The eBook title is:  The Essential Guide To Effective Music Self-Publishing And Licensing
which is now available as a free download in PDF format to all interested and serious music artists, songwriters, composers and publishers that are visiting  LicenseQuote for the first time, or have already signed up for a LicenseQuote publisher free or paid subscription account.

Purpose and introduction

The content is geared for new, serious and experienced artists, composers, publishers and music catalog owners and license managers that want to ensure they have a good “handle” on everything it takes to be effective and successful with their music publishing and licensing business or related services.

We believe this guide will enable artists and self-published composer/songwriters to analyize and review their music publishing and licensing options, direction and goals to more effectively harness their related music catalog management, growth, target marketing, cleint relations, level of independence and licensing sales goals.

Regardless of your current status as an independent artist, songwriter or composer, this music industry eBook helps you evaluate your current areas of strengths and preparation for moving your career forward based on your interests, needs, background experience and commitment to creative planning and related business plan goals.

This eBook project was recently assembled by a team of experts (see credits below) who each contributed their various areas of music industry specialties with emphasis on: music business, music publishing, music licensing management, music supervision, music catalog organization, songs/tracks meta-data and tagging techniques, technology, music industry research, special reports, editing and production.

eBook guide credits:

Editor: Michael Nickolas – Owner/manager at Studio Nine Productions
Research and reports: Michael Borges – CEO at LicenseQuote
Music business consultant: Gael Macgregor – Music Supervisor and independent consulting
Tagging techniques: Marina Garza – Founder – Tag Team Analysis
Catalog organization: Andrew Aversa – Founder, composer at ZirconMusic.com

Below is a table of contents with titles and brief summaries for each of the 18 chapters contained in the eBook. It starts with a general introduction in the first chapter and then builds on the content matter with chapter subjects increasingly more detailed and advanced which the more “seasoned” composers and publishers will also appreciate.

The length of the eBook is about 30 pages in a factual, to-the-point “white paper” style presentation which appropriately reflects the essential nature of the eBook title, content and purpose.

Table of contents with chapter titles and brief introductions

1. Music Licensing and Publishing 101
This chapter gives you an introduction to what makes a music publisher, why self-publish and how it pays to be proactive.

2. Music Publishing in Depth
Get an overview of music publishing activities and the various types of music publishers including: the self-published primary publisher, co-publisher, sub-publisher, mass aggregation sub-publisher and three main areas of music publishing specialty activities: publishing both the music compositions and sound recordings, publishing only the music compositions and publishing only the sound recordings.

3. Working With Existing Music Libraries
Learn about some popular music libraries and weighing your success, i.e. the pros and cons of working with one or more music libraries.

4. Starting Your Own Music Library
If you didn’t sign all your songs/tracks with an exclusive library deal, and/or you continue creating new music content (compositions & recordings), you have the option to set up and manage your own music licensing store (see www.licensequote.com). There are many advantages and benefits in doing this which are covered in this chapter including: advantages and benefits, and a list of essentials for establishing a successful online music licensing store.

5. Who Are Your Customers?
After doing some research, we made a list of the most common kinds of music licensing buyers. This chapter explains how to identify the most common kinds of music licensing buyers and lists among the top 60 unique kinds of licensing buyers active in today’s market.

6. License Types
This chapter list the most common kinds of music usage licenses your customers may request. These are all included in the LicenseQuote (standard) Advanced rate card which includes over 20 unique license types including a custom license which buyers can request to negotiate special usages, terms and pricing. The list includes the license type title, brief description and summarizes the most common usage details.

7. License Prices
This chapter shows the results of research done to establish reference points of typical license pricing values. The first step was to find a number of active music licensing libraries competing in the same general marketplace. Points covered include: selecting a sampling of independent music libraries, number of libraries used, setting some common denominators for easier comparison, listing the most common license types, setting up a pricing table, discussing what the averages (average prices) mean and a general conclusion based on historic perspective.

8. Royalty Free Model
Some, but not all, music libraries use the term Royalty Free or Royalty-Free to describe the kind of licensing terms they offer with their stock music services. The term’s exact usage varies from one music library to the next. In this chapter we’ll explore the background of this term and how its definition and various usages (applications) came about and are most commonly being used. Important areas covered include: royalty free music intro and background, how some limitations and restrictions got added, notes on Cue Sheets, the performance royalties factor, other variations of royalty-free music, and summary of main principles behind the royalty free music.

9. Catalog Organization
When presenting your music to clients for licensing opportunities, you’ll want to sort your catalog by placing songs and tracks under headings that will help prospective buyers find what they are looking for. For example, if you are offering a catalog of general or generic production music, you could organize your tracks into a collection of different musical genres, as in “Rock”, World” or “Ambient”. Or maybe you would want to present your tracks grouped by “Album” as in “World Volume One”, “World Volume Two” and etc. This chapter provides some helpful suggestions for grouping your music in various ways which you can “mix and match” as needed, or focus only on one or two that makes most sense for your type and size of catalog. Groupings include: genre, album, artist, band, featured, group, new release, performer and vocalist. This chapter provides a summary description of each one and encourages you to use one or more group headings as needed. They’ll appear as music search filters in your licensing store and can also be searched by the group title keywords.

10. Tagging
After organizing by the desired headings, put some thought into tagging and describing each track, so your music can be searched out from the sea of tracks presented for licensing, or even from your own licensing store. This chapter provides suggestions for effective tags, keywords, sentence description editorials, and describes a sentence discription formula.  This helps you use consistent tags and short descriptive sentences, to increase your possibilities of having your music available for the right spot.

11. Alternate Mixes
You can boost sales of your music by offering alternate mixes of all or certain tracks. This chapter provides examples of mixes, including titles and descriptions, and gives an example of a typical set of mixes. With a bit of planning, you can set up a nicely streamlined catalog that’s optimized to keep all mix tracks grouped together with the main (primary) song / track titles they belong to.

12. Piracy and Watermarking
Unauthorized music file sharing is rampant, but the “watermarking” solution is a simple, affordable way for you as an artist, songwriter, band or record label to protect your existing audio. The use of short audio watermarking messages mixed with music preview files in MP3, protects your audio from unlicensed uses. This chapter provides an essential overview with tips and suggestions on how to watermarking to protect your copyrighted audio files.

13. Promoting and Growing Your Music Catalog
This chapter gives you an outline of tips and suggestions to help you get started promoting and growing your music licensing catalog! Learn why quality trumps quantity, what buyers care most about, how to focus on your main strengths, quality, type and quantity of music, making contact with music users and getting a business coach along with some helpful tips for promotion and growth.

14. Success Criteria for Music Publisher Licensing Sales
This chapter highlights some important keys to success for any kind of music publisher or library, regardless of the physical size of their catalog, mix of tracks and genres, etc. We include a list of top ten key points for music licensing sales success. Though not meant to be comprehensive, (because the factors and criteria are many, inter-related and complex), this is a realistic list for any serious publisher to consider when first shaping their business model, pricing rate card, terms and customer service plans based on their catalog type, size, resources and unique situation. Applying even only a few of the top key points will help you move forward with more confidence in the direction that best suits your needs.

15. What is My Catalog’s Value?
Topics covered in this chapter include: what influences music catalog sales valuations, comparing sales value estimates and projections, typical range of average catalog valuation, scope of research statistics, sales average details from various licensing stores, catalog growth factors, and tips for inreasing catalog valuation efficiencies.

16. Future of the Music Industry
We share our belief that the future of the music industry won’t be created or inspired by a committee meeting or some corporate conglomerate, it has to be real music from real creators/performers who can inspire us. We believe that real music from the best creators/performers are always individuals that, sooner or later, get discovered and appreciated for their raw, authentic talent.

17. Resources and Tips
Over the years our LinkedIn group Music PAL (publishing and licensing), group has had many discussions about songwriters, composers, publishers and libraries marketing and promoting their music licensing sales. This chapter shares some key points and insights learned from these discussions among our group of professionals, including input from several music supervisors who often have dealt on both sides of the licensing “table” as publishers and buyers. This chapter discusses trends like: music supervisors breaking the mold to deal directly with artists and labels, how personal contacts lead to fruitful relationships, marketing online, using the internet and your website, customizing productions to different audiences, understanding your catalog and what attractions it provides, approaching a publisher or supervisor the right way, and having strong relationships with directors and film editors, songwriter split sheets, copyright registration and performance rights organizations such as ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, custom music quote request form and where to find a template of a standard music licensing agreement form.

18. Glossary of Music Publishing and Licensing Terms
We list and define the most common music industry terms ranging from A&R (Artist & Repertoire) and Assignment of Copyright to Work for Hire and Writer’s Share. Key terms include: blanket license, clearance, Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP), cover songs, film music, licensor, licensee, master use license, mechanical rights, performance rights licensing, pre-cleared music, publisher’s share, sampling, score, sound recording, self-publishing, sync rights (aka synchronization licensing) and many more key music publishing and licensing business terms.

Note: This is a “soft” release of this new eBook resource. In the near future you can expect and updated version with a more final “look and feel”. Meanwhile you can get a head start with this first release to explore all the available content. Thanks and please feel free to send us your first imporessions along with any suggestions or feedback, as it will be much appreciated!

Stripe for individuals and businesses

Stripe is an American company that allows both private individuals and businesses to accept payments over the Internet. It enables them to accept payments and begin processing credit cards with only a few lines of code that can be embedded on a website as easily as one might embed code for a YouTube video. Stripe “takes care of fraud prevention and currency conversion for a 2.9% cut [and] pulls a $0.30 charge per transaction”, Mashable reports.

Stripe’s easy-to-use concept has been crucial to the development of other startups and developers. What Stripe did was simplify that process and really cater to developers. It said, “You go develop you application and we’ll take care of the payments.”

What Mashable says about Stripe

Mashable says that 2014 was the “breakthrough year” for Stripe which scored high-profile partnerships with companies such as Apple and Twitter, and raised $70 million in venture capital funding at a $3.5 billion valuation. The company has invested to expand internationally and its services are now available in 18 companies.

Stripe’s most recent funding round took place in March, 2014, which put it at a valuation of $3.57 billion Their next round of funding is proposed to be at a valuation of $5 billion.

Unlike other payment services, including PayPal and fully integrated e-commerce solutions such as Shopify, Stripe specifically focuses on providing the technical, fraud prevention, and banking infrastructure required to operate online payment systems. Notable online companies that use Stripe as their default payment processor include Fitbit, Kickstarter, reddit, Twitter, Wired, Salesforce.com, Squarespace,Encyclopedia Dramatica and The Guardian^.

Payment logistics and features

Payment logistics: With Stripe, web developers can integrate payment processing into their websites without having to register and maintain a merchant account. Stripe, in line with its competitors, charges a fee of 2.9% + $0.30 per successful credit card charge. Unlike most of its competitors, however, Stripe does not charge setup fees, monthly fees, validation fees, card storage fees, or failed payment fees. Furthermore, there is no minimum monthly payments volume required to use Stripe.

Stripe has a seven-day waiting period for transactions, during which time it profiles the businesses involved to protect against potential fraud. Stripe then transfers the funds directly into the bank account linked to the payee.

Features: According to Wikipedia,  Stripe’s back-end API supports a variety of programming languages and environments, including: Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, and Ruby^.
There’s also an SDK for .Net and other platforms that connects to their Rest API In addition to one-time payments, Stripe allows its users to charge their customers on a recurring basis at annual, monthly, weekly, or custom intervals. Customers can also offer trial periods of arbitrary durations, with recurring payments commencing immediately after this period completes. Further, coupons can be issued in a variety of configurations.

Checkout: Stripe’s checkout product consists of an embeddable payment form that developers can quickly integrate into their websites without having to undergo extensive technical implementations.

Connect: Connect is a tool that allows Stripe customers that operate marketplaces or payment platforms to provide their users with seamless payment processing. Connect verifies the identity of the sellers and ensures they are compliant with their local laws. Stripe also handles paying the sellers. It is currently only available in the United States and Canada, but Stripe plans to expand to more markets. Notable clients include Doordash, Instacart, Kickstarter, Lyft, Postmates, Shopify, Squarespace and Skiddle.

Apple Pay: Stripe’s Software development kits support Apple Pay integration in iOS apps. Stripe’s Apple Pay enables one-touch credit card payments on iOS devices equipped with a Touch ID sensor.

Security: Stripe’s payment processing meets PCI-DSS requirements, reaching Certified PCI level 1. No sensitive customer data reaches client’s servers, removing clients from potential liability issues.

Story behind founding of Stripe and industry competitors

Story behind the founding of Stripe.

Industry competitors:

• PayPal
• Intuit GoPayment
• Braintree
• Square
• Zuora

All around, we are looking forward to switching to Stripe to enhance our subscriptions collections platform to help our publishing clients more easily manage plans switching and upgrading, and also find ways to improve their options to collect license sales payments from their registered store users and licensing clients. If you have questions or would like to explore this further, please feel free contact our custom support service for more details. We’ll be happy to respond ASAP to help you manage your upcoming music licensing sales plans and related logistics.

Unique business model from its inception

From the beginning, since we first launched the LicenseQuote calculator and subscription plan services over 8 years ago, our ownership and management team decided to make to model our business as a unique, useful and first-class online “software ss a service” site.

We achieved this by focusing first on a Free DIY (do it yourself) music licensing sales business calculator for music publishers to use on their website to help their staff and clients calculate pricing for a variety of music licensing usage and related pricing values.

After our first year of successful implemention and feedback from over a thousand users, we moved ahead with plans to develop a complete licensing sales management service which has evolved into the highly feature-rich platform it is today.

