent distribution network together then.
PROUD OF MY ACHIEVEMENTS?
Sometimes people say I must be so proud. Yes it’s quite unbelievable how much of my life I spent unemployed then finally went on a late business binge which is working out well relative to my no-expectations. But sadly, I only really think about all the problems to solve, and how far I am from future plans that seem far more interesting than what’s happening today.
All I’ve achieved is to build a steady company fairly well in a mature industry, it’s not rocket science. I think my most important achievements have been the songs I wrote with the old band Ooberman and newer songs with The Magic Theatre. They made no money but in my heart of hearts I know they’re operating at a level way above my daily work in the way the lyrics and music work together. I’m wasting my talent building business empires but never mind.
DOG AND BONE
Business schmizness, I’ll remember September mainly as the month the dog (pictured) ate a cooked chicken bone off the street, us Googling the horrors it can cause and 4 days of watching his poo and waiting for him to collapse. Dog fine, panic over. “Ego canis sum non sollicitus”.
OVERALL THEN
September is always a fearful month when hopefully a lot of the year’s income all comes together, and my yearly nightmare of low royalties doesn’t come to pass. A worst case scenario would have me fretting, cancelling things and juggling budgets, but just like every other bloody September everything was pretty good - income up, no worries, false alarm. I ended the month then aged by worry over problems that never happened as usual, from financial strife to chicken bone splinters.
So yeh. USA trailer stuff was good. New label income rose well. New software sold well. Next month I’ll be finishing the book and re-organising some of the international distribution - onerous but doable.
Another busy month ticked off the to-do list then, no music composed, one step closer to growing a monstrous empire and eventual death.
AUGUST WORK TALES
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DRONAR MASTER EDITION AT LAST!
I can’t believe it! At last after 4 years we’ve finally got our “Dronar Master Edition” ready for release on 4th September. See link for news & trailer video:
This mammoth Kontakt library works with the free Kontakt Player and contains 50GB of audio from our 1st 8 modules in a new fast engine, with over 2000 “multi” presets and thousands more single presets.
Get it quick! Big intro discount and bigger discounts for owners of the ‘modules’.
Ok ok, sales pitch over but honestly this is GOOD SHIT WHICH MAKES AMAZING EXPRESSIVE ATMOSPHERIC PADS & SOUNDS.
Right from the start, this Master Edition was always the plan. We would make these separate themed libraries and call them “modules” because they were all going to be part of the Master Edition. Doing it this way enabled us to sell them fairly cheap (£50-ish before discounts) to cover our costs, build up a following in the press (lots of 5/5 reviews in Sound On Sound magazine), and loyal customers who we rewarded with loyalty discounts.
You could only use these ’modules’ with the expensive full version of Kontakt which kept it exclusive for the early adopters.
That was the master plan, and so here we are at the final stage, 4 years since we began.
The scripter, me, the sound designers and performers are on profit shares so hopefully it will do well and reward everyone for their years of effort. That’s the hope, but who knows? Maybe it will end in a backlash and I’ll get chased out of the village by angry torch-wielding customers. Hope not.
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DRONAR FLAMING
Talking of angry customers, have a read of this:
…in which people who found our Dronar modules too resource-heavy subjected me to a roasting, but seemed somewhat pacified by the end, after I’d answered a lot of difficult questions. (I’m forum member “dagmarpiano”).
I could have said I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS SHIT I RUN GOTHIC STORM but that wouldn’t be true, in the sense that I do have time for that shit because I also run Gothic Instruments, care about Dronar and don’t want angry forum-dwellers fomenting hate, not unfairly at least.
Right enough Dronar - now the library publishing news:
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TRAILER NEWS:
In August it was great to see our music and sound design placed in trailers for Aquaman, Wonder Woman 1984 and Hotel Transylvania 3, plus a second trailer for the upcoming Activision game “Spyro”. We also gave a ton of quotes for future potential placements.
We also did lots more custom work - outcomes to be determined!
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BREAD NERD
August is the end of our financial year which leaves me spending hermit hours staring at cashflows and drawing graphs, measuring the past and predicting the future.
I've become a numbers nerd and neurotic bread-head. Hopefully it will pass.
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YAY! AND HMM...
The financial news is both great and worrying. Great because we’re at the end of a record financial year - income up 30% on the year before. Big growth in US income from trailers. Steady growth for the newer labels. Big growth for the Kontakt software. So wow well done everyone involved in this, looks like the plans are working out well at the moment.
Worrying - because the extra money is now all spent on expansion costs and oh drat, the next financial year has even higher costs with new labels, new software development costs and loan repayments, and because I’m not psychic I can’t assume continued high growth. There’s plenty of reasons for optimism - unpaid invoices due in, new software coming which people will hopefully like and buy, growing catalogues, deepening client relationships and brand recognition - but what if? What if things unexpectedly get worse? What if some of my best working relationships with clients go wrong for some reason?
At the start of every financial year it’s the same - a switch from the party of a good year just gone to the hangover of looking at a spreadsheet that forecasts rising costs with me worrying whether new income will match those costs.
So far every year after a couple of months things are going fine and I stop worrying.
But what if this year is the one that changes that and it all goes wrong? How do we pay wages and fees to those who rely on us now? How do I pay my mortgage? How do we keep making new music and fund sales trips if there’s no money to cover it?
As they say, cheer up it might never happen. An asteroid could destroy Hollywood. A helicopter could land on my head. Or it could be fine and probably will be.
Who knows. In this game you need 99% optimism and 1% fear.
Someone put that on a mug, it sounds like a BUSINESS quote from someone with BIG BALLS who talks in BULLSHIT QUOTES with made up statistics.
Talking of which:
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WHAT THE NUMBERS SAY
While crunching the Gothic Storm numbers and doing graphs I found a few things. Like:
- USA income was 45% of all income. Thanks Uncle Sam.
- 50% of all writer royalties went to just 2 people out of over 200 on the books - those who did the most tracks, and have been writing for us for the longest time. They are also very good, which helps.
- 80% of our income was from the USA, Australia, Scandinavia, Czech Republic, YouTube and Spotify combined.
- Gothic Storm income has grown 340% in the last 4 years
- Profit is still low. Lol. 8 years after launch I’m still ploughing everything into new projects and forever short of cash. Someone stop me, I’m a maniac.
As for the other labels - they are too new to measure very well. Income is unpredictable with no obvious trends yet. Plenty of good signs but nothing that makes sense on a graph.
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SECRETS
As well as all that above, I found out other things that I won’t share in case friendly competitor spies haven’t figured these things out and I’m giving them free help 😉
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OVER-ENTHUSIASM
We’ve already hit our entire 2018 target for album releases from Minim and Lovely Music. Great! But wait! That means we have to slow down production from those labels until the start of 2019 now so we don’t go over-budget and annoy our agents with too much to deal with. Sorry composers, new opportunities have dried up there for now.
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ARTISTIC STUFF
I’m a stuck record: I’m ashamed to admit that it’s been another month of not getting very far with our epic “Raven Princess” album. Ok well I do have piano + guide vocal versions of every song and am now developing the first one into the first orchestral mockup so that’s something. I can tell I’m rusty at the efficient composition process though - hardly written anything for a few years and not sticking to my fast writing method which is:
- Always create a list of sounds and list of what to do in each section
- Follow that to-do list and only evaluate how it sounds when you’ve completed the list.
It’s a great technique for writing in a fast, fluid, expressive and imaginative way compared to trial and error and getting stuck in ruts. Must remember to use it!
Well that’s all folks. Next month’s report will be all humble thanks to the amazing team who turned Dronar Master Edition into a big hit product. Or, I’ll have gone off the grid, chased by angry customers.
JULY WORK TALES
Latest work I did between lunar phases.
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GOOD STUFF
As ever with great thanks to the team and especially Michael Coates we’re keeping on schedule with our plan to release 100 excellent albums this year (spread across 6 and soon 8 labels). This is a reasonable output per label, not too much and not too little and I think about as many as we’d ever want to release.
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LIBRARY OF THE HUMAN SOUL
This month we recorded albums 61 and 62 in Vienna - the final 2 live albums and therefore the end of an era. 62 albums of 30 tracks each with live strings since 2014. It was this labour of love concept “let’s capture the whole of the human soul, every human emotion in thousands of tracks with live strings for film makers”, requiring $200,000 to be spent without knowing if there was a market for it. Well ok that’s not like Elon Musk borrowing billions to make rockets but it’s certainly cleaned me out and needed some loans! It takes years for library music to earn good money but here we are 4 years after we began with some good signs of income growth from around the world so it all looks ok so far. It will break even in about 2 or 3 years I think.
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TRAILERS
My personal chief focus is Hollywood trailers and that’s going well I think - quite a few quote requests (where studios ask us what we would charge if they want to use certain cues), which often but not always lead to placements. Plus a couple of confirmations in terms of Fantastic Beasts II and the new Predator movie. Also we did a few more custom jobs in July so let’s see how they pan out. It was great to see custom jobs from new clients who are finally trusting us after a few months of nagging as well as more from previous clients - always a good sign if people come back for more!
With quoting prices there’s no happy medium. Quote too high and studios could start avoiding you, quote too low and you will lose your best writers who can get paid better elsewhere, and personally it seems to me that any price a studio will be happy with will be too low for writers!
After one quote this month, a well-respected clearance specialist (being an independent lawyer-meets-haggling agent who works for the studios) said “in my opinion that’s very expensive”. However, I know what prices others charge, what studios regularly pay. So although there’s a slight worry of ‘are prices dropping?’ or ‘will this particular studio stop working with us at these prices?’ I don’t think you can react too weakly to this kind of thing. I think ‘this is very expensive’ doesn’t exactly mean ‘this is ridiculous, they’ll never pay and you’re going to be laughed out of town’. I know it’s a cliche but quality comes at a higher price tag - our sound design is all hand crafted from processed original recordings, an exclusive art form whereas I suspect that some ‘sound design collections’ out there are really thinly-disguised sample library sounds.
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WOMEN COMPOSERS
In my blog last month I mentioned a vague intention to appeal for more women composers and so decided to just do that. I didn’t want to seem patronising but I thought I’d take a chance and see what happened with a few posts in composer groups.
Well I got some truly excellent demos - better on average than the 99% male unsolicited demos I usually get. This might just be that posting on fairly professional composer forums will bias the responses towards the better end, or maybe it’s something else - that great female composers aren’t pitching work unsolicited as much as males for some reason. If you’re a female composer do you have any theories about that? Could it be that females are being less assertive and confident, waiting for permission? Or that they have more self-doubt after being brainwashed that men are better composers? Or maybe it’s just my initial theory - my appeals were on forums where quality composers hang out so if I’d appealed for male composers there they would have been great too.