List of customer service and tech support resources

Over the years, here’s some of the main values and beliefs we’ve built on:

• Intro videos for music publishers, composers, labels and library owners on LicenseQuote home page. Videos can be played on our site or on YouTube
• Pre-registration and subscription questions and inquiries
• Custom plans and price quotes for all new and existing music publishers and copyright owners
• Free plan usage, gives new clients a basic “test drive” of the service along with full customer service support
• Pricing page which clearly displays a list of all standard plans, features and pricing
• List of primary features for the Manager and Library plans
• Publisher’s start guide to provide an introduction to setting up and using a new publisher account
• Help files on all publisher account pages and consoles; click the green question mark button at top-right of any page to open the help file dialog
• Fast, friendly customer service and tech support (see details below) by email (recommened), Skype or phone when requested by appointment
• Customer service to assist with all subscription, billing and related accounts admin support
• Basic tech support to help new users get a “head start” with setting up their publishing account
• Advanced tech support and related account setup or customization assistance
• Development and implementation of suggested/requested new features when appropriate and feasible
• Extensive knowledge resources via blog articles and tutorials page
• Frequently asked questions pages to help all new and existing users answer the most common questions about the LicenseQuote platform and service
• Gallery to showcase a sampling of our various subscription members and how they’re using their licensing stores
• List of testimonials from current (or recently) active publishing subscription members
• Private professional discussion group for new and active music publishers to network and discuss current issues in today’s music publishing and licensing industry. Please visit and join us at Music PAL (Publishing And Licensing) group on LinkedIN.

But besides offering all these “connection points” with our existing and potential new publishing clients, we mainly thrive on getting input and feedback to help us evaluate our progress and further enhance our client’s user experience.

That’s why we offer a Feedback form from our Contact page. This is specifically geared to gather client feedback and suggestions in a practical, quick and efficient way guaranteeing that no questions, requests or suggestions ever “fall through the cracks”.

Replies to our customer service and tech support services

Here’s how many of our clients have recently replied with their positive feedback after receiving assistance from our customer service support:

• “Thanks so much for explaining, I’m learning how things work. I think it’s great that your company take time to help people understand.”

• “Thanks for the help with the audio file.”

• Got it. I’ll make the adjustment. Thanks so much!

• Thanks for the super quick response! The instructions below make sense and I tried the paging and 10 songs per page options. The library and all tracks are showing fine and as expected…”

• “An amazing job.  I will finish mastering and upload the first 75 tracks and then upgrade our subscription plan. Great customer support.”

• “Ok, sounds good. That should do what I need. I’ll let you know if I have any other questions. Thank You!”

• “Thanks Doron, good to hear from you. The site looks like it really developed nicely. Attached is my metadata, let me know if this will be ok.”

• “This is what I’d love to see. Just some quick thoughts. Hope it’s helpful in some way.”

• “Thanks so much for the demo and following up. The product and UI are super impressive.”

• “Hi, I am thinking about joining the paid plan, it looks great. Just a question… thanks!”

• “Great, all good with me… thanks!”

• “Very interesting! It’s good to have these figures as it’s a big help to me in pitching to UK clients to be able to give comparison rates.”

• “Thanks, Michael.  I appreciate your prompt reply.”

• “I’d still pay LicenseQuote yearly to keep my masters on your server, and because of the great way it handles the license calculations, communication, documentation and delivery!”

• “Thanks for the update on my plan at License Quote. I really like what you have going on there!”

• “Seems to be fine. I checked it on the site and it displays fine.”

• “No problem Doron, you gave me a hint and I think I can figure something out with that formula.”

• “Thanks Michael and Doron!”

If you are a new, existing or soon to be LicenseQuote publishing client, please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or need any assistance with setting up your plan, upgrading to a new plan or deciding which plan might work best for you. To get started, you can always register for a FREE plan account to explore and get familiar with the basic platform, and then consider upgrading to an appropriate plan later after you’ve had some time to get familiar with the basic account.  Thanks, and as always, we appreciate your questions, suggestions and feedback!

Q. Do music supervisors visit the LicenseQuote site on a regular basis?
A. Yes! They land on our Find Music To License page to search from all our active publishers, brands and libraries which currently offer about 10,000 tracks ready to preview and license. If music supervisors and licensing buyers are already working with a specific publisher, they will have bookmarked their website and/or licensing store page and go directly there.

Q. Is there a way to get monthly visitor information?
A. Yes! Currently we have extensive GA (google analytics) in place for our site’s global visitors and traffic stats. The public page stats continue to increase monthly with an average 10% – 15% growth rate ranging above the 20,000 page views. The top page visits include our client’s storefronts, licensing stores and the Find Music page, followed by these pages in order given: Pricing, Features, Gallery, Demo, Tutorials, FAQ and Contact page.

Other factors: Please keep in mind that LicenseQuote.com is an ad-free commercial, business-to-business site for music publishers to connect with end-user licensing buyers, so we are NOT competing with retail portals such as CD Baby, iTunes or music-streaming subscription service sites. Please also see “Other stats” at bottom for some more interesting facts!

Q. Client success, results- are clients earning? Is it proving to be a successful way to marketing and sell music?
A. Yes! Most of our clients, the publishers and library owners, are very proactive in managing and promoting their catalogs and stores. We believe the primary reason for this is because they have the opportunities to deal directly with the end-user licensing buyers (the licensees), set their own pricing, negotiate deals, collect 100% of the sales directly and build their Store Users (buyers) client list. This means they are naturally 100% motivated to be proactive, since they don’t have to share any cut or commission with our service.

Q. Are people trusting the LicenseQuote platform?
A. Yes! Please review our partial list of unsolicited, unpaid testimonies on this page: What people are saying about LicenseQuote. We also hear from our publishers how satisfied their license buying clients are with the interface and use of their LicenseQuote powered stores. Of course we believe it’s not only the technology platform that’s great, but also the fact that our publishing clients are so highly motivated to provide first-class service to their licensing clients.  Besides great music, technology and competitive pricing, hands-on customer service always makes a big difference, and this is what each of our publishing clients wants to provide.

Q. Any marketing from your end or is that strictly up to the portal owner?
A. Both! LicenseQuote provides the Licensing stores and powerful search tools for buyers to easily find and preview music, get price quotes, negotiate deals, pay with on or offline methods (as negotiated with the publishers) and instantly download their contracts, receipts and licensed audio files.  On the other hand our publishing and licensing clients are also very proactive by promoting their licensing stores from their own websites, contacting their existing list of clients and offering a great service by giving them direct access to their own catalogs and online libraries. In many cases our publishers also offer custom music and licensing services.

Q. Can we handle pricing from our end after the buyers fill out the licensing inquiry form?
A. Yes! For each Licensing Profile our publishers can offer any combination of these licensing negotiation options: Place bid, Request quote and/or automated pricing calculations. For each license type the pricing and terms can also be customized as needed, including any major foreign currency. This means you can create different pricing profiles (aka rate cards) and apply to any group of tracks or catalogs as needed. On the Collections Settings page (in your publisher account) you can select various options for your clients to pay including: PayPal or credit card, Check or money order, wire transfer or any custom terms you want to offer.

Q. Do you provide blanket licenses?
A. Yes! Our publishers can offer blanket licensing for any of their registered store users. This means you can enable or disable the “blanket licensing” for each unique buyer on the Store Users admin page in your account.

Q. What about single-song downloads for a fee for fans?
A. Music songs/tracks in your store can have an optional retail “Buy” button enabled from the Licensing Profile admin page. This lets you set the price. If set to $0.00, the track is available for Free or promo download, but the default price is $1.00 which can be edited and saved. It’s therefore up to each publisher to decide about selling retail song downloads to fans and the pricing that gets charged.

Q. Can we make the song available for a one-time download as well as for licensing?
A. Yes, absolutely! The main feature is always the licensing button for the Licensing of the tracks,  but it’s no problem to enable the Buy button and set pricing for instant purchase payment and download, for example by fans for their own non-commercial (personal) use of your songs.

Q. How do LicenseQuote music providers (publishers) handle fulfillment?
A. On the Advanced Settings admin page, they can select delivery options which includes the WAV, AIF or MP3 master files (based on available master file) and/or the MP3 preview file. Therefore it’s possible for buyers to have access to download the master or both the master and preview files.

Q. Will people visiting the main site be able to find our LicenseQuote powered store portal?
A. Yes! When they search for music on the main “Find Music To License” page, they can search by publisher, brand or catalog name, as well as keyword searches, genres and tags. When they find and preview your song, they can click the track’s License button and instantly go to YOUR store. This makes it easy for music supervisors and licensing buyers to find your music and connect directly with you in your own store. If they already registered for the global stores search, they will be instantly logged in to your store and their contact listing will appear on your Store Users admin page.

Q. Timeline, what you need, delivery of needs and steps.
A. Publishers coming to LicenseQuote can start with the LQ 15 FREE plan, which gives them plenty of time to explore their catalog and store setup options. Everything is in a self-serve (do-it-yourself) mode which lets you set up your tracks, licensing store and embed the store your website so you can start promoting and selling right away, even on the first day. However, please note that the FREE plan is limited to 15 total tracks (i.e. songs), and 3 licensing sales, after which buyers can still find music and play tracks, but can’t purchase licenses until you’ve upgraded to a paid subscription plan.

Q. What is the scope of designing our licensing store portal?
A. The setup is very intuitive and many publishers don’t even need our (optional) setup wizard. We have extensive Help files on each admin page, and the most important decision, besides adjusting the colors theme for your store, is to either link to your audio files or upload them so we can store them for you with our integrated S3 storage solution. If you get stuck, check the help files, Tutorials page, Knowledge base or send us an email with your question. Also, during your Free trial period, all features are fully functional, so you have plenty time to explore and learn to use your Publisher admin console.

Q. Payment and any additional costs or payments other than your list of plans and pricing?
A. LicenseQuote has NO hidden costs or fees! The plans and pricing you see on our Pricing page includes all features for all accounts depending only on the plan you select. If you have more than 1,000 tracks we’ll give you a custom plan and price quote based on your exact needs. For a custom plan quote, please fill out this form.  We usually respond within the same day!

Start Guide download link

The free start guide is available to download in PDF format and covers the most important aspects of setting up a new LQ Library (catalog and licensing store) service plan in 10 pages which includes images of the account menu and related console pages.

Start Guide highlights

The start guide highlights the following areas (pages & consoles) in the publisher’s account:

Catalog > Profile & Brands, Genres, Tracks/Songs, Edit Track, Tracks Configuration, Filters and Custom fields, Store Settings.

Sales > Rate Cards, Sales Report and Manage Clients page.

Once you are familiar with the menu and navigation of these essential Catalog and Sales setup tools, the rest of the areas and features will make more sense as they are typically used after you’ve completed your store setup, launched live on your website and completed your first clearance inquiries and licensing sales.

Getting on the ‘fast track’ and related articles

We hope this start guide gives you good orientation to get you on “fast track” with setting up your music catalog and customized store.

For more information, please also check our extensive list of helpful blog articles, including the one about Promoting and growing your music catalog.

At the top-right of the blog, you can also use the “Search for:” box to find articles on many important publishing and licensing subjects which (further below in right column) are also sorted by various categories.

• Increased tracks ‘Feature’ sort ability from 10 to 50 tracks – the Feature setting is on the Tracks/Songs console page in your publisher account.

• Manager plan API Demo Page – visit this URL – https://www.licensequote.com/Storefront/ApiDemoDesk.aspx

• Improved/reformed Global Store registration and usage – for music supervisors and licensing buyers.

How it works:

1. Global Store Buyers are required to provide company name, telephone number and website address when first registering.
2. Buyers registering first with the Global Store can then visit any publisher’s store if they are logged in to the Global Store.
3. Buyers coming from the Global Store will appear on the store’s clients list after sending an inquiry or downloading something (if the store allows that).
4. Any buyer coming to any store, except the Global Store, will have to register at that store.
5. Buyers registering at any other store won’t be able to visit other stores with the same username and password credentials.
6. Buyers can use the same email address to register in multiple stores including the Global Store, but can use different passwords in each store.
7. Publishers can enable or disable Global Store partcipation on the Advanced Settings > Promotion console: [  ] List your tracks in the Global Store and accept Global Store buyers

• Calc-Matrix Edit page is now called Pricing Matrix Edit page – this makes the terminology more consistant for usage with all related Rate Card features.

• Ability for publishers to manually generate a contract – by using the “Generate License” button at top-right of the Sold Licenses page.

• Improved WordPress plugin – to embed LQ store on a WordPress site.  See “WordPress Plugin” dialog link towards top of the Store & Settings page. You can also check out MangoMatter for more on this.

• Clear display of Publisher’s Store ID number – now appears at top-right of the Store & Settings page.

• Ability for publishers to control the Submissions limit value – Default is 10 (recommended for most users) but value can be set from 1 to 20 songs per songs Submission session.

• New ‘Save Quote’ button feature – lets store users save, download and/or print out the license quotes they want to save, share or compare with other quotes.

• Jurisdiction for default Submission agreement – now fills in the default State according to the user profile to identify the place of jurisdiction.

• Multiple Files download feature (in one click) from Store > Projects page – speeds up the process to download multiple saved files for upcoming project review.

• Detect when store user is trying to download a file from Android or iOS device and allow download – for improved usage with popular mobile devices.

Thanks to all our publishing clients for your continued suggestions and feedback which makes it possible for us to continue making new feature and function improvements for your account, store and music licensing buyers usage.

Listed on the Plans & Pricing page, it says the “LQ Manager is a music licensing management and sales solution for music creators, publishers and libraries that already have an online catalog or don’t need one. This can include a variety of artists, bands and copyright owners that don’t want or need to set up a directly integrated catalog with tracks preview player as our Library store plan includes.

Manager plan store details

The Manager plan store includes a Track/Song Name field which lets buyers enter the name(s) of the song titles they are interested in licensing. More details can be added in the optional project Description field to further discuss and negotiate the track’s usage in the license buyer’s project.

As with the Library store, the publisher can set store usage options such as automated price calculations and/or request clearance, price quotes and negotiate on-line.

Overview of Manager plan features

All the other features will already be familiar to current or previous Library plan users, including the account settings, billing options, advanced settings, API & Integration, business profile page, store & settings console, and all the Licensing Sales tools needed to complete the whole licensing sales management process.

This includes the inquiries management page, list of sold licenses page, rate cards settings (standard or custom), sales reports and a modified ‘manage clients’ console which lets publishers add and invite new store users, import and export lists of store users and configure the store registration and related usage settings.

Embedding and advanced settings options

The Manager store can also be linked to or embed directly on the publisher’s website., and the Advanced Settings gives publishers control over the following promotion and licensing options:

Promotion
[  ] List your business profile on the ‘Find Publishers’ page
[  ] Link to your business profile from your store

Licensing
[  ] Require project description when buying a license
[  ] Show contact option to store buyers

The options (as shown above) can be enabled or disabled by checking or unchecking the box.

Manager account home page

The Manager account Home page also features handy store view stats which can be selected by week, month or yearly period.

Plans & Pricing

The Manager Plans & Pricing are flexible with standard plans ranging from 250 up 4,000 tracks/songs and custom plans and pricing for larger publishers and copyright owners with catalogs over 4,000 songs. For a custom plan and price, please use our Custom Plan Quote form.

Summary of Manager plans

In summary, the license Manager plan accounts includes all the rich license sales, customer management and API & Integration features that the Library plans include, minus the direct integration of the music Catalog and MP3 preview player in the store.

Manager plan users will also have to deliver the master files to their clients after their license purchases, unless they already have access to them via their site or a third party sales (e.g. iTunes) or delivery service.

By popular request, the new Manager plan and store is now available to meet the needs of various publishers and copyright owners that simply want to offer a convenient license sales interface to their clients and enjoy the features and benefits of managing their licensing sales business from one integrated account and store.

We also offer a Free Manager plan with limited features, but it’s enough for most publishers and get familiar with the plan and it’s many powerful features which are available in the upgraded subscription plans.

To see current default pricing, please log in to your publisher account or register a publisher account if you have not yet done so. There you can also adjust the base pricing and related price calculator mechanisms on the Rate Cards and Pricing Matrix Edit console pages.

Simple A Rate Card

License types and Descriptions
Basic License – Covers most general uses such as websites, videos, podcasts, in-store music and music on-hold. You may sell up to 1,000 physical products or downloadable products that contain the music. License is worldwide and lasts in perpetuity.

Extended License – Covers all Basic and additional uses including: radio, tv, film, multiple locations music-on-hold, multiple web sites, more than 1,000 copies; and internet video sites including YouTube commercial rights license with YouTube Partner ‘Revenue Sharing’. This license includes sync rights (composition & recording) as well as mechanical rights. The license is worldwide and lasts in perpetuity. Cue sheets are required for broadcast use.

Custom Composed & Recorded Music – Price will depend on your requirements and usage. Please contact us with your inquiry and description of your custom music project needs.

Custom License – Price will depend on your requirements and usage. Please contact us with your inquiry.

Simple B Rate Card

Note: For License Type descriptions which are abbreviated, please login to your publisher account to review full text.

Personal or Education, Non Profit – License music for Non Profit personal use at home or for education plus following: Multimedia project, video game, film that you will not show to a paid audience (includes office presentations). Film that you will not distribute to others in any way (including free copies) Stream or display on your own personal, not-for-profit website. [Abbreviated… please log in to your publisher account to read full text]

Business, Limited – This License is for music used for Business related purposes that will NOT be broadcast or shown in theaters. Includes: Office Presentations, Meetings, Corporate Videos, Employee Orientation, Training Videos  [Abbreviated…]

Business, Extended – Use in a tv, radio or video advertisement plus the following: Videos, films, trailers, games, or other multimedia projects that you were hired to make, intend to sell, distribute, or release to paid audiences or clients – reproduction of the project is included. [Abbreviated…]

All Included, Unlimited – This option is a full all-included ‘Buy Out’ license. The licence allows you unlimited use in multiple projects in perpetuity as follows: Use the music in any of your productions provided it is synchronised with other audio and/or visual images. [Abbreviated…]

Custom License – Price will depend on your requirements and usage. Please contact us with your inquiry.

Basic Rate Card

Advertising Rates. Radio – Any production created to generate profit, commercial gain, or branding messages, and developed for broadcast distribution. All Advertising agreements include Internet usage but not vice versa.

Advertising Rates, Television – Any production created to generate profit, commercial gain, or branding messages, and developed for broadcast distribution. All Advertising agreements include Internet usage but not vice versa.

Advertising Rates, All Media – Any production created to generate profit, commercial gain, or branding messages, and developed for broadcast distribution. All Advertising agreements include Internet usage but not vice versa.

Film Sync, Festival or Internet – License Music For a Movie Production. This license is for any video or film project which will be shown in theaters. If your project will not appear in theaters or be distributed by a third party, choose a different license.

Film Sync. Budget Under $3 M. – License Music For a Movie Production. This license is for any video or film project which will be shown in theaters. If your project will not appear in theaters or be distributed by a third party, choose a different license.

Film Sync. Budget Over $3 M. – License Music For a Movie Production. This license is for any video or film project which will be shown in theaters. If your project will not appear in theaters or be distributed by a third party, choose a different license.

TV Program, Broadcast Only – Any production created as part of a broadcast. Distribution includes terrestrial, cable, and satellite television. This license does NOT include DVD, website streaming or online rental distribution. To have all those included, please use the ‘TV Program – Broadcast + Full Distribution’ license.

There’s an outline with detailed info on what to expect when needing to cancel, switch or upgrade/downgrade subscription plans as needed. This information helps you plan and prepare to get the most from your current or future LicenseQuote subscription plans.

a) You can cancel your Monthly subscription plan at any time, though it’s best to cancel near or before the automated renewal date which is set on the date you first activated your plan.

b) Yearly subscriptions are sent an expiration notification (reminder) email about 10 days before your scheduled expiration date. This gives you 10 days to decide to continue, switch to another plan, or cancel.

c) To switch to another plan, you will first need to cancel your current plan and then immediately select and activate your new standard or custom plan. No files, meta-data or settings will be lost during your switch. After receiving your payment, we’ll send a prorated refund (to your PayPal account) based on any unused portion of your previous plan.

d) If you intend to cancel and forget to do so (by mistake) at end of your Yearly plan, please cancel within 30 days, and we’ll provide a prorated refund.

e) Sorry, except as stated above we offer no refunds for cancelled plans.
Tip: To get the most usage from your subscription plan, it’s best to cancel on or shortly before your plan’s scheduled expiration date.

f) After you cancel your subscription plan you can still access your account and activate a new plan at any time. However, after a subscription has expired or is cancelled, you can not add more tracks to your catalog and your licensing store will be disabled until you select and activate a new plan.
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Sometimes we get emails from publishing clients that forgot when they started their subscription, or from one of their staff members or bookkeeper that isn’t aware that the owner/publisher has a monthly subscription plan. Eventually when they see it, they may wonder what it’s for among the many other products and services their business is paying for, so we want them to be “in the loop” to understand that cancellation or switching plans is very easy, and can be done directly on the Subscription page in the publisher’s account.

Other ways to cancel:
You can cancel directly from your PayPal account, and also contact PayPal support if needed to guide you through the process if you are new with them, or not familiar with their service.

You can also contact LicenseQuote customer service to assist with cancelling your plan, or with switching plans, which requires that you first cancel your current plan, and then select a new one to activate. Please note, regardless of your needs, we are always here to help and answer any questions you have regarding your subscription plan status or changes.

Getting started with the Submissions feature

Under the Catalog section of your account navigation menu (on the left side) you’ll find Submissions listed just below the Tracks/Songs item. Clicking it opens the Submissions page which includes all the controls you need to Edit the Agreement which is between you (the Publisher or Library owner) and the Submitters that will be uploading their audio files for you to review.

When Submitters register on your Submission Form page, they can then upload up to 10 songs/tracks per submission session, until you’ve reviewed the tracks and either accepted or declined them. When the first batch of submitted tracks have been finalized in the review process, the submitter can then start another submission session.

Finding submitted tracks

Submitted tracks will appear listed in a dialog on the Submissions page, and when selected, will appear at top of the page with a play button (to preview the track), a download button (to download the master file) and the composer, applicant, copyright info and description.

When you click the Review button for any selected track, a page opens with all the track’s meta-data, same as on the Edit Track page in your catalog. This lets you edit or add any data already entered by the Submitter during the submission process. This also includes Brand/Artist selection, Tags, Genre, Rate Card selection and Custom fields if you are using them.

Edit Agreement button

The Edit Agreement button (at top-right) lets you open, review and edit the Submission Agreement wording which the Submitters must read and agree to before they can upload their songs. There are two sections on the Submission Agreement edit form:

a) the Introduction which lets you enter a customized message for all submitters to see at top of your Submissions Form page, just below your store header. This can include information about what kind of music you are looking for or where there’s currently a need, and so forth.

b) The main part of the agreement terms, which lets you review the default (standard) agreement and edit as needed, or delete everything and enter / paste in your own Agreement wording which is between you and the Submitters.

Email notifications

Each time a new Submitter completes the registration process, and/or submission process, you are sent an email notification, and their account info will appear on your Submissions page including their name, email address and how many tracks they have already uploaded for you to review. You can also the Manage Submitters link (on right side below the review dialog0 to view and download the Agreement which will include the Submitters contact details as they entered on the registration form.

Accepting or declining submitted tracks

After playing a track and reviewing the song’s meta data, you can either Accept or Decline the track. If accepted, it will be moved to the Tracks/Songs page for access to be included in your Store, as long as all data has been entered and you make the song visible in your store, same as with any other track you upload to your own catalog. Also, the Preview and Master files will be found on the Files/Uploads page in your account.

The submitters are also notified when their submitted songs have been approved or declined. If declined, the message says that all uploaded files have been removed, to assure the Submitter that their files won’t be accessed or used any further beyond the initial review process. If accepted, the Submitter is notified as such by email, and can expect that some licensing sales may occur in the future, after their tracks have been added to your catalog and appear “live” in your store.

Tips for successful music submissions

1) To make the upload files work, you’ll need an LQ plan which includes our integrated audio files storage. This assures that the submitted and uploaded audio files are safe (not lost or misplaced) and easy for you (as publisher) to find and manage as needed.

2) Make sure you have enough tracks “headroom” space in your account to accept uploaded audio Preview and Master files to review and accept or decline as needed. Generally you can expect a faster catalog growth rate when using the Submissions feature and should plan accordingly with your LQ store subscription plans.

3) You can send email invitations to invite Submitters to submitt their songs. The email should include a link to your Submission Form page which you can link to or embed on a page on your website. On your site you should also offer a link or button which opens up your Submissions Form page. This can be “hidden” on your site or made a public based on your needs, management objectives and library growth rate goals, etc.

4) It is recommended that you stay in touch with Submitters whose songs you have accepted, for example, to let them know how your licensing sales are doing, and when they can expect their first payment for their share of the sales revenues from your licensing store.

5) You can use the Sales Report page to filter sales according to various Brand/Artist names, which makes it easy to track total sales (for example) on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis. You can also open and download a copy of the custom sales reports and send a copy in PDF (or other) format to the artists and composers you’re representing in licensing store. This makes it easy to conduct and manage your licensing sales administration.

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If you have any questions or want to share your comments or thoughts, please use our Contact forms page. Thanks and we look forward to your feedback!

Player buttons added on publisher’s console pages

Player buttons have been added on Tracks/Songs console and Edit Track page.

When clicked, it opens up the waveform image player in a new popup window for convenient previewing of audio files already uploaded to our integrated storage or linked to your own storage server, as the case may be. This is the same waveform player as used in the store, so you get exactly the same preview player as your registered store users and clients are using.

Submissions Terms of Agreement form

We’ve recemtly improved the Submissions ‘Terms of Agreement’ form interface which appears for Submitters to review and accept before uploading new tracks. Submitters (i.e. the songwriters, composers, publishers) can now easily find the Print and Save buttons at the top of the form to easily open, download and/or print out the publisher’s Submissions ‘Terms Of  Agreement’ contract in PDF file format.

More functionality coming up soon for the Publisher’s ‘Submissions’ feature to make it easier to save and manage all approved tracks, submitters and related Terms of Agreement contracts. We’ll post more details (soon) in a new blog article.

Publisher ‘Sign-Up’ form simplified and streamlined

The Registration (Sign-Up) form for new publishers now asks what the estimated library size is with a simple free-form entry field. Only a number needs to be entered to complete the registration process. This gives us a better idea of the typical ranges of catalog and library sizes that various publishers or library owners have.

Also, currently we don’t ask anymore how you discovered LicenseQuote, but if we offer that again in the future it will be reduced to about 5 of the most common discovery/referal scenarios.

Increased Batch files uploading ‘per session’ limit

The Batch files uploading limit on Upload/Files console has recently been increased to 2 GB (giga bytes) per upload session.

Examples:
a) 2 GB  is about 200 audio MP3 files assuming that each audio file is an average of 4 minutes length, at 320 kbps (constant bit rate) at average file size of 10 MB.

b) If you are uploading a mix of WAV or AIF for the master files, and 320 kbps sampling for the preview files, your “mileage” will vary, but you can estimate that 80 audio files will get close to the limit, for example 40 WAV master files plus 40 MP3 preview files. In this case each set of master and preview files would be about 50 MB in total file size.

Audio Files uploading tips

1) You can upload multiple MP3, WAV and AIFF audio files and also ZIP, PDF and MID files.