Either way, it’s nice to have a few great new female composers aboard, bringing up their representation from who knows, 5% to 10% of our writers. Still bad, but better!
I have to admit that I have unhelpful female composer stereotypes in my subconscious - like an expectation of their music being more emotional, elegant and melodic but less technical, aggressive, meticulously programmed and engineered. I know that’s nonsense - our single best mixer/producer is female, while plenty of our male writers are better at emotional/melodic music than technical/powerful music - but it’s as well to keep remembering your prejudices so you can try to filter them out and use your ears.
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FUTURE POP LAUNCHED!
The end of July finally saw the launch of our new “Future Pop” label. This is the brainchild of our man Michael Coates - former head of the US office now helping to keep everything managed in the UK.
Michael wanted to do this because he loves catchy music, and the other main rationale is just that pop is pretty much our most requested style from TV and advertising clients so - let’s go all-in on POP in its many guises!
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SONGCRAFT SOON
New label Songcraft (all songs) is still inching towards launch. The first music was written nearly a year ago but it’s taken this long to get to the point of 5 albums being ready. Possibly this label won’t have a high release rate being complex and labour intensive (it has songs with lyrics recorded twice for male and females). Or just maybe we’ll lock into a tight team of writers who understand the drill and get it moving more quickly after launch. Let’s see!
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MY PET PROJECT
Again progress has been less than I hoped for on our artistic “Raven Princess” album. A mixture of other things coming up, family dramas, not being disciplined, days off with trips as well as a few in bed with a chest infection meant I just didn’t put in the hours. That said, we now have 10 songs out of 12 with “guide vocals plus a guide piano” recorded and we’ll be starting to add the orchestral arrangements in August.
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CASH DRAMAS
This time of year always has a lot of cash uncertainty. Although we’ve seen 20 to 30% per year revenue growth for a few years, we have growing monthly costs and try to spend available money on releasing new music, meaning cash levels are never very high. Meanwhile this September will see our largest ever royalty payout to writers (good news for writers!). Plus, we have some loans to begin repaying from November.
August to October always has the main royalty earnings of the year so if it all comes in healthy no probs. If it comes in lower than expected it will be stressful times ahead - having to restrict the number of new albums for a while and other cost-cutting. Well, we’ll see!
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HEALTH OF THE LIBRARY MUSIC MARKET
I often hear composers (and more rarely publishers) talk about dangers of the library music market weakening with too much competition creating a ‘race to the bottom’ with prices, and certain publishers or composers undercutting the value of music with low prices.
I’ve heard all this since I started in 2004 and I still have to say the evidence of trouble remains thin on the ground in any figures I’ve seen. Our albums are earning for writers roughly what my albums earned for me 10 years ago. Newer albums are earning roughly the same as older albums. The new labels are seeing very similar early earnings growth to the oldest label. Who knows what the future will bring but at this point the market’s still holding up fine for us at least, so no need to hit the Plan B button yet (in which I focus on music software, or other software, or write pop songs, or write books, or mix or master or piano-tune, or paint pet portraits, or join a freak show, or become a traffic warden).
So as ever my advice to composers remains: write a lot of great library music for great publishers and be patient, because earnings take 3 years to start coming through but when they do, they should be fine!
JUNE WORK TALES
Current state of play here at Gothic HQ:
AVERAGE JOE:
Not much drama this month. Business plans are going as expected in terms of costs, music production and sales. Maybe that’s dramatic in itself since planning is a bit of guesswork so how on earth have we managed to get everything about in the middle of expectations?
SPACE STUFF
I got a bit further in a negotiation with NASA about using our music, a new draft of a contract, but no deal yet!
TRAILER STUFF
One great new thing for June: we’re proud to have started representing Alessandro Camnasio’s new Last Sonic Frontier label for US trailer placements.
We had one major custom music placement in June (Ed Watkins, for Operation Finale, main theatrical trailer), plus lots of small ones and some custom trailer work still going on in the background.
PRIORITISING STUFF
As ever, there was some head-scratching about what to prioritise - e.g. how much time should I spend on music software when there’s lots of other stuff to do? Am I working well within short, medium and long term goals? How much time can I spend composing music without any negative impact on other aspects of the business? Hint: keep delegating as much as possible to freelancers to free up time.
I like the idea of always trying to get the best out of every day, always trying to improve what I’m doing etc. but I’m a bit stumped at the moment. What I’m doing now is already the product of a lot of priority-tweaking so it’s all kind of pretty good, until I have a dramatic revelation or genius advice that changes everything.
TEAM STUFF
I hope everyone I’m working with is happy. I try to ask if anything can be improved but make sure you tell me if I can improve anything, if you work with me!
KONTAKT STUFF
Our new Dronar Glitchscapes came out - initial sales in the medium range for our Dronar series. The biggest ever was Live Strings. People like live strings, especially when it’s this amazing, and low price, what can I say.
I feel a bit frustrated that our Dronar Master Edition is now finished but just slightly too late to make a July launch window, and now, apparently since August is a dead month for sales we’ve had to delay the release until September. It’s a drag but never mind, that’s only a couple of months away!
LEGAL STUFF
One nasty surprise was a legal letter on behalf of a writer asking for his music back because we’d ‘failed to exploit his work’, and ‘sent him no statements and no royalties’. That wasn’t true, we’d made his music as widely available as anyone’s, we HAD sent statements and a small amount of income so I can’t see how we could be found in breach of contract. His music was released less than 3 years ago and it usually takes 3 years to start seeing income so his lack of faith is premature.
Also, it’s only a handful of tracks and income is unpredictable until you have hundreds of tracks. As some will know, our writers with a lot of tracks do well out of us, and some lucky/talented writers with a small number of tracks do well too.
I’ll have to leave you to make your own mind up about the wisdom and likely outcome of his actions, but it’s a reminder to me that the bigger things get the more of a target you become.
MEANING OF LIFE (SELFISH VERSION)
In terms of what I want out of the day, week, year, life, things are pretty good (touch wood!) - good teamwork, fairly low stress, usually in a pretty good mood, good & growing income, good relationships, good health, travel, work life balance, creativity. Without really noticing or appreciating it, life is better than it ever has been - I’ve had plenty of problems and struggles on all levels in the past. So, maybe NOW is the ACTUAL PEAK and some shitstorm will make everything worse soon. So, I’d better enjoy it while it lasts 🙂
MEANING OF LIFE (UNSELFISH VERSION)
What am I doing to make the world a better place? Not much. Well I’m giving some good music options to clients, some work and royalty income to talented composers, a bit of money to charity but not as much as I should. Hassling meat & cheese eaters about animal suffering once in a while, for what it’s worth. I have vague charitable and pro-social thoughts like - can I set up a music company that benefits composers in poor countries (answer: there lies a legal danger from unregulated copyright cultures). Can I set up a label all for women composers (patronising? would that make me some kind of Charlie out of Charlie’s angels - a white knighting knob head)? Prioritise non-white writers (patronising?). A label where all profits go to animal welfare (mmmaybe!).
Well anyway, I could at least ask more female writers to send in demos, and think about that animal charity library label one day. And give more to charity. Etc. We can all do a bit more than we do without too much trouble can’t we?
THAT RAVEN PRINCESS
I made some good progress producing me and Sophie’s fantasy album “Raven Princess” though we’re still on “piano plus guide vocals” versions. I can’t say what an amazing pleasure it’s been to devote a few hours many days to really delve deep into the significance of different chord options to get subtle colour effects, and interweaving motifs that symbolise the raven, magic and the wolves. Hopefully we’ll have something to show for these hundreds of hours of work at some point (2019 probably!).
SHOSTAKOVICH & AARON COPLAND
Been listening to a bit of Shostakovich and Copland this month. Hard to say anything that other people haven’t already said. Shostakovich seems complex, colourful and interesting with a huge range from bright and melodic (under pressure from Pravda!) to dark and nebulous, with a lot of quoting and references like a post-modern magpie. And Copland, yeah the sound of wide open, positive, striding youthful America, at least on the Appalachian Spring suite I listened to. Great evocative music.
NEW LABEL SONGCRAFT
And… the new label “Songcraft” (all songs with singers!) continues to be delayed from launching while we wait for at least 5 albums to be totally complete and ready for launch. We have 2 great albums finished and another 7 in various states of production so hurry up slow-pokes if you’re reading this! It’s quite a logistic challenge - getting separate male and female versions of each track - transposed into the right key, fixing up the singers, and explaining library music to songwriters who think it all sounds like a scam.
Elaborate new label concepts are not for the faint of heart but then again, Library Of The Human Soul was a complex beast to get in motion but it started running more smoothly after the first year so here’s hoping!
AS GOOD AS IT GETS
So there you go, business as usual month this month - no big novelties and no great disasters. Just predictable averageness which could well turn out to be the peak month of my entire existence by virtue of a lack of significant problems.
Touch wood.
MAY WORK TALES
Overall May seemed pretty good - an award (kind of!), lots of new music, good progress on most fronts.
MORE NEW MUSIC
In May we released some great albums:
Trailer albums: Primal Excitement, Long Rises, Family Adventure and Kick Ass Action.
From Minim (minimal TV and advertising label): Quirky Moments, Rippling Ambiences, Dreamy Ambient Positivity, Cool Products and Emotional Spanish Guitar).
From Lovely Music (upbeat TV & advertising music): Tropical and Quirky Folk.
From Library Of The Human Soul we had the Negative Transitions albums.
This brings us up to 254 albums across our 6 labels and hopefully anyone who listens carefully to our music at harmony.sourceaudio.com will hear that the quality keeps rising with plenty of novel ideas, we’re never repeating ourselves, with tons of fun new ideas in the pipeline.
TRAILER WORKS
Also in May we worked on some great custom tracks for some major upcoming movies. We got some nice trailer placements (How To Train Your Dragon 3, Ant Man and The Wasp, 2 The Incredibles Lego game trailers, Avengers Infinity War).
KONTAKT SOFTWARE
Work continued on getting our Dronar Master Edition (Kontakt) software ready for release.
HOLLYWOOD TIME!
One novelty was our second trip to LA this year, catching up with our friends at the trailer houses. This is going well - they certainly seem very happy with our albums and custom work. I guess they’re using them in their trailers so I can’t have totally misread that! It was also great to get some meetings with important new clients.
Also in LA we had a discussion with our multi-territory sub-publishing partners BMG about how best to work together in the US and came up with good plans I think, so that looks good for new opportunities ahead, especially for our non-trailer labels in TV and advertising.
WINNERS! GOLDEN TRAILER AWARDS
We also went to the Golden Trailer Awards in a beautiful old Ace Hotel Theater in the faded glory of downtown LA. That was all very exciting with lots of booze and bumping into familiar old faces. It’s a small world!