2) It’s best to name the audio files with easily recognizable names, such as: “My Blue Hat.mp3”

2b) If you need to add a brand or catalog name, add that info after the song/track name, for example like this: “My Blue Hat_Brand name_Catalog no.mp3” You can mix and match as need, but best to keep with a consistant format and always start with the song’s title so you can easily find it (later) when selecting it from the Edit Track page or searching for it on the Upload/Files page, etc. This also makes it easy for your clients to recognize their downloaded audio files after they’ve completed their license purchases.

2c) If you only use a catalog number your clients may be confused about which files match up with the track titles they remember previewing, licensing and downloading, so best to always use file names which directly reflect the actual song/track title names as they appear in your licensing store.

3) Do not close the files upload console page until your files have completed uploading. This prevents accidental interuption or disconnection during the files uploading process.

4) When uploading is completed, you can start another batch files uploading session or upload just one, two or more files as needed.

Thanks for reviewing, and if you’d like to share your feedback with us please use one of our contact forms. We look forward to hearing from you.

New Features

Blanket Licensing Sales
This new licensing sales feature is optional and can be turned On or Off (by checking a box) on the new Blanket Sales rate card. We’ve pre-populated this rate card with 3 basic License Types as follows:
1) Online, Corporate, Non-Broadcast
2) TV & Radio Programs
3) TV & Radio Commercials & Programs

As with all other Rate Cards, you can edit the License Types, titles, descriptions and pricing to suit your needs. When the feature is checked to be On (Turn blanket licenses sales ON), the ‘Buy blanket license’ option will appear for buyers to “click” from the top-right of your store header.

Submissions
This new music submissions feature lets you (publisher/library owner) review audio files which composers and songwriters can upload to your account.

Use of this feature requires a subscription with our integrated audio files hosting plan. Submitters can upload up to 10 tracks at a time (as a flood control measure) with both MP3 preview and MP3, WAV or AIF master files for your review, at which time you can accept or decline each track. When completed, you can let the submission party upload more tracks.

Also, you can edit the standard (default) Agreement or delete and enter your own terms of submission. This is a great feature for busy publishers that want to seamlessly integrate their submissions process with their online catalog and store.

Rate Cards
The Licensing Profile (in the Sales menu section) is now called ‘Rate Cards’ and has been updated with 3 new standard (optional) Rate Cards as follows:

1) Simple A rate card – 2 simple license types plus a custom composed & recorded music license and a custom license.

2) Simple B rate card – 4 simple license types and a custom license.

3) Basic rate card – 10 of the most common (popularly used) license types.

The original standard (default) license types is still available and is now called the ‘Advanced’ rate card. As before, this rate card features all 21 “classic” LQ standard license types. The new Blanket Sales rate card is now also listed on the Rate Cards page in your publisher account.

Console Users (Admin permissions interface)
On the ‘Settings & Users’ admin page (previously called ‘Account Details’), you will now find a Console Users feature which lets you Add new users and define various admin permissions including: Catalog Manager, Sales Manager and Setup Manager.

You can check any or all of these options to manage the range of access you want to assign to any partner, colleague, staff member, webmaster or consultant, etc. You can also enter these account user details: Username, Password, First Name, Last Name, Email and Title for added security and management convenience.

Other Improvements

New Library and Publisher fields in catalog and related changes – This improvement lets publishers define their Library Name and can then use more than one publisher in their catalog, for example each track can now display it’s own publisher field.

Sold Licenses filter – You can now sort your history of sold license by Licensing sales, Retail sales, Blanket downloads and Free Demo downloads. Accordingly, you can then also sort the Price column from highest to lowest or from lowest to highest price.

Simplified License Types setup – When setting up a simple license type which requires no Properties and related multiplier Values, it’s possible now to enter only the license type title and base price, and nothing else.

WordPress plugin – You can use the new WordPress plugin to simplify integration with your WordPress based site.

Always leading users back to your site – Thanks to a new embed code and API mechanisms, links will always lead users to your store on your site and never to your store on our site (when clicking shared track links and shared project links). This will work with 90% of the site configurations, but not all depending on your code and some site hosting technical limitations.

Hide the store header or the login and registration links – If you do not like or need the standard store header, you can now hide it. You can also hide the login and registration links if instead you are using the API and have no need for that.

Got feedback about LicenseQuote?

If you’d like to share your feedback with us, please use one of our contact forms. Thanks, we look forward to hearing from you.

Music Publishing And Licensing group background

Music Publishing And Licensing is a private group established and managed by LicenseQuote in April, 2008 and though we are selective in screening membership requests, we are still adding an average of 35 new members per week for a growth rate of about 2,000 per year. We work hard (round the clock) to prevent and screen out spam and blatant self-promotion, as we post fairly strict but fair guidelines for all existing and new members to follow.

Moderation of discussions and comments

New discussions must be approved, so they go into a submission queue to be reviewed before being posted on the main Discussion page or sometimes on the Jobs page, if more appropriate there. Everyone can post Comments, though we also moderate them and respond if they are tagged as spam or off-topic, etc. This approach maximizes interesting and useful discussions while keeping spam and other distractions to an absolute minimum.

Sampling of recent discussions

Below are some examples of the types of Discussions our group has been enjoying over the last year or so. Titles and the total number of comments are current as of August 19, 2014, and are likely to increase over the coming weeks and months.
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Why does YouTube performer think she is entitled to use copyrighted music of others without a license? – 23 comments

YouTube ads and monetization – 12 comments

Rumblefish Opt-In – 8 comments

When you submit to a music library, do you supply the metadata, or do they do it for you?

Do you prefer to supply your own information? – 20 comments

Hit License – 24 comments
Note: This discussion asks members about their experience and thoughts on the “hitlicense.com” service.

Getty Images Music Licensing – 55 comments
Asks members about their experience with the “Getty Images Music Licensing” library service.

Do licensees need to know the PROs of composers/publishers for cue sheet submission? – 28 comments

The future for stand-alone songwriters – 52 comments

Are you confused by Shared Licensing, Work For Hire, Blanket and Sync Licensing? – 32 comments
Note: This discussion clears up many questions about the publishing and licensing business agreements, contracts and related collaboration arrangements.

Do you think the Non-Exclusive/Re-Title model has a long future that is really beneficial to composers as opposed to publishers? – 59 comments
Note: This subject generated tons of interesting discussions from various points of view!

What’s the good and bad with signing with multiple non exclusive entities? – 73 comments
Note: Another “hot” topic that still gets a lot of views and occasional new comments, though it was posted 6 months ago.

Microstock Music Stocks – 8 comments

TOO DIVERSE? I write songs in many genres. When some people see me, it is assumed that I just write or sing in one style, which is far from the truth.
Have people ever been amazed by your diversity? – 25 comments

How much “free work” did it take before you found success? – 48 comments

Would rather get money upfront rather than collecting tiny payments over years and years? – 13 comments

Books about music publishing – 25 comments
Note: A number of helpful books are listed and recommended by various music publishing and licensing professionals.

“Why can’t I find a home for my music?” Do you find yourself asking the same question? – 76 comments
Note: Lots of great discussion including input, advice and tips from many different active members.

Is there such a thing as a Music Publishing Appraiser? – 6 comments
Note: By the way, yes there is, and one member says that typically these experts are Economists or CPA’s who have specialized in music publishing.

Are you unhappy with such things as the rising bar for production music? – 38 comments

Songtrust – anyone have any experience with this? – 8 comments

Music Supervising Experience – 5 comments

Whose responsibility is it to register cues from for a film score with the PRO’s?
Is it the production company or publishers? – 26 comments

Anyone ever applied for an ASCAP PLUS Award? – 9 comments

Can a PRO-affiliated writer/publisher participate in royalty-free music libraries? – 33 comments

Anyone here have the scoop on why Viacom decided NOT to re-new the blanket licensing agreement with Pump Audio/Getty Images? – 13 comments

You just signed a deal on an Exclusive “In Perp” for a piece of your music. Should you give up copyright? – 30 comments

Submitting to pandora question – 28 comments

Overseas licensing – 13 comments

PROs and Public Domain – 12 comments

What genre is this? How do you decide as a writer or a producer? – 52 comments

How do you search libraries? What do you like to see and what is effective? – 28 comments

Share backend royalties with a library? Never in my life have I heard such a proposal. – 47 comments

Has anyone had any successful placements with Music Clout? – 82 comments

My First Publishing Deal – 34 comments

Is it realistically possible for a NON-touring/performing artist (who makes purely instrumental music) to make a living? – 13 comments

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Again, the above is just a sampling of some of the interesting discussions posted in the Music Publishing And Licensing group over the last year, so if interested and you haven’t joined yet, you are welcome to request membership and get involved to have access to all these (and many more) discussions.

About Music Publishing And Licensing members

Most of our members are very involved in this field either as composers, publishers, library owners, music supervisors and/or other services related directly to the music publishing and licensing business, so you can be sure to find some interesting and helpful discussion to read, comment on, ask questions or post your own discussion subjects.

Tips for posting your own discussion

Before posting a new discussion please check on the ‘Search’ page (at top menu between Members and Manage) to see which subjects have already been posted in the past, and then plan to post accordingly to avoid duplication of subjects and titles that already exist from previous discussions.

Thanks and hope to see you there!

If you’re a music publisher, you will now find the Library Name field on the Users & Settings admin page in your account, which used to be the “Publisher Name” field.

If you wish, you can keep the same name that you first entered there, as it’s only for your store usage, but if you have another or different name in mind to be used for your official Library name, of you can edit and save it, but you will need to update the links to your store which are used on your site, because the store URL (site address) is always directly related to your Library Name entered in that field.

On the Tracks/Songs > Add Track and Edit Track pages, you will find the new Publisher field towards the top, below the Composer and above the Copyright field. If all your songs are registered with the same PRO (performance rights organization), or not with any PRO , you can keep the publisher name (if any) that you previously entered, or you can enter the same name there for all your songs, though this field is not required, as it’s just a nice option to have if you want it to appear in your catalog and store.

In the store header (at top of your store), you’ll now see the Library name listed, and the new title and name(s) will now also reflect accordingly on the receipts, contracts and the tracks data in the store and for each licensed track.

We want to thank our publishing clients (like Simon Smart from Smart Media Music) for sharing their usage experience, insights and new feature requests. This helps us stay on the cutting edge of many practical and useful implementations which all active publishers (on our site) can also use for their own accounts, catalog and store.

Publisher admin permissions

Various types of console user permissions can be turned on or off by checking corresponding permissions access boxes such as: Catalog Manager, Sales Manager and Setup Manager. Adding a user involves entering their username,  password, first name, last name, email address and optional title, on a small dialog which opens after selecting the “Add New User” button in the Console Users section at bottom of the Settings & Users admin page. When done entering these fields, clicking the “Save” button sends an email invitation to that user  with the login details. The Console Users management grid will then show the details of the currently logged in user.

Admin permissions function details

Catalog Manager – can add/edit Brands but nothing else on that page (will be shown as read-only), and can add/edit/import/export tracks everything on the Tracks/Songs page except the Configure dialog (will be shown as read-only) and can upload files and add/edit genres.

Sales Manager – can access the Licensing Inquiries, Sold Licenses, Sales Report and Manage Clients admin pages.

Setup Manager – can access all the things not mentioned above.

Global Manager – a user having all 3 permissions ( as outlined above) can do anything.

Overview how it works

1) The first/default user will have all 3 permissions. The grid will have 3 columns, one for each permission besides the First and Last name columns.

2) The first/default user can not be deleted or edited and will have all 3 permissions always available by “default”, since this belongs to the publishers as primary user from the time of initial registration.

3) All added (subsequent) accounts can also be edited and/or deleted to give the account owner maximum flexibility to add, change or remove various levels of admin access permissions to their publisher’s account.

4) Adding/editing users will be allowed only from the first/default user, and not from a later (subsequent) added user.

5) The Settings & Users (previously Account Details) page will show the details of the currently logged in user instead of the ones for the account owner. Also, the change password function will be for the logged-in user.

Designed for convenience and ease-of-use

We’ve designed this new feature to work as easily as possible to help music publishers better manage their accounts by being able to offer their team members, including employees, staff or other outsourced or auxilliary personnel, the access needed to help them manage their music licensing catalog, rate cards, licensing store, sales and business reports, by giving them access (as needed) to achieve the specific tasks assigned to them, while protecting other data-sensitive areas reserved only for owners or top maanagement.

Give it a test drive

If you’ve been expecting or requesting this new feature, please feel free to give it a test drive now by setting up one or more ‘Console User’ accounts (as needed) toflexiibly manage your music publishing and licenising business. You’ll have full control to add, edit and/or delete any user accounts, to easily set up a test, or start using right away to assign or delegate certain management tasks to others on your team.

As always, f you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to send them to us from our LicenseQuote Contact page by using one of the appropriate contact forms on that page.

Plugin that embeds LQ store on a WordPress site

This feature/tool (now in Beta) makes it as easy as possible for non-programmers to use, or if you have a webmaster or developer, it will help them set up your store more quickly and easily on your new or existing WordPress site.

Here’s what the Plugin has:

1. Widget (user can drag and drop to dynamic widget area – if supported by template)
2. Filter function which is binded to the_content() WP function and works for a single article \ stand alone page.
2.1. Filter checks if there is a custom field registered for a page\article and gets widget ID.
2.2. Filter parses DOM of content and searchs for placeholder (any tag with). If found then it adds widget script into placeholder (id is taken from placeholder tag or from custom field). If no valid ID is found then filter dooes nothing.

Instructions for installing the WordPress plugin

Download the plugin from this link:
https://www.licensequote.com/demo/lqstorewidget.zip

You can install plugin automatically through WordPress or manually by uploading a plugin via FTP (for more information see this link).

To install plugin manually, first decompress the file named “lqstorewidget.zip” into your WordPress plugins folder (Example: “www.yoursite.com/wp-content/plugins”).