WE WON! Kind of! Aspect Ratio won an award for Best Trailer for a TV Series/Streaming Series (Westworld) featuring our sound design by Alessandro Camnasio.
Not sure if I was meant to be doing sales to drunk trailer editors but I ended up pretty much talking to composers and other publishers all night 🙂
INSIDE KNOWLEDGE
Part of the purpose of going out to LA so often is to pick up inside knowledge to keep up and stay ahead. On this I can say 🤐. Tons of new ideas and surprising revelations about how decisions are being made and who wants what.
EPIC SYMPHONIES
Announcing: our new “Epic Symphonies” project. This is where composers with amazing labours of love written for fans not trailers allow us to represent and promote their music for movie trailers without handing over any ownership.
The first signing is the incredible “American Epic” by Dwayne Ford and we’ll do a big push soon.
MILD PERILS
As usual May saw the same tensions - the ever present threat of running low on cash if we rush too far ahead with too many albums, the frustration for me of wanting to spend half of each day working on me & Sophie’s album “The Raven Princess” and often ending up running out of time and doing nothing. I will keep resolving to defeat this issue by ever more clever time management and delegation of tasks!
FEAR OF LOSING YOU
One of my endless worries is keeping composers happy. Beyond just liking everyone and loyalty, our reputation is built on amazing composers producing world class music so if I piss them off without realising it and lose them, I’d be back to square one. So, if you’re a composer and not happy with anything make sure you tell me, (but maybe not in the comments here to spare my blushes!). Maybe I can help and resolve whatever the problem is. Don’t go into the arms of an attractive competitor - they’re all evil; they just love you for your deep slams and realistic trombone sforzandos, they don’t love you for your essential youness 🙂 Please, just give me a second chance. I can change.
BURNED OUT BEACH BUM
I got a bit burned out this month with long work days in the build up to the US trip but tbh after a few days watching seals on wild Pacific beaches and giant redwood forest walks near San Francisco there wasn’t much stress left so I seem to be ok in mind and body, as far as I can tell. FOR NOW.
NASA NEWS
Talks are still ongoing with NASA about them using our music in their videos - still legal red tape to clear but we’ve been told there’s been progress and the video team really want to use our stuff.
HUMAN SOUL NEARLY COMPLETE!
One difference in May was sending out the briefs for the final two Library Of The Human Soul live strings recordings for albums 61 and 62 (to be recorded in July). That’s 62 albums of 90 tracks recorded over a 4.5 year period, £160,000 spent on this novel idea of thousands of 1-minute tracks at 120bpm in the key of G with live strings which combine to capture the whole of the Human Soul, every track named after a one-word emotion like Calm, Peace, Hate, etc. - see www.libraryofthehumansoul.com for more!
End of an era! What an amazing, and gigantic undertaking. The best days are ahead though, in terms of raising awareness amongst film makers of this unique resource.
OTHER UNDONE STUFF
Man, our new label Songcraft was supposed to be launched by now - it’s well under development but not there yet. Our new Kontakt software series “BeatTrix” was supposed to be released but remains a series of UI sketches. I haven’t joined the gym.
MORE MONEY PLEASE
What could be better business-wise? Well, as ever, it doesn’t matter how much comes in, more cash in the business account would help fund more expensive productions and allow advances for custom writers, so that would be nice.
FAMOUS LAST WORDS
Well who knows what calamities are around the corner but at least today I can say that all seemed pretty stable in May - great team, rising income, rising opportunities and a Golden Trailer Award 😉
APRIL WORK TALES
So then, what happened in April? The labels saw bigger worldwide earnings than ever - as you might expect given the expansion in number of albums. April saw more monthly quotes than ever (where we give price quotes for potential trailer placements), more custom work than ever, and bigger Spotify sales than ever.
On the other hand costs are higher than ever, but higher writer royalties, more recordings, fees for freelancers and *exquisite* branded novelty items is all good right?
Also, we got nearer to our big Kontakt Instruments release the “Dronar Master Edition” - binaries approved and encoded by Native Instruments, authorization codes generated, leading towards perhaps a June release.
In a nutshell at least at the moment we’re seeing a lot of positive momentum as all the plans and re-investment comes to fruition, as we become more established after a few years in the game, and as we get more fast and efficient thanks to constantly tweaking our processes for getting high quality music out there.
Here’s what else transpired in April:
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TO BOLDY GO
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Quite a highlight was a phone call from NASA about possibly using our music in their videos. Watch this “SPACE”. Lol.
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THE FUTURE IS BMG
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After 6 months of discussions we’ve signed a multi-territory sub-publishing (agent) deal with BMG Production Music. This is a deal where in some countries (UK, Germany, France, Austria, Netherlands) they are now acting as our sales agents. They are an excellent, confident team highly focused on expansion. We tried to do direct sales to clients in the UK in 2017 and did a bit better than our former sub-publisher but I strongly suspect that BMG will do better still and give our writers a nice boost in earnings.
The deal also covers the USA with us dividing up our roles - BMG will do all our TV and advertising promotions there from now because they’re the experts in those areas, but we are continuing the direct trailer sales in Hollywood. That’s our core specialism where we’ve built up some great relationships with trailer houses. We weren’t doing amazingly well with US TV and advertising so this is all very promising.
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NEW LABELS: SONGCRAFT & FUTURE POP
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We are now working hard on getting a new songs-based label up and running “Songcraft” where every song has a male and female version. PRS membership has just been approved. We have 9 albums in production and could see a June launch. We also have another pop-focused label “Future Pop” being developed by our Michael Coates who formerly ran the US office in Hollywood, now back in the UK. This label is Michael’s baby which he’s operating from within the “Harmony Music Libraries” umbrella.
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TRAILER NEWS
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The custom team are working hard on some exciting future movie trailers - our tracks are front runners for a few trailer houses now but I guess some of them could be up to a year away from any confirmations. April has been our biggest ever month for the number of projects we are involved in so this is still growing fast.
In April we had 3 library tracks placed in the Marvel’s Avengers Infinity War campaign, confirmed tracks in Westworld campaigns and Deadpool II as well as a cue confirmed late for Dunkirk. Gabriel Brosteanu also did some amazing custom work as part of a trailer for the game Spyro. I won’t get ahead of myself but buried in the blog here I’ll say I have high hopes for some custom sound design by me and Alessandro Camnasio in a film about a *marvellous* aquatic superhero. Plus - maybe Hotel Transylvania 3, Avengers 4 and lots of other unconfirmed maybes!
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OTHER STUFF
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In other news significant to me at least - I got an Ibanez mandolin which sounds great, although I need to get the action lowered on the G string - you have to bend it out of tune to get a note at the moment!
Also I bought some wooden and felt plectrums that sound fantastic on an acoustic guitar with high capo position. The wooden plectrums by Bison Boa sounded so amazing I ordered 100 and then had the Gothic Storm logo engraved on them for client giveaways.
I also had some fountain pens engraved with the Gothic Storm logo too. I’ll keep a few for myself thanks!
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HOLLYWOOD NEXT MONTH
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We’re back in LA next month to meet the trailer houses with planning now underway. Expect us to be handing out those beautiful branded fountain pens and exotic wood engraved guitar plectrums to anyone who’ll give us a meeting! We’ll also go to the Golden Trailer Awards for the first time. We even bought a half page advert in the program.
I was debating the idea of a composer meet-up one night. Should we have a composer meet up? Probably!
I think in the last couple of years me and Sophie (the co-owner) have spent more time in LA than any other city including London or even Liverpool (which is 7 miles away!). It’s starting to get a home-from-home vibe where we’ve got to know our tasty vegan junk food places, and the little things like rushing to the Sidewalk Cafe in Venice Beach before 12pm for their Venice Potatoes before they stop serving them 🙂
It seems like some kind of impossible miracle, but because of the way that trailer placements go up after visits, these holidays I mean business trips (hi HMRC!) literally pay for themselves. I know how lucky I am, but you know, I’ve suffered enough, give me my moment of sunshine in this short bleak grind of existence, bookended by eternities of nothingness.
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BASCA
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It was great to be on a panel about library music for BASCA in London this month. A lot of composers mentioned to me there that they’d read my articles in Sound On Sound and felt inspired so that’s truly great to know that I’ve helped some people. I’m lucky to have a long history as a struggling composer before being a more successful composer then publisher. It means I really feel your struggle and want to do my best to point those with talent in the right direction.
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THE RAVEN PRINCESS
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Sophie and I made some progress on “The Raven Princess” - our fantasy album that could one day be the basis of an animation (you never know!). A few too many times it got relegated to the last hour of the day after a ton of urgent things were dealt with. However, we at least got 2 more songs to the current stage which is “piano plus guide vocal in Cubase”. That’s 6 out of 13! This needs to speed up because my ‘tune sketches’ folder is already filling up with ideas for the next album.
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BE A LUCKY IDIOT
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I’ve been thinking about some lucky mistakes I’ve made in my music career. For example we once got offered a record deal after I threw a cassette into the audience and it hit a record company A&R man in the head.
More recently we got the highest client downloads of any newly launched album after I sent out the wrong link and had to follow it up with an apology and correct link.
Another time I invited the wrong writer to work on an album because I’d mixed some names up. I put his tracks last because I didn’t think they were great but then they became amongst our most successful before I finally realised he was great and I was listening with prejudice, as the late George Michael so presciently warned me against in 1990.
Also, a couple of years ago we signed a contract based on a misunderstanding about what it was, continued to think we’d made a mistake for a year but then it went on to produce a ton of high profile placements and new income. Thanks, fate!
Many mistakes have gone great. Arguably I’m at my most strategically astute when blundering.
Ok ok there’s also been some good decisions between blunders. Importantly, a background constant has also been good music with lots of love and attention put in by me initially and then other writers.
So, one moral of this story is that you don’t need to worry about all your decisions being perfect. The other is that it’s important to do good work over and over so that when you create new opportunities and expand your network by accidentally stirring up clouds of chaos in the silty riverbed of reality, good outcomes can follow - because more people are taking notice and some of them are looking for what you have.
So, blunder away but do good quality work. Doing nothing will lead to nothing but doing something good and getting yourself out there however imperfectly will open doors.
To be a lucky idiot then, you need a bit of hard work and quality alongside your blunders.
MARCH WORK TALES
Here's my latest self-aggrandising drivel!
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March seemed pretty good for progress I think!
CUSTOM PROGRESS
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Our big push into trailer custom work saw its first major success with a placement on the main Ready Player One theatrical trailer for Don Bodin’s track. We are now working with 8 different trailer houses on custom projects so this is really taking off well with some incredible music from the team making amazing first impressions and so far, converting everyone we work for into a repeat customer.
KONTAKT SOFTWARE
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Software-wise we got our new Dronar Metal and Glass Module released and off to a pretty good start with sales. We now have our big 30GB “Dronar Master Edition” finished and sent off to Native Instruments for encoding - expect this glorious release in May or June.
NEW MUSIC
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We have lots of exciting new albums released and in production with a strong emphasis on reacting to requests from clients - that means more music people will actually want!
We’re maintaining a steady 2-albums per week release schedule which keeps us on target for our 100-album plan for 2018. This is spread across 6 labels so isn’t actually a huge amount of music per label.
MONEY
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Income-wise all is on a reasonable footing at the moment for the publishing labels - Gothic Storm income keeps increasing a bit more every year and the newer labels are starting to earn a bit. We’re not exactly sitting on a cash pile - as income rises it is quickly invested in new projects leaving profits forever thin. At least income is rising not falling though!
In 8 years of publishing music and software I’ve still never taken out a salary! I’m living on my writer royalties and re-investing new income in growth. It’s voluntary work so far!
FUTURE OSCAR
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We’ve made good artistic progress with me and Sophie’s “Raven Princess” album. All songs and lyrics are written with 3 tracks now at the next stage which is to get good working structures into the computer with just a piano guide track and me signing falsetto like a castrated angel - high up in Sophie’s range to be replaced by her more naturally angelic voice later.
One new idea for this project was using as many medieval sounds as possible (because the story is set in maybe 1500). That meant I had to buy “ERA II Medieval Legends” sample library! Lots of lutes, recorders, spinets, hurdy-gurdy and other weird things. These will be used for colour, with perhaps the main instruments being orchestra (including live strings!) and percussion.
We’ll also use a lot of voice and drums because it is set in a mythical North very loosely inspired by northern Scandinavia, therefore Sami people who I think mainly used voice and drums rather than musical instruments.
An idea I had this month was to eventually write the story up into an animation movie script and pitch it to producers. There will be a few stepping stones between now and collecting the Oscar, but it might be an idea worth pursuing!
THE PERPETUAL INCUBATOR
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Another idea I had this month was to start a new library music label every two years and then sell each label when it reaches 10 years old. This would give my company the role of a perpetual new label incubator - starting up, growing then selling to bigger labels who can keep building future income for the writers. A condition would be that any buyer would have to be at least as likely to earn good royalties for the writers as we can.
Why build and sell? I’m more of an ideas and building things person than an administrator of giant things. I’m at my best using creativity to overcome novel problems and would wilt into depression at the top of a ballooning corporate hierarchy. Selling up as each label becomes a handful could be a good way to stay lean and agile.
Still, it’s just an idea for now, not a fixed plan.
ANGRY GREY-BEARDS
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One notable March thing was me putting a post on a composer Facebook group suggesting that sometimes composers over 50 can have worse production quality than younger composers and wondered why. This led to a wall of outrage from Emmy-winning senior greats. I tried to say, I only meant unsolicited demos I get from home recordists, not the work of professionals. It was notable that I got a lot of friend requests from over 50s composers after that. Must have triggered some mixed emotions amongst the grey-beards!
MONEY MORALS
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I’m a composer who spent most of my life with no money but things finally picked up in the last few years, making me perhaps particularly sympathetic to the plight of composers needing income security.
A lot of people now somewhat rely on me for current and future income (composers, employees, other freelancers). So, this is an opportunity to put into practice a kind of belief I always had that capitalism can be put to good use by using the money in a way that helps everyone. In theory it can be win-win because so many people are on royalties that the more the company earns the more everyone else earns. But it’s not as easy as that. I also have to balance budget priorities between long term income for many writers (meaning keep expanding) against more short term income for fewer writers (meaning give out advances, put money into marketing over new albums, into expensive productions over cheaper productions).
There is also the morality of income levels. I’ve put so much of my own money in, put a successful composing career on hold and risked so much of my own writer royalty income (for example putting £170,000 into the library of the human soul project which won’t break even until 2022). So if these projects go well, does that give me the right to (eventually) earn a lot of money because I put in the risk? Or does it mean I got rich off the back of tons of writers, making me a fat cat 1% capitalist swine? And then - am I even motivated by money? Kind of, in the sense that a minimal level helps to remove some stresses like bills and debts, but artistic & creative projects mean a lot more to me than say, £3,000 shoes.
Luckily, for now I’m no better off than I was 8 years ago thanks to all this reinvestment, so I can safely put off my anxieties about being too rich until I am. It’s a worry though, right?! Perhaps on my grave it will say “For a poor man, he worried a lot about the burden of wealth”.
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So then in a nutshell all seems ok. Famous last words!
FEBRUARY WORK TALES
My monthly catch up about my work stuff.
A SYNTH MADE OF BRASS
Following an enormous audio editing odyssey by Giovanni Tria we finally released our Dronar Brass Module in February. Rich, warm live brass going into Dronar’s complex atmospheric synth engine. What’s not to love?
Buy it while it’s on offer (20% off, 40% off for previous customers)! https://www.timespace.com/products/gothic-instruments-dronar-brass?fbclid=IwAR3y4Ot6VIgRSGlyOYcWnHlIrivZYdEOFPRk71HIZAK3CFqmMPpjubB0JD4
DRONAR MASTER EDITION
We’re hard at work on the big one, the Master Edition that combines all our Dronar modules into one gigantic Kontakt Player-compatible Dronar engine. First beta is near ready. Launch in May or June!
NEW MUSIC
Amongst many amazing albums February saw the beautiful and lush Classic Film Score Jazz from Rohan Stevenson and trailer music albums Tech Thrillers and Gabriel Brosteanu’s powerful Action TV Spots album.
BEING REJECTING
I’ve noticed that I keep having to say to people lately ‘that’s not good enough, sorry’ - people who I like and hate to say anything negative to. It’s MUCH harder to explain why something isn’t good than just an instinctive reaction that it’s not good - a full and accurate analysis really means taking over part of the writer and producer job and that’s just not possible. So, I’m risking upsetting old friends by saying ‘I can’t take this, but listen to this other great music to emulate what they’ve achieved’ - but without a detailed explanation and I’m sorry about that. It makes me feel terrible.
To be fair to writers too it’s partly subjective since often what I think is the best music doesn’t do as well as things I thought weren’t great. Still, some of it is to do with trends moving fast such as the incredible quality of modern sound design in trailers where formerly great composers are getting left behind because they are ‘only’ orchestral geniuses and not also world class sound designers.
I guess running a company means sometimes having to upset people and risk damaging relationships with bad feedback.
TRAILER SURGE
Our new trailer custom music team is hitting its stride with works in progress for 7 major trailer houses. It’s early days but we’ve already seen one confirmed placement for Don Bodin and a quote (where we quote the fee if it was to be used) for another writer. These quotes often but don’t always lead to placements btw.
Meanwhile I’m ramping up the system for adapting custom pitches as library tracks so that, far from wasting energy if their amazing music doesn’t land, writers will make their true income in the years ahead from worldwide library royalties.
You can never say for sure until confirmations, but certainly, we now have more tracks being used in trailer cuts in progress than ever before. Will they come through? Maybe! Are we still a small company? Fairly, but we’re rising fast!
2017 was our biggest year for trailer placements and now we have even more great, relevant music; we’re going out to LA far more often and are building some great deeper relationships by giving extremely high quality inventive music on tight deadlines so I’m hopeful for good things this year.
ATOM MUSIC
This month we began representing Bulgaria’s Atom Music in Hollywood. This came about after a major Hollywood studio wanted to use their track but wouldn’t deal with them directly thanks to a busy and cautious clearance department that can’t take chances on unknown quantities. Luckily we hooked up, helped them get the placement and now we’re promoting their epicness in the US.
THE RAVEN PRINCESS
Oops didn’t keep to my plan of spending 4hrs per day composing for this album in Feb. Well, now it’s March so I’ll redouble my resolve. Small progress was made with developing the compositions. I also bought and set up a fancy new iMac Pro to record it with which I have to use now, or I’m just becoming a sad old boss with the computer equivalent of a collectible guitar on his wall that he never plays, a symbol of artistic ambitions unfulfilled.
Say it ain’t so, iMac Pro. Let me light your 18 cores with musical majesty, not torture you with emails.
OTHER STUFF
We’re helping a BBC Scotland show rebuild their selection of music; working on Alessandro Camnasio’s Dronar Metal and Glass Module, developing new music labels; talking to a major label about some degree of sub publishing in the U.K. and USA; soon representing an amazing new trailer label which is near to launch, and working on lots of great new music. Meanwhile I’m talking to a publisher about turning my sound on sound articles into a series of small books about library music.
So, keeping off the streets and out of trouble!
January Composing Tales
Two major themes of January have been my plan to switch back to composing music 4hrs a day (after a couple of years having no time) and a week in LA combining trailer music sales with a trip to NAMM as a software developer with Gothic Instruments.
I’ll put composing and work stuff in two separate blogs since they’re so different. Starting with composing then:
COMPOSE YOURSELF
I didn’t exactly do 4hrs every day but I probably managed it half of the time. Instead of working on commercial writing I’m going all out on developing our epic fantasy album “The Ice Raven” with Sophie which has been a pure joy. All songs have the melodies, chords and structures worked out with rough live piano recordings and most have at least some lyrics written. It has lots of lovely melodies and ideas so all we can do from now is make it worse by the actual recordings not living up to the way it sounds in my head 🙂
Mainly what I did was keep learning the songs by playing them on the piano and made refinements as I went along, improving chords or inversions of chords, dropping weak bits, adding new intros, outros and little middle bits.
Sophie has also listened through to all the works in progress and helped come up with new lyrics, improvement ideas and a slightly revised track order.
For each song, I also collected a photo in my notes that I took or found on Google images to sum up the vibe - all attached to this post!
Well it’s great fun. I need a bit more time for learning to play them fluidly and refinements then we’ll start on the proper recordings. Me and Sophie’s agreed plan is to make this mainly orchestral but add any other sounds that might help convey the album’s themes: the far north, mystery, ancient times, myths, a transformation into a Raven, wolves, glaciers, northern lights, catastrophes, mountains, the afterlife, a river spirit, an ice castle, a wise witch, spirits of the ancestors, snow and a journey across the universe.
I like the fact that we’re starting from the point of how to convey this big idea, and not who will listen to it or buy it or if it will make or lose money. I’ve never quite been in that position before. In my band days I always had to balance trying to please a lot of different people with different opinions (label, manager, different band members, press, radio, fans), against doing things I felt like doing, always trying to find some kind of compromise.
Our first two Magic Theatre albums had more of a free spirit but there was at least some sense of wanting to keep the label happy.
This time it’s just the idea that matters. It’s all about the story and set of scenes, capturing them well in music, melody, songs and lyrics, and who it’s actually for is something to worry about much later once it’s finished.