To use the plugin within WordPress use one for the following methods:

1.  As a widget (drag-and-drop to widget area)

OR

2. Place the following PHP function in the source code of your Theme:

<?php
add_lqstorewidget(“Your-Store-ID”);
?>

OR

3.  Add the following code with your store ID to your single content page:

<div class=”lqstorewidget” id=”Your-Store-ID”></div>

You can get your store ID from the “Store & Settings” page in your console.

Sold Licenses – filter usage improvement

We now save the last setting the user selected for next time the page loads.

Example:
If user selects ‘Licensing Sales’ and leaves the Sold Licenses page, next time he comes back to this page, the ‘Licensing Sales’ filter would still be selected, instead of the ‘Show All’ (initial default) setting.

API implementation demo

We’ve added links at the bottom of the API console (admin page) for an Implementation demo and download demo code link.
Please follow these links for complete details: LicenseQuote API implementation demo. You can download demo code here.

Manage Clients admin page search box

There is a search box at top-right of the buyer’s list console which lets you easily search by client’s name or other known fields such as company name or city, etc. This makes it fast and easy to find and sort according to the various search criteria you have in mind.
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We want to thank our subscription clients for their suggestions, input and feedback which enables us to develop and plan these kinds of new features and site user enhancements.

1. Show All
2. Licensing Sales
3. Retail Sales
4. Blanket Downloads – to track usage for accounts that have the Blanket license download permissions enabled
5. Free Demo Downloads – to track optional setting which lets buyers download Free evaulation audio preview demos

See image below:

You can also click the Price column to sort from highest to lowest price amount, or click again to switch view from lowest to highest price amount.
This makes it easy to review various commercial licensing or retail sales trends, in addition to the sales details provided on the Sales Report page.

If you are a music publisher and want to use LicenseQuote to easily manage your music publishing and licensing sales, please visit our home page to learn more and sign-up to get started with our LQ 15 FREE plan which lets you start building your own private label catalog and store with up to 15 songs/tracks. Anytime later, you can upgrade to the next level when you’re ready to increase  your catalog size and add more tracks.

If you need a Custom Plan Quote (for catalogs with more than 1,000 tracks), please use this form to contact us with your custom quote request. We will reply on the same day, usually within a few hours.

The Buyers intro video can be viewed on the front page or directly at YouTube at this link:
There it can be viewed in a larger screen size which may help some viewers see more details on the video images.

For buyers using English as a second or third (non-native) language, or still learning English, we’ll post a transcript of the video’s audio as heard from the voice over script. This way they can read all the sections (slides) in the video, and copy & paste any portion(s) to a translation engine to help them better understand the context of the video presentation. This may also be useful to our international (foriegn language) publishing clients who may wish to further review the contents of this video.

Note: The numbers below correspond to the slides (image transistions) used in the video, so you’ll get an idea of each slide’s audio presentation context.

01 If you’re a music supervisor, creative director, media editor or licensing buyer, you can use the LicenseQuote Global Store to

02 find music and get instant quotes, request custom pricing, negotiate deals and license directly from a large network of professional music publishers and libraries.

03 Global store registration is quick, free, and gives you access to save music in your account to favorites or projects.

04 You can search by selecting from any or all publishers,

05 Type of song, source of composition,

06 and optionally sort by featured, alphabetical, most played or recently added. After selecting any of these filters, you can browse the tracks and click to play them and review the descriptions and other track properties.

07 You can further drill down your search by entering any combination of words in the keywords search box. Usually two or three words to describe the genre, mood, style, or instrument will provide the best results.

08 When you find tracks you like, you can save them to favorites or a custom-labeled project folder.

09 To license a track, click the license button on the player.

10 This opens the license page which lets you select a license type,

11 enter a short description of your project, check the calculated price, then click the Purchase button to continue the purchase process.

12 A Review and Purchase page appears which lets you select the payment method, check the agreement, and click the Purchase button, which opens the payment gateway, where you can use any major credit card or other available payment method.

13 After your payment is completed, you’ll be returned to the store where you’ll find the purchased license on the Licenses page. Clicking the “View” button for the track you licensed, opens the

14 License summary page, where you can instantly download the track’s audio master file, licensing agreement, and receipt. When logged in to your store, you always have access to your

15 saved Projects page, where you can also manage “Multiple tracks license inquiries”,

16 pending and all previously purchased licenses on the Licenses page,

19 and Profile page to manage your account details and change your password if needed.

20 On behalf of all music publishers, libraries and the LicenseQuote management, we welcome you to get a free Global Store account and start using this dynamic resource to save time, money, and enhance your music licensing productivity.

We are pleased to provide this video resource to introduce all music supervisors, creative directors, production editors and licensing buyers coming to our site, (as well as our publishing clients) with a clear orientation how the LicenseQuote Global Store works to benefit them in their every-day music business and licensing needs.

Example of mixes

For example if the main track is a 3 minute song with vocals, some mix versions might be:

Mix A – Bed, song without vocals which could be used as a sound bed or accompaniment track.
Mix B – Instrumental version of song, using for example a guitar or piano to play the lead melody.
Mix C – 60 second (instrumental version)
Mix D – 30 second
Mix E – DnB (drums and bass) only mix
Mix F – Full-length instrumental with no drums
Mix G – Bumper, used at end of audio or audio/visual presentation, typically 3 – 5 seconds long

Though any song/track can have a number of opitional mix versions, most catalogs and libraries normally focus on a set that works best for their type of catalog, ranging from 2 or 3, up to as high as 6 or 7 mix tracks.

Generally it’s best to to keep the same number of mixes for each main track, and keep the same set of mixes to be consistent, so music supervisors and licensing clients know what’s available and what to expect in terms of your catalog offering.

Typical set of mixes

For catalogs that only have instrumental music (without lyrics and vocals), this might be a typical set of mixes:

15 Second
30 Second
60 Second
Bed
DnB
No Drums
Bumper

In the example above, there’s a total of 7 unique mixes.

How to add track mixes

To add track mixes on the Tracks/Songs > Edit Track page, start with the same name as the main track title followed by a colon and then the unique mix name.

Example
Song Name
Song Name : Mix A
Song Name : Mix B
Song Name : Mix C

In the above example, you’ll find the main “Song Name” track in your store with the “3 mixes” notice below the title. When you click the mixes notice, they will open up in their own mixes box.

Tips:
1. Mixes are a handy way to group various track versions together in your store, and each mix track still counts as a “song” in regards to your LQ plan total tracks limit. For example, if you have 50 main tracks and each has 3 mixes, that’s a total of 50 tracks + 150 mixes = 200 total tracks.

2. After the colon you can use any subtrack mix title you wish, as long as the main title remains exactly the same.

3. If you change your mind or don’t need the mix version(s) anymore, rename them to another track title, or delete them from your catalog.

4. If you are importing tracks from a spreadsheet, on a CSV file, the same rule applies by using the “colon” to designate the mix tracks as shown in the example above.

Main vs mix track search functions

The mix (child) tracks will be found only by searching for the main (parent) tracks, hence the main track’s meta-data (tags or custom fields) should include some information about the mix tracks which can picked up by the store’s search functions, including the keyword searches and various filters. In other words, even though the mix track’s description, tags and other fields data can be viewed in the store (when selecting or playing the mix track), the search engine will only search for data among the main track titles. To summarize, this means the search results will only “return” the main tracks that qualify best for any given search and filtering.

With a bit of planning, you can set up a nicely streamlined catalog that’s optimized to keep all mix tracks grouped together with the main (primary) song / track titles they belong to. When buyers add mix tracks to a projects folder in your store, they can then get price quotes, send inquiries, license and download them as any other main track in your store.

If you are using your own storage server, please use this URL link format to your files:
Master files > http://www.yourdomain.com/master/songname.wav (example)
and
Preview files > http://www.mydomain.com/preview/songname.mp3 (example)

Important: You can not link to music or .aspx pages, but only directly to the actual audio files such as .wav and .mp3, etc.

Of course you can also place all your master files (AIF, AIFF or WAV) and MP3 preview files in the same directory, for example like this:

Master files > http://www.mydomain.com/files/songname.wav
Preview files > http://www.mydomain.com/files/songname.mp3

We also recommend that you use a reliable domain hosting service which includes enough space and bandwidth to store all your audio files, and that you have an FTP connection (with appropriate software) to easily upload and manage all your audio files in one area.

Most domain services such as Godaddy, typically include or offer some basic shared hosting where you can upload and store your audio files, and then link to them. As long as you know where you uploaded your audio files, and are familiar with their names, you’ll be able to enter the links to them on the Tracks/Songs > Edit Track page in your account for each unique track in your catalog.

Tips:
1. Your MP3 preview files should be encoded in CBR (constant bit rate) format instead of VBR (variable bit rate), to make sure it works in the store player.

2. Maximum audio file size is 150 MB.

3. Note, the LQ 15 FREE plan does not support AIF, AIFF or WAV files, only MP3 audio files.

4. Optionally, you can also provide additional protection to your Master files by entering a Username and Password which you’ve set up for the master files directory on your hosting server. In such case, be sure to use two directories, one only for the Master files which will be password protected and lets buyers download them only after their license purchase, and a preview files directory, where you’ll store your song’s MP3 preview files to be streamed for playing in the waveform player in your store.

Remember, the preview files must be MP3 (for streaming and playing purpose) and can optionally be watermarked by you (with rotating audible messages), for additional protection if  you wish.

After you’ve set up your links, be sure to test them to make sure they are working as intended in your licensing store.

Please note, you will be responsible for checking and maintaining all external song file links you set up. If you’ve set up the external audio file links correctly in your catalog, on the Edit Track page), they should play fine in your store and reliably deliver the Preview file plays to all your store visitors and licensing buyers.

If you still have a problem, please let us know (send email to LQ support) so we can check your link format and help you resolve any issues which may have occurred on your end.

The article starts with this introduction: This is the type of artist that used to be TuneCore’s biggest cheerleader. Now, he’s decided to speak out against unfair and predatory practices that have emerged at the company, and risk the ramifications that come with that.

Steven’s premise is that TuneCore, which began as a way to help and protect artists, has reverted back to the old industry model of exploitation at every opportunity. He then lists his first two points of main contention:

• First, TuneCore pulled a “bait and switch” retroactive change to the terms and conditions of its Publishing Administration deal.

• Second, TuneCore is making a rights grab to control my music in YouTube.

What Cravis didn’t know was that Tunecore was going to change the terms of their agreed upon non-exclusive deal in the middle, making them exclusive. Steve says: “Suddenly I (and potentially thousands of other TuneCore artists) would have to drop out of other non-exclusive synch licensing arrangements and give TuneCore my rights exclusively in exchange for TuneCore continuing to provide its service.”

It’s only natural that Steven wonders how many thousands of other artists TuneCore tricked with this bait and switch maneuver. Then he goes on to explain how TuneCore grabbed unauthorized copyrights to his YouTube royalty (performance income) rights.

At the bottom of the article, Steven posts a series of 9 email messages (truncated) which went back and forth between him and the TuneCore management. The emails are dated from February through December 2013 to show how this story started and unfolded.

Please note, if you are using TuneCore for any of your publishing admin or licensing sales services, we urge that you carefully read the terms of service, and if you haven’t already started with TuneCore, be sure to read them carefully and consider running them by a qualified entertainment attorney to be sure of the terms and your rights.

Meanwhile we wish Steven Cravis, a former LicenseQuote publisher, much success in getting out from under his undeserved copyrights entrapment.

Link to article on the Digital Music News site:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2013/12/18/tunecorepredatory

* Added Price column on the Sold Licenes console to easily see the price for each license sale.

* The Old store was retired (on November 11, 2013) and replaced by the New store which features the waveform player, track navigation paging options and many new buyer-facing features.

* The old Captcha (human filter check) on the store Contact form was replaced with a new streamlined, automated filter. This provides robot-generated spam protection while making it much easier for buyers to send messages to publishers from their store contact form.

* Added option to hide the Contact link from the Store header, which can now be set on the Advanced Settings page. This is a nice option for publishers that already have a contact form on their website, and don’t need an extra one dedicated only for their licensing store.

* Buyer’s license contract for publisher t0 approve. This new feature lets buyers offer to use their own license contract, which for example, certain buyers or agents may already have in place, and/or require to be used. The publisher can access the uploaded contract (in their account) for review and approval.

* The Global Store registration page now contains a special text message to inform new store users about the advantages and benefits of registering to use the Global Store. The message is currently posted as follows:

* The Small play buttons on the track rows (in New store) now function the same way as the main Play button in the Waveform player, simply click to Play and click to Pause.

* The Global Store now has a Projects page and feature which lets buyers create custom-named project folders to save tracks to. When there are two or more tracks, a “Multiple Tracks Licensing Inquiry” button appears which lets the buyer send a quote request to the publisher based on total number of selected tracks which have been added to the project folder. It’s also possible to remove tracks or add other ones, but this should be done before a multiple tracks license inquiry is sent.

* The Advanced Settings page now has an option to “hide” the total number of tracks from the store. This is for new, small or specialty catalogs where the focus is on newly featured tracks and less on total number of available tracks. The default setting is to display the total track stats, so check this option if you want to hide them.

* On the Profiles & Brands admin page, “Songwriter” has been added as a brand type which now appears in the combo-box (pull down) menu. We already had Artist, Composer, Performer, Vocalist and several others, but now Songwriter has been added to the list as a new brand type option.

* On the Tracks Edit page, the Type and Source filters are now required to be selected from the combo-box menus. This encourages “best practice” which give buyers these filter options in the Store to easily target the type and source of music they are most commonly searching for. In most cases one of the options will fit best, otherwise the publisher can select “Unspecified”.

* It’s now possible to upload master and preview audio files directly from the Edit Track page, but you can still use the Upload/Files page to upload and check your uploaded files. This saves time in case you start adding a new track, but forgot to first upload the audio files.