For once it doesn’t really matter if anyone listens to it and that’s quite freeing. If the execution works as well as I hope I’m sure we’ll want people to listen, it’s just that the main thing for me is having something we can say: we took everything we’ve learnt over the years and spent as much time as was needed to make this the best version we could of what we thought was a good idea.
Part II: trailer trip!
Hello folks, it’s been a busy old month so I’ve split this blog into 3 parts. A couple of days ago I mentioned our composing project. Next time I’ll say a bit about the sample libraries but here I’ll report on our trip to Hollywood selling trailer music.
HOLLYWOOD TRAILER NEWS
Work in January has been dominated by a trip to Hollywood to help catch up with our trailer house friends, and I don’t say ‘friends’ lightly - after 8 years in the game it’s getting that way now - clients become people who we like and want to help, not customers to sell stuff to.
This trip has been very interesting because we made a decision in October to ‘cut out the middle man’ (i.e have agents or a salesperson) and so for a small number of our best clients I have now taken over as their main point of contact. This has gone very well. Because I built up Gothic Storm from the start no one knows the albums, performers and composers better than me so it makes sense, and I’ve known a lot of the trailer house music supervisors for years. This new approach has enabled me to react to nuances in what the clients say in conversations. It has led to immediate new ideas for albums and allowed us to steer the ship swiftly into the massive current trend for custom music.
This LA trip has opened up lots of amazing opportunities to work more deeply with existing clients and to be tried out by new clients and so in the next months our success will be determined by the quality of pitches we offer. Me and Sophie (co-owner) have done a good job of explaining how good we are on our trip, the next step is delivering the goods!
We only started the custom work in October and I can say that it’s moving fast and our music has become front runners for some big upcoming movie campaigns.
Where does this leave our library music? Well, sound design remains in massive demand. Also, music that sounds like regular music - funk, pop, jazz, country etc is also now in very high demand in trailers more than it ever was but it has to be reported: that classic epic trailer music sound is of very minority interest in Hollywood now and its biggest market is instead becoming games trailers, fans on Spotify and YouTube and worldwide TV.
Hollywood has changed, again! The trailer editors are more in control, wanting to adjust and customise everything. And the movie directors are now taking more control: wanting only exactly that right music that expresses the exact mood of the movie.
That’s good though hey: everyone wants something new and it’s our job to make that new music and stay ahead of the trends.
CUSTOM WORK: YOUR LOW ODDS OF SUCCESS
It’s important for composers to realise that the odds of success can be extremely low with trailer custom work. Up to 100 composers could be pitching, across the different music companies and trailer houses, and hundreds of commercial tracks might also be in the running. So why do it? One answer is that if you’re really amazing - better than everyone else - your odds are much higher. The other is that whatever you write can be repurposed as library music where you will definitely see long term income from around the world in TV and advertising.
So, aim for the sky but see a major trailer placement as an amazing lottery win whereas you’re really writing library music for the rest of the world.
WHAT MAKES OUR COMPANY SPECIAL?
We’ve learned on this trip that we have unique capabilities making us uniquely attractive to the trailer houses. But you know what, I’m not going to say what in case our competitors see this and copy our innovations 😉
Thanks for reading! Coming next: a bit about my sample library plans!
PART III: SOFTWARE STORIES
Another important focus this month has been our Kontakt software company Gothic Instruments.
Me and programmer Adam Hanley began this in 2014 and it took a year to get our first release (DRONAR) finished and we’ve released 10 products since then. This software creates instant expressive soundtracks by blending multiple sounds and creating complex layers of bass and high notes with chords and sound effects. It has picked up great reviews and sales - I thought we’d done a pretty good job but I have to admit it’s gone better than I expected.
Our next immediate release will be the Brass Module, live brass recordings converted into atmospheric pads and strange effects.
Until now everything has been building to the “Dronar Master Edition” - an officially licensed 50GB product with the free Kontakt player which combines 8 modules together into one big sample library. We hope to have that out by April and I’ve been at NAMM in California talking to international distributors and Native Instruments about co-ordinating a big release.
I think it will probably go pretty well and it’s interesting to have a toe in these waters of music software development. It’s a whole world of its own, a big ecosystem of major players and independents - just like other worlds I’ve roamed - bands, record industry, library music industry and Hollywood trailers.
It’s basically all the same. Find good people to work with. Do good work. Get to know people who can help. Talk up what you do and why it’s great. Get opportunities. Prove yourself. Move up the ladder. Hire and train people. Grow. It’s probably much the same in any walk of life.
THE ULTIMATE PURPOSE OF ALL THIS
Sadly, there’s no ultimate purpose to inching up ladders, but it’s nice to make stuff that people like, it can be fun and interesting, it’s better than being on the dole and I have to admit it’s nice to offset a trip to California against tax.
Also, brass pads!
December (and 2017!) Work Tales
Hello and thanks for reading my business blog!
DECEMBER DOINGS:
December had the same old stuff I always go on about: another Sound On Sound article all about library music printed (9 of 10 - nearly finished!), more great new music released, good PRS income growth for the labels, good Black Friday sales for Gothic Instruments - nice boost from VST Buzz - thanks Emmett!, plus promising growth of custom composing opportunities from Hollywood.
WRITER REASSURANCE:
Some reading this might be writers on my publishing labels wondering if all is well and their music will earn well.
Here’s what I think: all is well. My evidence for that is that as a writer I’ve had music placed with a few good library music companies since 2004 and I can see how much each album has earned on average, and I can see that earnings per album for my companies are comparable. That’s not a huge surprise because (a) I have many of the same international agents as the library companies that I worked for and they know what they’re doing, and (b) I’ve tried to be careful with quality control over writers, mixes and masters to make sure only good music gets through (which earns more than bad music, and benefits everyone by helping to build brand reputation).
My first library publishing company Gothic Storm Music began in 2010 so I’ve had a bit of time to monitor how income grows. Now we’re seeing a very comparable pattern of income growth with the newer labels The Library Of The Human Soul (started 2014), Lovely Music (started 2015) and Minim (started 2016).
Separately, I have high hopes from some new agent (sub-publishing) deals that are being discussed which should increase earnings in some important territories.
Overall then, all is well.
AND THE BAD NEWS?
There’s not much to complain about.
Forced to find problems I’ll say that we have a high tax bill in January but you know, first world problems. Many small things are less than perfect: we remain a bit overworked thanks to big plans and a small staff with income not quite growing fast enough to take new people on; also we have certain legal contracts that would be nice to rip up (we could get better terms now than when we signed them) but they will lapse in the next year or two.
Also, there still isn’t the cash to fund all my ambitions: more albums recorded with bigger budgets and my vapourware MovieMusic iPhone app which has been started and cancelled 4 times since 2014. However, I have high hopes of cash improving in the months ahead as various long-term plans come to fruition so we’ll see about those.
WHAT HAPPENED IN 2017?
We had a big production growth: 83 albums released compared to 55 in 2016. Sales income up 25% on 2016. Gothic Instruments released 6 products in 2017, up from 4 in 2016. Major Hollywood trailer custom writing opportunities went from virtually zero to about 15 jobs since I took over direct sales in October.
Personally, the biggest problem with 2017 was that it was highly stressful for me. My workload doubled thanks to fast expansion. I had no time to write any music. We lost our main designer after a dispute in June. We had a potential cash shortage which never really materialized but required a swift and significant change of plans in August. Someone accused me of copying their artwork. Some writers got justifiably upset about various things at different points which I did my best to address. And, we had a staff crisis in October (man overboard!) which wobbled the ship at the time.
It was well worth all the stress though. I didn’t have a stroke, always a boon. The time-crunch led to improved delegation of roles and new efficiency methods (we Trello-ized our universe!). And out of the ashes of personnel problems we have a happier team with better results than before.
Phew!
2018 EXPECTATIONS
I expect 2018 to be different to 2017 in a few ways:
We will probably increase staff with at least one new hire as the admin burden grows (you have no idea what admin trail follows closely behind the growth of new music and income!).
Also:
2018, OFFICIAL YEAR OF FUN
I’m hoping we can make 2018 more fun for me and everyone I work with and for. Try to reduce stress and enjoy it all more! And release at least some more fun trailer music, not all so serious and aggressive as previous years.
PRODUCTIVITY:
I’m expecting our library music albums to go up from 83 released in 2017 to over 100 in 2018. Gothic Intruments Kontakt libraries: expecting 12, up from 6 in 2017.
BOOK:
I’m planning to expand my Sound On Sound series of articles all about library music into a book.
LOST IN MUSIC:
I will start writing music 4hrs a day from the start of January - mainly focusing on my The Magic Theatre projects and maybe a new Ooberman album. Now that Michael can do most of what I can do we can share the work better and I should be able to perform my Hollywood trailer sales, quality control, expansion and strategy roles well while bringing some composing back into my life, which I’m REALLY looking forward to.
NEW LABELS:
Watch out for Songcraft and Epic Symphonies - 2 new labels for 2018.
HOLLYWOOD DOUBLE LIFE
Instead of hiring a full-time LA salesperson in the US the 2018 plan is to sell non-trailer music via a great sub-publisher, me continue with direct trailers sales (which I’ve done with some success since late October), me and Sophie (my wife and the business co-owner) travel to Hollywood approx. every 3 months to meet our contacts (instead of yearly or six-monthly previously), and continue to have a part-time rather than full-time person in LA helping with essential local tasks (thanks for saving our butts Rogerio!).
This US strategy was set in motion in late October and so far has seen a significant upswing in sales and opportunities over our previous approach.
iPHONE APP: 5th TIME LUCKY:
The app I’m trying to make is MovieMusic: putting the incredible emotional live-strings film music of Library Of The Human Soul into the hands of amateur iPhone video makers, albeit with certain restrictions and upselling plans to avoid cheapening the value.
I believe I’ll be able to get version 1.0 of this app released in 2018 by trying a different development approach: outsourcing to freelancers. 4 times previously I favored the approach of partnerships with programmers but each time it hit the same problem: great people who couldn’t find enough time to stay on schedule because of their other work pressures. I think paying a fee to a programmer for specific tasks will be more straightforward and likely to get things moving, as long as I can find the right programmer, so that’s the first thing on the to-do list.
HIGH 2018 GROWTH EXPECTED:
All signs point to a large growth in sales as all the expansions from 2014 onwards really feed through, new better sub-publishers take over, new Hollywood trailer plans take off and the Gothic Instruments master plan finally hits its stride. That will mean better income for writers, designers and programmers and more money for admin staff to take the pressure off us a bit, allowing us to continue to think more strategically and avoid cutting corners.
If that rosy outlook doesn’t work out I’d be surprised but we have a pretty solid foundation and can at least continue as we are, putting out great music, enjoying working with great writers and that lovely small group of clients who are starting to trust us on the big projects. Of course there could be dangers and personal pitfalls ahead but barring all that it’s pretty optimistic from where I’m looking!
LAST WORDS
Thanks for reading, hope you found some of that informative in some way! If you’re reading this as a composer I don’t know, keep writing lots of amazing music and send some to me to hear 😉
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone!
NOVEMBER WORK TALES
This was the month of really taking over the LA trailer sales and also pushing for some new improved international sub-publisher deals.
That plan is working well - can’t go into details thanks to competitor spies reading my blogs (yes YOU lol) but I can say that we’ve had some great results with the trailer companies, including building closer relationships and great chances to pitch for some major custom work which I also can’t talk much about 🙂
Also - we now have 3 of our labels signed to BMG Production Music in France with talks for other territories and labels ongoing. BMG have a great vibe I have to say - so far everyone I’ve met there has been more friendly and enthusiastic about growth than I’ve seen elsewhere - partly explained by the fact that they are strongly getting back into the library music world after they sold their catalogues to Sony a few years ago.
SAMPLES
Black Friday went well for our Gothic Instruments company! Also, we have a new Dronar coming out very soon - the Vintage Synth Module, a classic analog synth lovingly programmed and sampled by Alessandro Camnasio.
STUFF DONE IN NOVEMBER
My 8th article for Sound On Sound all about things that can go wrong with library music (read and tremble!) was printed last week, and I’ve nearly finished writing the 10th - a Dictionary Of Library Music.
We put out lots of remarkable albums in November: Dark Fantasy, Dark Encounter, Teen Rock, Neon Nights, Struggle, Science, Gypsy Jazz, Criminal Funk and Summery Acoustic. Each does exactly what it’s meant to do exceptionally well with great authenticity and live performances - thanks to all writers on those beauties!
Apart from Library Of The Human Soul albums (where mixing and mastering is shared between Christoph & Gabriel), each album as ever was expertly mastered by Christoph Allerstorfer with me making final (usually minor) tweaks on my mirrored Cubase setup.
MY DAY
As for what I do all day it’s a real mix: a lot of answering and asking questions by message and email from many sources, seeking errors to fix, worrying about problems that might arise, doing some of the sleeve designs, checking mastering, listening and approving some of the works in progress, writing and sending out briefs for albums and artwork, devising step by step procedures that can be implemented in all the different areas we work, working out strategies for what albums and products to bring out, chasing everyone up who hasn’t done what they said they would do by a certain date (that’s pretty much everyone!), apologising to people I’ve accidentally upset, creating, signing and posting out contracts, practicing the piano, emailing and making phone calls to trailer houses in the evenings, writing this instead of getting on with my work 🙂.
I also drink a lot of coffee and waste time reading the news and Facebook.
2018 PLANS
Lots of great things are planned for next year - the big Dronar Master Edition, lots of new music in the works, a new label in April and another later in the year. Lots more visits to Hollywood (we’ll be there in January next) and hopefully lots of great opportunities for our composers to have their trust paid back (in £!).
YEAR OF FUN?
After a few years of being stressed out of my mind doing too much I’m hoping 2018 will be more fun. That includes spending more time writing music but also making more fun albums. Our movie trailer music has been pretty aggressive or dark and serious so we’re working on some more fun albums to go with the lighthearted aspect to a lot of big action films. I’m also hoping writers can have more fun doing projects they would really love to do.
BUSINESS OUTLOOK
From humble beginnings (unemployed with zero capital) 13 years ago income has grown an average 20% per year and next year looks likely to improve on that thanks to re-investing profits back into more great music and software, plus a bit of good brand reputation building up. In 2017 income grew from all directions and looks set to continue: movie trailer income was double the year before, software sales grew quickly and library music sales were also significantly up.
As far as I can tell then, things look good for 2018 for the companies and the employees, composers, programmers and designers who are coming along for the ride.
Touch wood 🙂
THANKS SO MUCH
There are over a hundred brilliant composers I have to thank but those who particularly put in all or a huge amount of their time deserve special thanks as ever - so, big thanks to Michael for EVERYTHING (production management, royalty admin, digital distribution, quotes, invoices, payments, UK & US books and tax, now sleeve design!), Gabriel for your management, mixing and amazing music, Roy for your metadata, Sophie for your strategy and image searches, Alessandro for your amazing sound design, Christoph for your mastering & amazing music, Andy for your contracts, Adam for your dazzling Kontakt scripting and Darin for your brilliant designs.
I like to think of each blog as an award acceptance speech.
OCTOBER WORK TALES
Welcome to my monthly blog about my various things going on!
LA STORY
A major part of the month was our trip to LA to meet trailer house friends old and new and as usual it was a bottomless treasure trove of info about areas we can improve and how things are changing. Six months from our last visit we found an ever growing demand for the high risk area of custom work (making new music to order instead of just offering our library music). High risk for writers that is - they can work tirelessly on amazing music only to be beaten to the pitch by other writers, or the trailer house might be beaten by another trailer house. Then again, it’s also high reward - up to 10x the fees so it just depends how much of a gambler you are. The consolation prize is that writers have great music that they can use even if the pitch doesn’t make it.
The trip also led to a change of strategy for our LA office where I’ll personally take over most of the strategic and sales roles, make phone calls in the evenings from the UK, go and visit 4 times a year instead of 1 or 2 to help maintain relationships, while still keeping someone locally in LA for time-critical roles (e.g. giving a fast reaction to music requests). Trying to run the US-office as an autonomous company allowed it to get out of control with me in the dark and losing touch. Sales have been good so I can’t complain, but there is a strategic problem that needs fixing.
We’ll still have a trusted new local person on the fast-reaction roles but the advantage of me as the owner personally meeting and talking to more clients is that I can translate what I hear directly into recording plans for the labels, and draw on my years of knowledge of writers, recording and production to put together fast novel solutions to the problems of clients.
You can delegate too much. If you’re not careful you lose track of what’s going on, and for as long as I’m the person responsible for everything growing well I need to be in the middle of the trailer music nexus to make the best decisions.
MORE COMPOSING IN 2018
As part of this month’s big re-evaluation, I have made a new commitment to get back to writing more music, with a plan to spend half of every day writing music from January. When I realised that the best thing for writers would probably be to hand over some of the sales and admin work to sub-publishers, this looked like a good opportunity to write more music in the extra time that this would free up. I had a pretty successful composing career before I invested my writer royalties in publishing and it’s time I got my toes back in the water. If all goes to plan, I will focus my business half of the day on trailer sales plus overseeing the production of great new music for our labels. Meanwhile Michael will still be working full time managing these productions (as well as royalties and finance) but hopefully the reduced admin burden will also free him to pursue his interesting label development plans within the company.
So: write more music, take more control of the most important aspects of the business, but hand over the more thankless stuff to other people with more experience. It’s a plan!
AS FOR THE KONTAKT SOFTWARE
This plan will continue as before. We have great products planned and a great team including our partnership with Time and Space who are doing an incredible job of marketing and sales. We have some big software plans for 2018!
SEPTEMBER WORK TALES:
GROWTH AND NEW THINGS
Hello anyone interested in what I’ve been up to!
I’m writing this in LA now at the start of a week of making new connections, learning new ways to improve what we do and find out what’s going on.
As for the month just gone, a lot of September was similar to any time: great music released, very proud to release 2 excellent Kontakt Libraries - Epic Drops and Dronar Cinematic Atmospheres which are selling well, another article about library music (all about movie trailer music) printed in Sound On Sound Magazine, another future article written (all about things that can go wrong in library music), more great reviews of our Dronar products in magazines, YouTube channels and blogs.
Some work was very different: one was some very swift business restructuring needed. We had an issue where a large increase in income 6 months ago triggered large investment in new music and also caused very high current writer royalties to be owed out, but now with current income lower we’re having to cut costs back to previous levels. It’s been bad having to delay new recording plans and delay releasing albums to keep it all affordable but things are on a more sane footing now so we’re out of the worst of it I hope. We got caught out expanding too fast instead of keeping that extra cash in the bank for a rainy day but that won’t happen again!
To put it in perspective I think we’ve already released around 60 albums in 2017 compared to a total of 35 in 2015 and 52 in 2016 so we’ve had our feet too hard on the pedal.
Another unusual event was a very short notice project to create a large set of new music for a large potential UK client. If this works out well it could be a big deal but if not we have lots of great new music for our labels anyway so thanks so much to everyone involved and your incredible and high speed contributions. I never knew Bossa Nova could sound so good!
In terms of future directions, work is underway on a new product line for Kontakt called “BeatTrix”, as well as new Dronar modules Brass, Woodwinds, Ethnic Flutes and Classic Synths. All of this is being prepared for next year’s Dronar “Master Edition” which will package everything together in a single officially licensed Kontakt library.
There is also a new library music label “Songcraft” coming but this has been delayed alongside the general cost cutting so we’re probably looking at an April launch.
Meanwhile our LA office is making continued good progress under Bryan’s management: a steady monthly growth in quotes, music requests, placements and custom work opportunities for our writers. We’re hoping to hire our first non-trailer salesperson there in January if all goes to plan.
As for the future: let’s see! This is all about trying our best, trying to balance being reliable and taking risks, building steadily but also trying to take big leaps when new opportunities come up. It’s not easy but every year for 15 years my companies have raised around 20% more revenue (turnover) than the year before so we must be doing something right! I’ve always been fixed on growth and new things and that means that extra income always goes straight back into next year’s plans. Growing and trying new things, that’s something reasonable to aim for!
AUGUST WORK TALES
Monthly rant/work blog time!
WHAT I DO
For the uninitiated - I run 6 library music labels under the “Harmony Music Libraries” banner, I’m in a band The Magic Theatre, write about library music for Sound On Sound Magazine and develop Kontakt music software as Gothic Instruments. Here’s how all that went in August...
ARTICLE WRITING
I finished writing my two-part article all about trailer music for Sound On Sound magazine. It was great to look deep into the trailer music and epic music worlds and get some interviews with key figures - a studio executive from Paramount, a few top LA trailer house music supervisors, some great composers including Thomas Bergersen and epic music YouTube channels. What did I learn? Well, you’ll just have to wait and read them when they’re printed in late Oct and late November 🙂 I can’t even summarize it really because there’s so much detail that the whole 12,000 words is just a big summary. Ok, small tidbits - the big money is going to a small number of LA custom music composers who work directly with music supervisors. Writers of library music for trailers have a roughly 1 in 2,000 chance of getting a track placed in a trailer but much higher for sound design. But, don’t worry too much because your trailer music can still make good cash around the world on TV, foreign trailers and from fans via Spotify streams and YouTube ad revenue.