* After a payment is made (via the store’s PayPal interface), buyers are now taken back to the publisher’s embed store page (on their website) instead of their stand-alone store on the LicenseQuote website.

* Three new file formats are supported for integrated files hosting and LTF (Link To File) options, which are PDF, MID and ZIP files. The ZIP files format makes it easy to include, for example, different versions of the same master files, and PDF is a great format for selling sheet music. Some publishers or libaries may also want to sell (or license) their source Midifiles, so this is another option, however, they should still use MP3 audio files for buyers to Preview their music in the store.

* On the Receipt, a VAT/TAX Info field is now supported for optional use, which can be pre-filled by the publisher on the Billing Options admin page.

* Google Spreadsheets (Drive) integration lets you import, export, edit and manage your catalog songs meta-data using the Free Google Spreadsheets service. In most cases you already have access if you have a gmail account, or you can easily sign up for a Free google account.

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Thanks to all publishers, and/or their licensing clients, for their suggestions and feedback which helps us continuously evaluate and improve our most important site functions and features.

Notes and analysis:
* Normally there’s some overlap between two or more genres, so the total count of searched returns will be greater than the total number of tracks available (at any given time) in the Global Store.

* All genres are created and self-defined by the publishers themselves (not LicenseQuote), so this gives a good idea which genres are the most commonly used, but is not necessarily a direct reflection of the most-searched genres by the majority of music supervisors and licensing buyers, though among the top third (15 – 18) it possibly could be.

* Keep in mind that actual search results will fluctuate (hourly, daily, weekly) as publishers switch or edit genres, tags, track descriptions and remove or add new material, etc.

* Most of these are considered “primary” genres, while a few could be considered subgenres, which have (for one reason or another) become popular enough to be recognized as main-line genres. This is mostly a matter of marketing and changing “tastes” as it’s common knowledge that genre “labels” are often used subjectively and may depend on the size and nature of a publisher’s active catalog.

* Not all tracks that are “Acapella” will appear only under the “Acapella” genre label, as many more could also be cataloged under Pop, Easy Listening, Hip-Hop or R&B (for example) and then use “Acapella” as a subgenre. So please note that just because a genre appears to have few tracks, it doesn’t mean there can’t be more similar tracks found. For example, you could search for “easy listening acapella” or other combinations of keywords to get completely different, even unexpected or surprising results.

* If you are a publisher with an LQ plan and catalog, you might consider using some of these popular (fairly mainstream) genres for your own store, using the genre filter and appropriate track tags, etc. For example, Hip-Hop will help buyers find your tracks more frequently than using lesser-known spellings such as “Hip Hop”, “HipHop” or “Hip/Hop”, so it helps to know which spelling to use for the most standard, popular genres.

Global Store Features

• Search music from all listed publishers
  • Use keywords, types and source filters
  • Preview MP3 files in waveform image player¹
  • Register once to access all publisher’s stores
  • Deal directly with the copyright owners & managers

• Save and share songs/tracks
  • Create and manage project folders
  • Alternate mixes and versions available²
  • Download audio files for your project evaluation²

• Get auto-calculated price quotes¹
  • License fees based on selected usage
  • Request clearance and custom price quotes¹
  • Blanket license subscriptions & downloads²

• Major credit cards accepted¹
  • PayPal payment processing
  • Field available for VAT or Tax info
  • Pay by check, wire or money order²
  • Download your contracts, receipts & master files

• New music added daily!

¹ Offered by most publishers, standard settings.
² Offered by certain publishers or per request.
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Search by Keywords…

The first and most powerful search option is the Keywords search field which lets people search for music, from among all active publisher members that have opted to have their catalog included in the LQ Global Search Store. All active subcription members (publishers), including LQ 15 FREE plan members, have this option enabled (by default) on the Advanced Settings page in their account.

When one, two or more keywords are entered into the Keywords search field (at top-right of the global search store interface), our database is searched from among all available songs/tracks as listed below. (Publishers please note: required meta-data fields on the Edit Track page are highlighted in red )

Brand name – the name of the artist, catalog, group or library, etc. that is used on the ‘Profile & Brands’ page in the publisher’s account.

Track name – the title of the track which is entered on the song’s ‘Edit Track’ admin page.

Composer name – the name of the composer(s) listed  on the Composer name field. This field is option and therefore not all publishers are using this field, depending on their type of catalog.

Copyright – the copyright field is also optional, but normally contains the writer(s) and/or publisher(s) names.

Description – this field normally contains a brief summary of the track’s main theme to show what’s different or unique about it. These texts also appear in the store’s track rows as well as in the Player when the song is previewed in the new store with the waveform image player. It’s one of the most powerful means for buyers to quickly find the kinds of music they’re searching for, assuming all tracks have thoughtful, well-written descriptions (highly recommend), and is also required before having the track appear in the publisher’s own local store and the Global search store.

Tags – this field is optional but recommended for publishers to use. Up to 10 tags can be used, including short two and three word phrases, and each tag must be separated by comma. Tags further extends the keywords search effectiveness, as all the publisher’s tags are included in each search and also appears listed on the Properties tab page. (Click the ‘Properties’ tab in the music player to view this page for any track loaded into the player)

Genre – each publisher can define their own Genre and subgenre labels, (rock, classical, hip-hop, pop, smooth jazz, etc.) and apply them to each unique track in their catalog and for display in the Genre filter in their own store. However, in the Global search store, we don’t list Genres in a Filter, but they are fully searchable from our “google-like” Keywords search field. So regardless which Genre or subgenre you are looking for, just enter it and you should get the same results as with the previous Genre filter in the old store, except this now also searches for all variations of subgenres as well.

Custom fields – Some publishers also add their own custom meta-data fields, which they use for filters in their own store, so when available, these are also searched by the keywords entry searches.

All Publishers filter

The All Publishers filter provides a list of all currently active publishers that have opted to have their catalog included in the LQ Global Search store. As mentioned above, this also includes new LQ 15 Plan members, which may have recently started setting up their catalog, and may only have 2 or 3 songs listed (as yet), but will eventually add more tracks as they grow their catalog. Currently there are about 280 total publishers that have opted to be included on this list.

When one of them is selected (from the pull-down combo box), the publisher’s catalog appears with all tracks that they’ve checked to make “Visible in Store”. This means that track should have a complete title (name), description, a master file and an MP3 preview file for play in the store. However, some pubishers are linking to their preview files on their own server or other third-party files hosting services which don’t fully support streaming of MP3 files. If this is the case, please test your URL links (to externally stored MP3 Preview files) to make sure they will stream in the new Store’s waveform player. If not, we recommend you use our intetraged files hosting, or use another storage service, for example, that lest you upload your audio files with FTP interface and supports MP3 files streaming.

If you are a buyer and you already know the name of the artist or publisher, you can narrow down your search by entering the Artist or Songwriter name in the keywords search or find the Publisher listed on the “All Publishers” filter.

Types filter

The Types filter lets you narrow down you search to more specific kinds of tracks, such as songs with vocals, instrumentals with melody and instrumental beds, etc. There are six more options including: Sound design, Bumper/Stinger, Loops, Beats, and Sound Effects. Tip: you can start your search with the Types filter and then use the keywords search entry, or start with the keywords search and then narrow your search down to one of the Types filter selections, so it doesn’t matter because it works both ways!

Sources filter

The Sources filter lets you narrow down your search within a certain status of the song’s origin, which includes: Original Composition, Cover and Public Domain. So depending on what you need or prefer, you can select (or not select) any of these options to help you further narrow down your search for the right track to fit your project.

Other search advice & tips

Please keep in mind that not all publishers have yet defined all their songs/tracks with specific filter Types and Sources, which therefore may still be marked as Unspecified (in their account) and will not appear from these search filters. However, we are constantly urging all publishers to check and update their meta-data settings to be sure they’ll include these additional (optional) filter settings and fields in their account for the benefit of licensing buyers coming to their store or using the Global Music Search store on the LQ site.

If you are a music supervisor or buyer, thank you for giving your favorite publishers any feedback which might encourage them to improve their song’s meta-data for improved search-ability in their store, and the Global Search Store if they’re opted in.

If you are an active music publisher, please take a momement to check that all track’s meta-data fields in your catalog are used (as needed), current and up to date. Of course if you don’t have song with vocals and lyrics, there’s nothing to add to the Lyrics data field, but you can still use a Description and Tags to help buyers find your instrumental music.

Please note that we are constantly working to improve the search experience in new Global Music Search Store which lets the public discover the kinds of publishers, songs, tracks and brands that are currently active on the LicenseQuote site.

Primary content providers

Number of active publishers – 239 (includes Free plan members)
Accounts with storage plans – 54% (LQ integrated storage)
Accounts using own storage – 46% (Link to external files)

Brands

Total Number of brands – 1,003 (artists, composers, catalogs, etc.)
Average number of brands per store – 4.19

Tracks and genres

Total Number of tracks – 26,063 (August 12, 2013)
Average number of songs/tracks per store – 109
Avgerage number of primary genres – 5.5 (per store)

Registered buyers

Total number of buyers – 2,335
Total pre-registered SSO buyers – 2,024 (87% Single Sign-On)
Total non-SSO buyers – 311 (13%)
Average number of buyers per store – 20 (over 1 year service)

Licensing inquiries

Total number of inquiries – 5,186
Average number of inquiries per store – 22

Licensing sales averages

Average number of sold licenses per store – 14.07
Average price of sold license – $103.87
Average revenue of sold licenses per store – $1,461.45

Analysis and comments

The stats from this report are a combination of averages and running totals over the last 3 years since we developed the global stats report to monitor the LicenseQuote site activity and related trends. The report lets us post updates as needed, with an emphasis on recent global license activity trends.

Rolling out the new site design

Along with rolling out the new LicenseQuote site design, we also released the new store which provides our publishing clients with many exciting new features and functions. We did a “soft” launch to check and test everything and will soon send a formal announcement (by email) to all active publishing members. Meanwhile, this article gives everyone including the public a “heads up” on what the LicenseQuote team has been working on which has now come to fruition.

New site design and pages

The new site design includes improved and updated images, layout, streamlined navigation and integration between all public and publishing member pages. The new tagline is “Publish Your Music – Without The Middleman” to clearly reflect our commitment to serving our growing membership of active music composers, publishers and library owners.  Many of the page titles still say “Music Licensing Solutions” as part of the description because after all, we also invite music supervisors and licensing buyers to visit our site’s global music search to help them find music and license directly from our growing list of active publishers.

On the ‘Find Music To License page, there’s also a link (button at top right) which opens the Composer/Publisher Directory.  This part of the site has also been udpated with improved visual design, streamlined layout and SEO for all publisher’s business information, listed tracks and descriptions which they’ve opted to be included in this public search directory. It also contains ecommerce seo services.

New plans and pricing

On the Plans and Pricing page, you’ll see some new things as follows:

1. New LQ 15 FREE plan which has nearly all features of the paid subscription plans but with a few limitations that apply: MP3 only files hosting, excludes option to be included in the global store search listing, requires “powered by” line, restricts use of API integration links and is currently limited to the first 3 retail or license purchase sales. Please note that the management reserves the right to modify the limits of the Free plan, and that its usage is intended to help new publishing members become familar with the most vital licensing sales and store features, so they can embed their store on their site to promote more music licensing sales.

2. Standard LQ Store plans ranging from LQ 75 songs/tracks up to LQ 1000 songs/tracks. Some of the plan prices have been adjusted slightly, but all the plans with “files hosting included” are now more competitive,  to reflect our increased volume storage dyamics. When you click the “Starts at…” links, a complete pricing page pops up at center of the page, so you can see and compare all the plans and pricing.

3. In the last column we now offer the LQ Custom Catalog plans for catalogs with over 1,000 tracks. We now offer larger publishers and libraries some new “module” options so they get only the primary features and functions needed to manage their online catalog, and not pay for other features they don’t need or plan to use.

New store

The new store with inline waveform player is built on the HTML5 platform to make the new music player very mobile-devices friendly. Our GA stats show that these browsers are now the most used on our site, in this order: Safari, Chrome, FireFox, Internet Explorer and Android Browser.

The new store comes with a default green & blue color theme, which publishers can modify or completely change on the Licensing Store (admin page) console in their account. At top of the console, there’s an option for existing publishers to switch to the new plan, which we encourage them to do.

Please note, within the next week, we’ll send an announcement about the new store, and then the switch will be automated for all publisher accounts, but meanwhile, you can already “test drive” the new store and adjust your image accordingly to best fit the new store header layout.

In the store, the buyers now have a new “Projects” page (see tab at top of store) where they’ll find “favorite” songs/tracks that have been saved, and can set up a Projects folder to easily manage all license clearances, inquiries and purchases that belong with the same project. The project folders can be custom named or re-named and also deleted when not needed anymore.

Advanced settings page

In your publisher account, on the Advanced Settings page there are now some new options as follows:
1. Optional “Show lyrics tab in the store”. The default setting is “Show”, which lets buyers see the lyrics (in the player) for any songs/tracks that you’ve added lyrics for. If all your songs are instrumentals and you don’t have any songs with lyrics, you can select the “Hide” option to remove the Lyrics tab from your store.

2. For each kind of purchase or download you can now select what the buyers will have access to, including: Deliver the Preview files, Deliver the Master files, or Deliver both. This covers these types of transactions: License purchases, Retail sales, Blanket downloads (for blanket license sales) and Free download (for free demo/evaluation of your audio files).

3. Enable single sign-on system – is on by default and recommended to help boost buyer traffic coming to your store from our Global ‘Find Music’ Search page.

4. List tracks in LQ Global Search – Default is “On” and now also works for LQ 15 Free plan members. This feature gives music composers, publishers and libraries addtional exposure to potentially interested music supervisors and licensing buyers.

5. List your business profile on the Find Publishers page – this is also enabled by default, but if not or you previously switched it off, you can always check it to switch it back on. This gives you additional marketing exposure and SEO for all your track titles, descriptions and live links to your store.