TRAILER PLACEMENT/GAG ORDER
Man, we were told directly by a studio to remove our social media references to a very cool trailer placement we got for a new Spielberg film - studio policy! Ah well YOU know what you got Wayne Dineley 😉
USA NEWS
Bryan Nguyen who runs the LA office constantly amazes me with his detective instinct and energy getting to the bottom of things, how they work and how to be the fastest and best. Because of the amazing slowness of the trailer music world we won’t really know the results of his work for a year or so - when we’re told belatedly where our music was used. BUT - the number of quotes we’re giving out has shot up dramatically and we’re getting on the inside track in the custom music world - something we could never do when we didn’t have an LA office. So, great work Bryan, you da man. WATCH OUT ENEMIES - ahem I mean, hi esteemed competitors, hope you don’t mind us joining the table and taking a slice of the pie.
THANK YOUS
As ever other progress in August was only made possible by the fantastic work of Gabriel Brosteanu, Michael Coates, Christoph Allerstorfer, Alessandro Camnasio - Composer / Sound Designer, Icebreaker Audio, Time & Space, Roy Goulbourn, Darin Leach, Andy Flett, and of course all the incredible composers for the labels.
CASH PANIC
I’ve had my head in spreadsheets for 2 weeks trying to avert a cash worry looming in November/December. A victim of our own success you might say, unusually high revenue back in spring led to two things: (1) fast expansion (hiring and a massively increased rate of music production) and (2) very high royalties owed out to writers this month. So, the income bump led to a big expansion in costs as we happily spent it all.
BUT, the autumn income is now only *good* not great meaning that everything now has to be scaled back for a while to avoid running out of cash. It’s hard to go from mild puzzlement to realizing there’s a serious problem up ahead, to then working out how to fix it and how to tell everyone that we need to slow down to normal levels. There’s hundreds of thousands of pounds flowing in and out now and I’m having to constantly learn how to adapt from being a composer-loner making pocket money (in 2013 my music publishing empire was just me, releasing 1 album that year) to this fast growing system (8 people, over 100 albums per year).
DISPUTES
One problem with doing more things is the greater capacity for people to raise disputes. In the last few months I’ve had some insane ‘infringement’ claims from fantastists. YES FANTASISTS. That’s my view anyway, but seriously for some reason it really gets me annoyed when my time is wasted justifying myself to idiots who are obviously wrong and yet take an arrogant righteous tone. Firstly - FOUR NOTES THE SAME AS YOUR SHITTY NEW AGE MUSIC IS NOT A COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT. Secondly - WE WERE INSPIRED BY SOMEONE’S ELSE’S DESIGN NOT YOURS WHICH IS SHIT. And thirdly - A PYRAMID IS NOT A TRADEMARK. I don’t know why this annoys me so much. Maybe it’s because they would all be serious issues if they were right, so it’s like being accused of something serious while being innocent. Still, I really should rise above this kind of thing. INSTEAD OF BAITING YOU LOSERS WITH CAPS RANTS
BECOMING ALOOF
Another sad side effect of this growth is me turning into the opposite of what I want to be - becoming aloof and too busy to be nice and helpful. What I mean is that when it was all on a small scale even 2 years ago I was mad busy but everything was done closely with the small number of people I worked with - composers and a couple of freelancers. If a new writer sent a demo they’d get an essay back with suggestions. Now? Everyone gets quickly written emails and messages full of typos because I’m always behind and rushing to keep up. Suddenly, there’s less soul; I’m just some aloof blunt typo-man throwing out orders.
Part of my plan for expansion was always to delegate - trust other great people to do what I’m doing then move on to new things. The result? That’s worked out exactly as planned, but then instead of being an encouraging mentor I’m leaving people to it for as long as it all goes well then only stepping in if there’s a problem, meaning my communications can be more negative than positive.
GROWING PAINS
So, in my attempt to just keep up with the momentum I’m getting into disputes, I’ve gone aloof and critical instead of always there and positive (even though to myself I’m perfectly positive and available!), while having to juggle these complex cash streams. It’s still just a small company though - imagine how it must be for a medium-sized or large company. Well, I guess it’s just the way of things - hierarchies form and it all goes corporate bullshit on our ASSES.
MENTOR WANTED
Maybe I need a mentor - a company owner who has gone through business expansion in a creative industry and can tell me what to do better. Any takers?
MY COMPOSING AMBITIONS
Man, I want to get composing music and writing songs but as you can see I’m growing a corporate monster that’s running me instead. At least me and Sophie (my wife & co-member of the band Ooberman (how we met) and co-writer with The Magic Theatre) have been working on one new song with most of the vocals recorded. Sophie’s voice is sounding amazing and she wrote the very-beautiful words.
MEIN STRUGGLE
OK so here’s what I need to do to resolve all of this: spend most days writing music, meditate on love, find a lightness of spirit, reduce my workload, generate ever higher revenues to keep expansion pumping, travel, meet interesting people, have much more time for everyone I work with and be positive, kind, thankful and encouraging.
Or just accept the inevitable and become a twisted Trump-Scrooge-Hitler monster barking garbled insults from the top.
JULY WORK TALES
So then, what did we just do? Hmm. Well, 12 great albums were released across our 6 labels - tons of fantastic, beautifully performed and mixed music all with its own universe of sound and purpose.
We’re close to finalising an important UK TV deal (allowing our music to be used by a major broadcaster) but that’s easy to say until it’s totally signed and sealed. It does seem like we’re in the final lap of ironing out minor technical things so touch wood.
*UPDATE* BBC DEAL SIGNED!
With samples we’ve been working on Sculptor Epic Drops - due out this month. Work has stalled on the Dronar series thanks to difficulty finding someone who can edit the Brass samples and severe limitations on my time for training someone. The sad fact is that Gothic Instruments takes a huge amount of time for me and only makes a fairly small income compared to everything else so it’s slipping onto a back burner and will continue to do so unless I can successfully train and delegate my way out of having to personally do 30 hours of audio editing for every product. It’s amazing to have exciting product ideas and release them to happy customers and get great reviews (we got 5 out of 5 for Dronar Live Strings in the latest Sound On Sound magazine!), not so great to see other parts of the business suffer because I’m editing audio instead of getting music recorded and released.
So, that’s a problem to solve!
Writing these huge magazine articles for Sound On Sound magazine every month is also a huge time commitment but it’s great doing the research and has led to lots of great new connections with people who’ve read them, or who I’ve approached for interviews so I think this has been a great experience. I spent July working on part 1 of a 2 part survey of trailer music and it’s been really fascinating. The final draft is 6,000 words - might need some editing by SOS, unless they don’t mind me taking over the magazine.
The LA office is going pretty well - placements in Spider-Man and La La Land were confirmed, lots of quotes coming in and definite steady progress towards getting more custom work and on all the TV network approved lists. It’s not easy but if it was everyone would be doing it! We’re close to considering hiring 2 specialist TV salespeople - one in London, one in LA. Let’s see - cash is a bit tight for that level of risk but it looks like the only sensible way forward in these two large territories.
Work on a planned iOS app seems to have stalled so I’m doing what I can to see if we can keep that moving quickly or drop the plan for the 4th time or so. I think my problem is my wishful thinking that highly skilled and intelligent programmers have the time to invest in being in a partner (working for future income) when they need to pay the bills today, and I might need to switch this to outsourcing the programming to someone I can afford in the Ukraine or India, etc.
One hope I have, as usual, is that I will be able to get back to writing more music soon. I’ve been saying that for a couple of years so obviously I just HAVE to write the music, but I feel a lot of responsibility to everyone - employees and writers and my future self and family, to keep everything running well to make sure everything keeps growing, and that means no time for music still!
So overall then July sees a picture of continued steady growth of everything - more music, more sales, more work to do. And the big tension is time. All of these results require a large investment of time with none left for the stuff I really want to do - write music. Ok I actually do very little work in any evenings or weekends - but you know, that’s nice for leisure stuff. I couldn’t really face working all day then writing music all evening and weekend even though I know some people do that!
HUGE THANKS TO THE CORE TEAM MAKING ALL OF THIS POSSIBLE:
Gabriel Brosteanu (Library Of The Human Soul)
Sophie (Strategy and some sleeve work)
Michael Coates (metadata, UK & US finances, music approvals, royalty admin, US & UK PRO registration)
Bryan Nguyen (running the LA office, Gothic Hybrid production management)
Christoph Allerstorfer (mastering, producing live recordings)
Alessandro Camnasio (sound design)
Andrew Flett (contracts)
Roy Goulbourn (metadata)
JUNE WORK TALES
With June nearly up let's see what happened.
With our Gothic Instruments music software we released our Dronar Dark Synthesis Module with good sales and reviews, now preparing our Sculptor Epic Drops for release maybe at the end of July. I've also been taking to Native Instruments about our grand Dronar Master Edition aiming at a January release. Dronar work might be delayed a bit though; we have a brass module in the works but I'm the only person who understands our complex editing and mixing system and I've been caught up with tons of other priorities.
There's a few things I can't go into too much detail about. One was a falling out with someone I've worked with a lot for a year or two - I’ll be diplomatic and say no more! Another thing is a discussion about a company partnership that could help boost some plans. Another is me possibly doing some string arrangements for a pretty legendary band. I truly hope so but let's see.
On a less secretive level I finished article 5 in my Sound On Sound magazine series all about Networking. That series is getting some good feedback from composers (mainly saying ‘I wish I’d read this 10 years ago!’) and publishers saying it’s a good overview of the industry - no bitching yet!
Our labels released 13 albums this month - all exceptionally high quality, beautifully produced, colourful and emotional music that all has its own important niche.
Generally speaking I think progress is good on all fronts - overall sales income has been higher every year since 2004 thanks to extra income always being re-invested into new plans which have mostly gone well.
I've had to do a few rejections this month - dropping albums that weren't working out, telling people that their demos aren't good enough (when really pushed for an explanation). I hate that, I'd love to shower everyone with praise but never mind, it's just how it has to be I guess.
I’m planning to write some music every day from now. A pretty insane period of deadlines is relaxing a bit so I think it’s time to get back to an album project that’s been on hold for a while. Publishing admin might be boring but at least it’s a kind of a safe zone where I more or less know what I’m doing. Writing music and making it good - that’s *hard*!
May Work Tales
May's nearly up so here's my monthly report.
Our Kontakt software company Gothic Instruments released Sculptor Epic Risers, and is getting the next Dronar (Dark Synthesis) ready for release right now. I also designed the concept for a new range called "BeatTrix" - which has Beats and does Trix 🙂 Expect that in September maybe. We also have Donar Live Brass in audio editing and Dronar Live Woodwinds, Dronar Vintage Synths and Sculptor Drops in planning.
As ever my hope is to make this mad software release rush manageable by hiring great people to take over the tasks that I've done on the first products - recording, editing and preset creation, and I'm getting there but it's never easy to explain my madcap audio manipulation habits!