6. There’s several other options, plus now the ability to easily delete all previous Brands, Genres or Tags, in case you want to restructure your catalog with new meta-data, and quickly clear out all the old data.

Thanks for your feedback

If you’re a music publisher already using LicenseQuote to manage, promote and sell your music licensing, we encourage you to give the new Store a test drive and let us know how you like it.

Thanks also for any of your input and feedback as we are constantly striving to improve things and resolve any issues or unexpected errors/bugs that may appear.

We hope you enjoy using the new site, plans and store! To contact us with your thoughts or feedback, please select one of the forms on our Contact page.

Login issues

Wrong login place – Sometimes buyers try to login on the main LicenseQuote  site,  where only the music publishers login, so publishers may need to remind them to navigate to their store or licensing page (on their website) where their store is embedded. At the top-right of the store, it will say “Buyers” in bold letters, which is the right place for buyers to login.

Wrong username or password – Sometimes buyers may forget their Username, in which case they can usually find it in the “Saved Passwords” section of their browser. For example in FireFox, they would go to Tools > Options > Security> Saved Passwords. Then explore the page find the list of saved websites along the Usernames and Passwords. This is usually the quickest way to recover a “forgotten” Username and/or Password. However, if the password is completely lost, the Login dialog offers a “Lost Password” option which lets buyers enter their email address and then will auto-send a new password. The new password can then be used to login, and can then be easily changed on the Profile page within the store.

Each publisher sets their own licensing options

Depending on the publisher’s Licensing Profile settings and options, buyers may be able to download a free MP3 Preview file (for evaluation purposes), get instant quotes (based on pre-set usage scenarios) to make instant purchases, negotiate a custom license and price or get permission to download tracks based on a pre-arranged blanket license agreement.

When a purchase is made, in most cases the buyers will use their credit card or PayPal account funding, though sometimes the publishers may accept payments sent via checks by mail. In any case, after the license purchase money is transferred and cleared, the buyers should have instant access to view and download a copy of their license purchase contract, receipt and the master audio file(s) of the song(s) they licensed.

When buyers should contact the publisher

If for any reason the purchased licenses are not available on the Licenses page (when logged in to the publisher’s store), the buyer should contact the publisher about their inquiry, purchase attempt and/or completed license payment. The publisher can be contacted by email form from the store and typically the phone number is also listed in the publisher’s profile or on their website.

In nearly all cases the publishers can resolve any license purchase issues, especially those that have already been sold and collected via one of the billing options they’ve made available to their licensing clients.

If the publisher has collected the license sale and the buyer still has problems finding (or getting) access to the licensed song(s), the publisher should contact LicenseQuote support to further investigate the issue. In most cases we can quickly find the problem, and (occasionally) spot a bug or glitch which may have caused the problem.

Most frequently, the buyers are asked to use a different browser or simply clear their cache files and reload the store. This updates the most recent data on the Licenses page and provides access to the newest purchased music licenses.

Summary of licensing buyers customer service

If you are a music supervisor or licensing buyer, please always contact the publisher that you are inquiring with or have purchased a license from in the event you have any questions or problems. They will be in the best position to provide you with prompt, knowledgeable customer service and support based on the information they’ve already collected in their account.

If the publisher can’t resolve a buyer’s purchase issue, we urge them to contact LicenseQuote support (from their account Home page) and tell us how we can help them investigate any license purchase issue with one their specific transactions or clients. With this approach we’ve always been able to quickly resolve any questions or issues in the best and most streamlined way without compromising the privacy of their clients.

Customer service is all about resolving client’s issue and leaving client fully satisfied. If you’ve ever heard about Professional Communications Network, you know that customer service is their every-day job. It’s good to know that there are still companies like this whose aim is to provide the best possible service to client.

Marina says “after tagging music for Pandora and currently tagging and collecting metadata for licensing companies, I have accrued some important and vital techniques for music keywording/tagging.”

Effective Tags/Keywords

It is important to have a basic set list of keywords that you use consistently to describe the nuances of your music. Compile a list of words that fit with these categories:

Mood (examples: Happy, Somber, Energetic, Sinister)
Industry Usage (i.e. Blaxploitation, Earthy, Organic, Radio Imaging)
Tag descriptions (i.e. Textural, Atmospheric, Gritty, Smooth)
Subgenre (i.e. Orchestral Hybrid, Dubstep, Bubblegum)

Sentence description editorials

Construct sentences that are populated with effective keywords. Sentence structure sample:

“Pulsing and bright, featuring breathy female lead vocals, gritty electric guitar and warm electronic textures that create an introspective and reflective mood.”

Sentence description formula

1. Start the sentence off with the song’s textural information. Use two effective keywords. (i.e. bright and sparkly,  smooth and warm, gritty and crunchy)

2. The middle section of the sentence should highlight the featured instruments (which you can also describe based on the mood or texture of the instrument. i.e. aggressive guitar, driving drums, introspective acoustic piano) Also emphasis on musical form or style should be mentioned in this section if it is a dominant characteristic of the song.

3. End the sentence with mood descriptors. (i.e. solemn and somber mood, or uplifting and inspirational mood.)

By using consistent tags and short descriptive sentences, you increase the possibilities of having your music available for the right spot.

If you have a high volume of tracks or need assistance, my team is available. Visit our website: http://www.tagteamanalysis.com

Marina Garza
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Thanks Marina for contributing this article with helpful tips and examples about music keywording and description techniques. We’ll be happy to refer composers and publishers to your service to help them set up or improve their music catalog for use in their LicenseQuote powered licensing store.

Songs data file download link

The download link for the songs data file is:
https://www.licensequote.com/demo/Songs_Live Demo Store.csv

When you open the file, you’ll notice that top row is reserved for the names of each unique data field which appears in this order:

Brand,  Brand Type,  Track Name,  Copyright,  Composer,  Description,  Tags,   Genre,  Subgenre,  Type,  Source,  Licensing Profile,  Master File,  Preview File,  Visible,  Lyrics,  Tempos,  Eras/Styles,  Arrangements

The last three are Custom fields which we added to illustrate how custom search filters (up 15) can be defined and used by the songs/tracks in your catalog.

Reviewing the songs data file

After you’ve downloaded and opened the CSV (comma separated value) songs data file in a spreadsheet, you can review the data in each of the columns going down the rows.

The Brand is the brand name you’ve entered and selected a Brand Type for on the Profile & Brands admin page in your publisher account.

The Track Name is the song name (title) you’ve added on the Tracks/Songs > Edit Track page for each unique song, and so forth.

Initial setup tips

After adding your own genres on the Genres admin page, you’ll see them available to be selected for each song on the Edit Track page in your account.

Tip: We recommend you first add about 5 – 10 songs to your catalog and then Export to see how your own songs data appears on your spreadsheet. It will be exported as a CSV file, which you can then open in any popular spreadsheet application. Once opened you’ll be able to add more song titles in the same format, and brands, brand types (using our pre-defined types: album, artist, collection, catalog, library, etc.), genres, subgenres, etc. When ready, you can import the updated CSV file and everything will be added on the fly.

Note, except for the Default Licensing profile, you will need to setup any new Licensing Profiles you may wish to use on your songs data before importing.

Previewing the store filters

When you go to our Live Demo store, you’ll see the various search filters towards the top near the store header. They are as follows:

All Catalogs – which offers a selection of brands
All Genres – offers selection of genres and subgenres
All Tags – displays the unique list of tags used from all songs in the store
Types – Lists type of song, such as song/vocal or instrumental melody, etc. Other types are also available when setting up your own brand(s).
Sources – Options are original composition, cover or public domain. Since this is a demo store, using only “dummy” songs, most are designated as “original composition”.
Tempos – Song tempo (speed) options include: mid, slow, up tempo and variable tempos.
Eras/Styles – offers styles by decades (50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, etc.) or other keywords such as adult contemporary and modern.
Arrangements – most of these are simple, casual labels which describe the basic song arrangement format such as male vocals, female vocals or jam band, etc. You can create your own custom filters and use whatever description is suitable to briefly describe the nature of your recording arrangement.

You’ll notice that all these search filters, including the song title, brand type, compser name, copyright information and song description appears in the store. We felt that by comparing what you see in the store with the store’s song data file, it will give you a better idea how the store and song data file are setup and used, and how you would proceed to use the songs data import and export tools (on the the Tracks/Songs admin page) in your publisher account.

Additional tips for best results

Description – Use a short but well-worded song description not more than about 1 or 2 sentences, or just a few words, to describe what is unique about each song. This helps buyers find your songs when they are searching with keywords which are important to meet their specific project requirements.

Tags – No need to use more than a few well defined tags. Three or four is usually sufficient if unique and well worded to fit the song, but in any case, 10 or 12 should really be the maximum limit. The problem with using too many tags is that buyers will get too many search returns, instead of a smaller (manageable) group of highly targeted results.

Subgenres – It’s best to use subgenres only sparingly, if at all. In most cases it’s better to have a strong list of primary genres and use subgenres only when necessary. But if you have only 1 primary genre, then it makes sense to use several subgenres to help buyers find specific kinds of style variations.

Custom Filters – Custom filters are great to use but optional, so don’t go “hog wild” unless there is some important technical data your clients need, such as specific tempo in BPM (beats per minute),  exact length of the song/cue, moods, or exact instruments used in the recording, etc. Regardless, we support up to 15 unique custom fields which you can custom define (with name labels) as you wish, so if you already have a songs data file for your catalog, you’ll be able to migrate your data into our format once you’ve set it up and customized it as needed.

As with all standard and custom LQ Store plans, once a Custom Catalog plan is activated, it’s no problem to switch plans or upgrade anytime as needed.

Custom Catalog plans & applications

Catalog plan 1 – Catalog management + audio files playback
Note: Licensing Profiles and calculations available only for internal, office/staff use. No licensing sales buttons in store.
Applications: Compare with SoundMiner ™ with many similar features and uses but with an attractively competitive price tag.

Catalog plan 2 – Catalog management + licensing sales management
Note: Use catalog and license buttons. No Upload/Files or Link To Files (LTF)  support. No audio files playback in store.
Applications: Works well for publishers and libraries that already have a service or in-house solution to manage their audio files storage, searching and delivery. Can also be used by music publishers that don’t have or own their own masters (audio files which the record labels have), but still wish to offer a store with songs search and complete licensing buttons and sales support to their clients.

Catalog plan 3 – Catalog management
Note: Use only Catalog and Store search features. Use Licensing Profiles pricing calculations for internal use. No Upload/Files or Link To Files support.  A powerful online tracks/songs meta-data management solution.
Applications: For publishers/libraries which don’t have or own the masters (which the record labels have), but wish to offer an online store with searchable catalog. In this case they would be using off-line or other custom rate cards. Can also be used to prepare data to be merged with other catalogs, for a future LQ Store plan upgrade, or to manage royalty administration which doesn’t require listening to audio files, etc.

Comparative pricing overview

Pricing will vary based on catalog size (starting with a min. of 1,000 songs/tracks), whether audio files hosting is to be included or not, and monthly vs. yearly plan pricing.

In general, Catalog Plan 3 is the most economical because there is no licensing sales features and no audio files hosting or linking to audio files (LTF) included. Pricing is up to 30% below equivalent LQ Store pricing with the “Use Your Storage” as a reference guideline.

Catalog plan 1 and 2 are priced about 10% and 20% (respectively) of equivalent LQ Store pricing because certain features (modules) are turned off and not made available until such time as a plan change or upgrade is made.

Get a Custom Catalog plan quote

If you are interested in a Custom Catalog plan, please use this inquiry form to get a custom plan quote. Please complete all options and enter any important details (in text entry field) which best describes your intended catalog usage.

Thanks and we look forward to sending your custom plan quote to help you get started at your earliest convenience.

In your LicenseQuote publisher account, you will find this option in the Catalog section on the Upload/Files admin page. When you click the Upload Files button, the File Upload dialog will appear.  Towards bottom, you’ll see a check box which is checked (enabled by default) which says:

When this option is enabled, you can upload new recording versions of the same track/song files you have previously uploaded. This makes it convenient to easily overwrite an existing (older) file, for example after updating it with a new Preview or Master file. This might come handy, for example, if you’ve added a watermark to your file, or you’ve improved something with the Master and/or Preview recording file.

Our answer provides a brief tutorial for our newer publishing clients to learn how to use this feature which they can manage on the Buyers admin page in their account.

Q. Is it possible to apply a coupon code so that customers can get discounts ?

A. Yes, when Buyers first register their Store user account, they can enter an optional Promotion/Referral code.

This can be any code (text) you’ve assigned them in advance, for example by email, on your website, an ad, a referral plan or other incentive you may wish to offer. The data is captured on a per registered Store user (buyer) basis which then appears on the Buyers admin page (in your account).

Click the Manage link (for any buyer) to open the Store User Details Dialog where you’ll see the code entered (if any) at the bottom of the dialog. You can also Export the buyers information to see this field for all clients, for example on a spreadsheet which can open your downloaded CSV (comma separated value) document.

After the buyer makes their first purchase you can apply a discount (for example) to the next purchase or offer a discount refund, as the case may be. So it’s not an automated discount, but a feature that helps you manage discounts on an optional per-user basis.

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Thank you for your questions which we’ll try to answer here in our blog and upcoming articles. If you have other questions about your LicenseQuote account usage, tips or tutorials, please use the search box (at top right) to find other helpful articles.

How the license contract is set up

Your LicenseQuote publisher account starts with one standard license contract (online template) which is auto-populated at time of sale with the specifics of the licensed track(s), buyer and seller information, license type, pricing and negotiation transcript (optional) if used.

The main body under the AGREEMENT section can be customized, while the header, footer, schedule “A” and schedule “B” are again, auto-populated, based on the specifics of each unique license sale transaction.