The software thing is going well - great reviews, happy customers (except owners of Xeon cheese grater Mac Pros running Logic - Dronar doesn't agree with you guys, sorry!). Also, good sales. I had a master plan in 2014 that it would be out in 2015 and we'd bring out a big expensive 'master edition' in 2016. Hmm so we're now 2 years behind schedule but the sales are as predicted and we're doing everything we planned but just late getting into the speed-up phase that I expected earlier. Never mind, better late than never!
In terms of journalistic writing, article 2 of my 5,000-word-per-month Sound On Sound series about library music was printed this month (all about library music business models), and I've just about finished article 4 ('Meet The Clients' - where we meet these video editors who choose what music to use).
Article 3 was 'How To Be A Good Library Music Writer' and will be printed around 15th-20th June. Soon I'll be starting work on part 5 - a guide to networking - a yearly calendar of events and guide to all the forums and organizations that you can join.
One thing I've neglected until this month is UK library music sales. I officially took over direct sales here 3 months ago after having an agent for 7 years but between being busy and work travels it's been a slow start. HOWEVER - there was a big potential breakthrough last week. I'll just say it depends on a contract being signed so I won't blab until the ink dries. Could be a biggie though.
As for the US office - Bryan's doing a great job there - he's a total detective and superstar, infiltrating the trailer world underbelly and smuggling in our epic magic ;-). Trailer placements seem to be rising well and we're learning fast how to get ahead of the new trends and trying to set some.
In May I also began plans for a new library music label Songcraft - all songs with male, female and instrumental versions of every track. Phase one is finding the writers and singers and developing a collaboration system. 3 or 4 albums are in production already and I'm hoping we can launch this label in August.
Meanwhile our Minim label rolled out to new territories this month - Germany, Netherlands, Spain and Italy so most of the world is tied up for that now.
We got a few great new albums out too - 3 The Library Of The Human Soul albums, 2 Minim albums, 2 Lovely Music albums and a huge amount of amazing new stuff coming in the next 2 months from all the labels. It's a time of massive expansion and tons of great music.
This has been made possible by two fairly simple things: money and hiring. As income has increased I can hire more talented people to take over my old jobs and we can get more great stuff out there.
So, it might seem like I'm spinning a lot of plates but increasingly I'm just surrounded by great plate-spinners - like Bryan Nguyen, Michael Coates, Christoph Allerstorfer, Gabriel Brosteanu and Alessandro Camnasio - Composer / Sound Designer while I focus on the next thing 🙂
Thanks everyone for your help!
April Work Tales
This month was mainly significant for a US trip we made to meet the trailer companies in LA and then the sub publishers (agents) in Las Vegas.
I learned a dazzling array of new things to do and I think it was thanks to going out with the aim of really listening to people, what's happening and trends. Also, it was massively helped by Sophie the co-owner of my companies, a trained psychologist who knows what to ask, how to listen and how to make extraordinarily detailed notes that add back in the 99% I naturally forget from every meeting. I'm a man of gut instincts about what I think people said, but it turns out to be a faulty method 🙂
I won't blab about it here, but there'll be lots of new initiatives reflecting what we've been told.
It was also a great opportunity to meet and go on the sales trail with the highly creative and energetic new head of Gothic Storm USA Bryan Nguyen who is set to do great things over there.
April also saw the printing of my first foray into journalism - my series of articles for Sound On Sound Magazine for writers, about library music. That's getting a good response as far as I can tell. Turns out that writing 4,500 worthwhile words every month takes a bit of time! Ah well, it's great to pass on what I've learned and has led to possibly speaking on a writers' panel at the PMC (Production Music Conference) in Santa Monica in October. Yay, an excuse to go back to LA!
LA is such a great place to visit. The weather is glorious and the people seem marvelously resilient and positive in the face of their new evil tangerine overlord.
After LA we had a week in Utah, Arizona and Nevada, out in the amazing desert from Zion National Park to Monument Valley then the snowy mountains around Duck Creek Village before descending into the hot madness of Vegas for meetings with sub-publishers from around the world.
While in the US it was great to meet and catch up with Neil Mclean, Kavin Hoo Chuin Wui, Toddrick Spalding, Rogerio Maudonnet, Wes Devore, Michael Sherwood, Peter Baker, Ash Sewell, Ed Cox, David Reis, Jae Kim, Fabio Di Bari, Paul Gulmans, Lana Bui, Omar Herrera, Jessica Ruoti, Dhruv Kumar, Conor Aspell, Patrick Buchanan, Josh Bishop, Dylan Jones, Brian Murphy and Ricky Kendall II
Thanks for giving us your time and wisdom everyone!
Mind-blown, May will be spent getting new ideas underway (alongside new Kontakt software and 30+ albums being finished for release). So, all go as ever.
(Image: me up Duck Creek without a paddle)
March Work Tales
In which I go on about what I'm doing.
Hmm lots happened this month. Let's have a big welcome to Bryan Nguyen, new CEO of Gothic Storm USA, starting in LA on April 3rd with the hopes and dreams of a hundred composers resting on his confident shoulders. No pressure then 😉
My labels have released 11 albums or so in March - 3 more amazing The Library Of The Human Soul albums produced & mixed by Gabriel Brosteanu or Christoph Allerstorfer and written by a star-studded cast of greats!
We have amazing live jazz trio music written by Claudio Ottaviano and Antonio Vivenzio. Authentic Brazilian percussion recorded in Rio by Rogerio Maudonnet. Incredible French impressionist piano performed by a world-class concert pianist. "60s Pop" includes French Pop, surf rock and some Merseybeat-style tracks recorded live and in mono by a Liverpool beat duo. Also - amazing sound design from Dan Byers. Plus, some big budget Gothic Storm music with live strings and choirs.
Then my company Gothic Instruments got out our magnum opus - "Dronar Live Strings" - selling at double the rate of our previous biggest seller. Composers love strings! Especially when you can express yourself and make strange and beautiful noises with them 🙂
For iPads and iPhones we have something super-cool VERY close to release on the App Store (submitting for review today!). This has involved some fantastic last minute translations into Chinese and Russian - thanks SO MUCH Iliya Zaki and Stanislav Derpoliuk. This app isn't really my project and it's nothing to do with music, I'm acting as a kind of organiser to help manage it, and I can't say what it is because the MAIN PERSON doesn't like blabbing about everything before it's out like I do 🙂
Money-wise, March and September are the main months for international library music income where I find out if my companies are living up to my big boasts to writers, or whether it's all a hollow sham and I'm a charlatan. Thankfully I can breathe out, cancel my escape plan and put away the disguise because despite no lucky surprises all is growing well, in-line with expectations, especially thanks to great earnings from Australia, South Korea, China & Taiwan and Japan. The East is where it's at! Well ok Europe and the USA is doing pretty well too.
Also money-wise, I've realised that I've always taken less out for myself than even my own writer royalties, let alone publisher income. That means that despite 7 years of publisher growth it's all cost me more than it's made for me. But you know, that's to do with re-investment and a focus on constant expansion. One day I'll buy my island and hold the Earth hostage with a death ray, DON'T WORRY ABOUT THAT.
Starting April an ambitious iPhone music app putting The Library Of The Human Soul in the hands of the masses is going into a higher gear of development thanks to Peter Emanuel Roos devoting an official day per week on it, and more if he works all night and weekends. You never know 😉
Also in April - I'll be in the USA for 3 weeks on a sales trip so please expect an out of office reply.
Also in the month ahead - my journalistic endeavour - a monthly series of in-depth articles about library music for Sound On Sound magazine will start running. I'll get the spam filter ready for all the composer demos. I mean, I'll get ready to enjoy listening to all the thousands of amazing composer demos. Hmmm.
ANYWAY - yes yes you say, but what are the PROBLEMS? What's GOING WRONG? Just the usual - not enough time for everything, not enough money to expand staff in a way that would ease the workload, still getting no time to write my own music, not getting enough time to execute a good quality marketing plan for the UK.
Well, hopefully leaving the desk for 3 weeks will help me to forget about what I'm not doing while it all piles up.
Feb work tales.
Well nearly at the end of month 2. What have I done?
Hmm well, new head of Gothic Storm USA appointed but expect announcements later!
Over 50 albums are in production now - a massive expansion to help build the range of magical musical possibilities for clients. Also, I just can't say no to inspiring concept suggestions from writers 🙂
I'm dipping my toes in the waters of UK library music sales, some promising leads, met some nice editors in London and found some interested parties but I haven't been able to engage fully with that yet. Next month!
I'm now at the start of the new royalty season where my spreadsheets tell me to expect a big international business income rise caused by an expansion of albums and labels back in 2014 - extra cash much needed to pay for the big expansions this year - so let's see if that works out! Touch wood.
The new Kontakt library - Dronar Live Strings module is pretty much finished, sounds utterly amazing and is ready for me to start creating presets and likely to be released mid-March. Meanwhile the audio is all finished for future products Sculptor Epic Rises and Dronar Dark Spaces.
My two 4,000-word articles about library music for Sound On Sound magazine were accepted so that monthly column should begin running from next month.
I'm getting a strong yearning to spend some time writing new music but finding it hard to find the time still!
Now starting to plan a big US sales trip in April.
Non-work wise we got to see the Aurora and deep snow in Arctic Tromsø! And, beard grew.
Hmm that's about it for now.
Hope you enjoyed the speed-written blog note 🙂
January work tales.
Well it's been a bit of a nuts January - something like 30 albums all starting production together. Setting up a new efficient system to keep on top of it and bringing in further help to make it all possible.
Before that I had thousands of audio files to edit for our Dronar strings module. My sample audio editing is an insanely complex system of 50 steps or so. Gets great results but I barely understand it myself let alone try to explain that to someone else. But that's what I must do next time because there's no time for me to spend weeks per product juggling waveforms.
Highlights of the month include an incredible response to my request for library album concepts from writers. Writers are album concept geniuses it seems (at least the ones I know are), and by being writer-led this next set of recordings are going to be extremely colourful and surprising. Not that my ideas were bland crap I hope.
Another highlight was getting my mum's old piano tuned and refurbished this week. It hasn't been tuned or repaired for 40 years and all I ever knew when I learned about music on that piano was a kind of slightly loose jangly sound. But lo and behold after a few days with an expert it sounds very pure and sonorous. Who knew. The moral of that story is if it is broke, do fix it.
Then there's the new US office. Sadly Michael who moved from Manchester to LA to set it up last year has decided that he'd rather live back in our humble rain-cloaked kingdom and is coming home next month after a 6-month tour of duty in La La Land. He's made great progress there so hopefully we'll find a way to build on his achievements.
In February I'll be learning how to be a salesman in the UK, now that I am my own sub publisher here. Oops better get reading How To Make Friends And Influence People!
Well that's all for now, thanks for taking the interest to follow what I'm up to 🙂