This includes, for example, the track/song name(s), negotiation transcript, license pricing and License Type description, etc., which depend on other settings (not directly in the body of the license contract) in various places in your publisher account, most of which are on the Licensing Profile and Pricing Matrix covered in other articles.

Each licensing profile has its own contract

For each Licensing Profile you set up, you can then use the standard contract, or edit, modify or completely replace it as needed. This makes it easy to apply a unique Licensing Profile (along with its Contract) to any number of songs in your catalog and store.

Steps to customize your music licensing contract

When you open up your Licensing Profile (on the Licensing Profiles admin page), click the Licensing Contract “Edit” button. This opens the Contract Editor in a new window. There you can review the standard contract wording, which you can edit, hence, being able to change any part, modify as needed or add new titles, paragraphs or other lines of text, etc. This will effect anything in the AGREEMENT section which originally starts with section
1. License Grant and Performance Rights
and goes down to
9.12 Headings

After you’re done editing, be sure to click the “Save” button. From then on your custom contract will be available for any new license purchases.

The other contract fields are auto-populated

Note, as stated above, the other info that goes above the AGREEMENT is the identification of the seller (publisher) and buyer (licensee), which is filled in (auto-populated) automatically at time of license sales and won’t change the main body of the contract. A summary of this will appear at bottom along with the Schedule “A” which provides the specific licensing details (track/s names, license type, pricing) along with terms, project description and copy of complete negotiation transcript when used between you and the buyer.

Default contract reflects non-exclusive terms

The intial (default) wording for the License Grant (in 1.1) is non-exclusive to use the music. This is the most common kind of music library licensing, but you can easily change this to exclusive or semi-exclusive as needed, depending on your publishing and marketing plans.

If you plan to offer exclusive licensing, you should adjust your pricing (or rate card) accordingly, and mention it in the License Type description fields which you can manage on the Licensing Profile admin page in your account.

With this guide and a bit of practice, you’ll quickly be able to set up and deploy any kind of custom license contract needed to manage your music licensing sales.

CD Baby offers SoundCloud partnership feature

Recently CDbaby announced it’s partnership and automatic send of CDbaby music to Soundcloud. All it takes is for each CDbaby musician interested in this feature to log in to CDbaby and opt into having all, or most of their music appearing on Soundcloud.

The only problem is: They are available as full length streaming tracks. By this I mean, if it is a 4 minute song, the full 4 minutes will be displayed as a streaming track to any listener. The reason I call this a ‘problem’ is that full length streaming in the digital age is similar to giving away the file.

I’ve had fans of my music write politely to tell me they could ‘grab’ mp3s from the streaming audio on my web site. Since then, I’ve replaced them with either short audio clips, or audio watermarked tracks.The only scenario I can see this being useful for is if your doing your own direct licensing deal for someone’s film, or tv, or other media project, and you want specifically them to be able to listen through the tracks streaming online, but not everyone else. In this case, CDbaby has an interesting option, checkmark ‘Private’.

CD Baby’s own wording

See Cdbaby’s own wording:
“SoundCloud Private Tracks”

When you upload a track to SoundCloud, you have two options for how you want to share it with other users:

a) Public sharing means that anyone can listen to your track.

b) Private sharing is exclusive and means you have complete control over who has access to your tracks and who doesn’t.”

Private vs. retail sales purpose

But if you’re not using this for private purposes, I don’t think it’s going to help your music income if you publicly give away your full length streams of all the tracks that you also are attempting to sell elsewhere. People can just listen to the whole song online without buying it. Plus, at least in services like Spotify, Rhapsody and Pandora, the full stream plays generate money for the artists who own the content. But I don’t see anywhere that Soundcloud will pay anything for all the streams that will occur on a Soundcloud or CDbaby/Soundcloud account.

What will generate money for artists?

So, what will generate money for artists? It’s very simple. Make sure that:

1. Your music displayed on sites (which you could upload directly to Soundcloud and many other sites) is either 30, 60 or 90 second clips of audio, or is watermarked audio. ONLY stream full tracks of audio that you intentionally give away. For example: http://www.TheGiftMP3.com

2. Your music is iOS compatible. This means that it has code, such as Soundcloud or Bandcamp embedding code which works/displays well on Apple mobile devices; iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch. All Flash-only music players appear as a blank, functionless rectangle. Millions of people are using these devices to view web sites and check out music. It will take a while for all musicians, including myself, to transition our sites to this HTML5 code which is compatible with Apple devices.

3. Put iTunes and Amazonmp3 and/or your own shopping cart mp3 buy links close on the web page to your HTML5 music player.

4. View these music marketing tutorial videos in full screen high definition regarding increasing selling on iTunes, Amazonmp3 and Gumroad: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL598CA58D55016315
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Thanks Steven Cravis for contributing this well researched article complete with your advice, suggestions and link to related tutorial resources!

Note: If you are a music publisher involved in commercial licensing and would like to share an article with our community of readers and licensing buyers (on this blog!), please submit your proposed article (intro with link or text) via our contact form.  We’ll be happy to review your article and reply if feel it may be a good fit for the type of music publishing and licensing subjects we  cover.

Since this discussion involves the nature of Royalty Free music licensing practice, lets start with a summary of the main principals behind royalty free music. For complete details, please see this LicenseQuote article posted, Royalty Free Music – definition and common usage.

Summary of main principles behind royalty free music

The basic idea with Royalty Free music is that it helps buyers save money, and streamline much of the paperwork, calculation of fees, subsequent reporting and additional payments.

In terms of business structure and buyer convenience, it can be compared to Blanket Licensing, which gives music producers and buyers access to many songs (tracks/recordings) for single or multiple project uses. The difference is in the library’s license terms which may include some restrictions or limitations, but otherwise gives buyers access to one or more songs (as offered) at a flat-rate for use in one or multiple projects as needed.

So, even though Royalty Free Music is the commonly accepted term for the lifetime synchronization concept, this term is not an entirely accurate or standardized term. In the best case, its exact definition and intended usage can vary widely, but regardless there is always a fee paid (directly or indirectly) with the grant of any such music license.

Single-song licensing and beyond

When music licensing buyers only need one unique (specific) song from a publisher, the publisher will typically provide clearance and a license quote based on a standard single-song license price. This means the buyer intends to use a song (normally composition and master recording) on a one-time basis for a specific project. This suits many kinds of buyers, such as business or organization owners who only need to license music for the occasional, usually small, project.

If more (2, 3 or more) songs are needed for the same project under the same license type, the buyers can negotiate a custom multiple-song license with the publisher and usually get an attractive discount which the publisher offers based on the total number of songs involved.

On the other hand, there are licensing buyers who need access to a large variety of songs on a regular basis, such as full or part-time (professional) music supervisors, film editors, film/tv producers and various creative people working on commercial advertising and marketing projects.

Professional buyers need blanket licensing deals

These kinds of buyers are the most likely qualified to inquire about blanket licensing deals, which would give them access to any/all songs in a given publisher’s catalog. One popular approach with blanket licensing is that the licensing buyer (licensee) pays a fixed fee per term, such as 6 or 12 months, and thereby has access to use any or all songs in a publisher’s library. Usually the blanket license fee is based on the total size of the catalog, so a relatively small catalog of 500 songs would typically cost much less than a relatively larger catalog of 5,000 or 10,000 songs. But there are good and bad points (pros and cons) to offering unlimited access to a catalog based only on “x” catalog size at “y” price.

Pros – On the positive side, the licensing clients have the convenience of accessing any or all songs needed during the duration of the license term, which is typically 1 year, and can be renewed at end of each blanket license period.

Cons – On the down side, the buyers may NOT get full use of the license if the right songs are not found or used, plus the initial blanket license price may be high, especially for larger catalogs that offer many thousands of songs. If the buyer can’t find more songs/tracks that fit their project, they may be “stuck” sourcing other publishers to find those songs, which may cause them to spend beyond their yearly budget, etc.

Introducing a new subscription approach

To overcome some of these issues, there is yet another music licensing model which works similar to the current (more traditional) blanket licensing approach, while offering more flexible subscription terms and pricing. The first we’ve seen of this type is now offered by John Buckman’s new iLicenseMusic business website. The site offers high-end royalty free music licensing using a simple monthly subscription fee approach.

On the About page, you can see how the service and terms are being offered. By way of background, the catalog is owned and operated by the Magnatune, a consumer record label service, which currently has over 12,000 songs and is quickly targeting about 20,000 total tracks.

How it works

At iLicenseMusic.com, an $89 monthly fee gives commercial licensing buyers access to their entire catalog, where they can pick up to 10 (ten) songs per month to use in any way they like. The subscription is monthly and can be cancelled at any time with no continuing fees and no further commitment or other fees.

Buyers can listen and download any/all of the music online which provides buyers access to the whole run of the catalog to audition and select from.

The music used can be distributed with a client’s product and there are never any royalties to pay. This aspect implies that iLicenseMusic includes the performance fees with their license subscription terms.

The music comes directly from a selective (highly filtered) group of gigging musicians who write their own songs and get paid 50% of all iLicenseMusic licensing revenues, while getting to keep 100% of their own publishing.

The advantage of this subscription approach

What’s interesting about this subscription licensing approach is that the total size of a catalog does not directly bear on the price of the monthly subscription price. This is because the limit, in this case 10 songs per month, works regardless of the total size of the catalog. For example, it could work the same regardless if the catalog had 200, 500, 1,000 or any greater total number of songs.

In practice (which some of our own LicenseQuote publishing clients might consider), different licensing subscription plans could also be offered, based on the limit of songs used (placed into projects) instead of the total size of the catalog. For example, 5 songs/month, 10 songs/month, 15 songs/month, etc. Or it could be based on “x” songs per year at a certain price, which again, is not directly related to the total catalog size.

In my opinion, this approach makes it possible even for micro-size catalogs (with less then 200 songs/recordings) to offer a blanket subscription price based on maximum number of songs to be licensed in a give period, regardless of the catalog’s total size.

If you are a publisher using LicenseQuote

If you are a LicenseQuote publisher and would like to set up a custom Licensing Profile or License Type (in existing profile), you can do so on the Licensing Profile admin page in your account. There are help files to guide you, or you can tweak the existing Custom License type on the Pricing Matrix Edit page. You can also search our blog article with some key word like “custom license type” to read some tutorials on setting up custom license profiles, license types and related pricing matrix settings.

Optionally, you can also use the “Permit blanket download” feature on the Buyers admin page. For any Buyer listed, click the “Manage” link to open the store user dialog which lets you set permissions on a specific user (registered buyer) basis. We know that many of you are already using this option, but now you can consider a unique business approach to offering custom-tailored subscription pricing and services to any of your clients which typically need more than the basic single-song license.

If you have comments, questions of feedback, please use our LicenseQuote contact page. We look forward to  hearing from you!

This article points out some of the highlights of this discussion and provides links were you can learn more.

First, lets start with a brief definition of “ephemeral”, which means temporary, momentary or short-lived according to most dictionaries.

And though U.S. copyright law lets copyright owners retain the exclusive right to copy and exploit their work, the law does however allow for “temporary” use of copyrighted material without permission of the copyright owner under certain circumstances, hence the exemption known as “Ephemeral Recordings.”

In the production music business, this means that there are situations where a broadcaster can legally use music without having to pay a synchronization fee. Such usage is normally confined to live broadcast which uses incidental background music which was not produced (in advance) or pre-recorded for subsequent, scheduled broadcast.

For complete details, see Ron’s original article posted on his website:
Ephemeral Use and Production Music: Just the Facts- UPDATED

Summary (quote) of the article’s main points:

“In sum, the Ephemeral Recordings provision of the U.S. Copyright Act allows broadcasters to utilize music during a live broadcast, without permission of the copyright owner, as long as certain specific criteria are met.

However this exemption applies only to the initial broadcast of a program; any reruns, rebroadcasts or repurposing of the original content are subject to normal synchronization fees. Finally, the exemption applies only to broadcasters (not to studios, production houses or other entities) and may not apply in cases where pre-produced content is incorporated into a live broadcast.”

One of our members, Robert S., asked several questions:

“Do broadcasters sometimes try to “sneak in under the radar” with bumpers and other subtle uses of tracks? I’m thinking of instrumental intro’s to songs in which they use only four or eight bars and turn it into a loop that simply repeats. Sometimes the track is recognizable and sometimes it might be a vague, simple blues progression (but from a song that once had airplay). Or do they report such uses and it comes under a blanket licensing fee?”

Ron Mendelsohn answered:
“In our experience, broadcasters are generally good about reporting, whether it’s a full cue or a bumper. Whether this is a needledrop fee or part of a blanket depends on the deal you have with the broadcaster.”

Ron’s reply to a question about sync fees:
“Regarding sync fees, I can assure you that these are very much alive and well in the production music industry, and I would encourage you and everyone else to maintain the value of your music instead of giving it away.”

To read the complete article, follow the link (above) which goes to the Megatrax blog page. To read all discussion comments on the Music PAL group, follow the link at top. If you are not a member yet, please be sure to request membership. Inside the group, go to the “Search” page to search for the article by keywords such as “facts on ephemeral music use”, which is part of the discussion title. It will show up with the article title and link, which will take you directly to the Discussion as originally posted in August, 2012.

If  you have any questions or comments, you are welcome to post them on this Discussion for review from the rest of the members.

Key points for music licensing sales success:
1. There is no direct correlation between a publisher’s catalog size, total number of buyers and licensing sales success. Besides quality of music, it’s mostly about the business model, marketing, pricing, terms (see below) and customer service, which each publisher and library needs to direct and manage for themselves.

2. As far as exclusives vs. non-exclusives, there are many buyers that simply won’t use non-exclusives use of music from publishers or libraries. There are also many media networks that won’t use non-exclusives. The network policy can extend to all their properties which can include multiple cable and internet affiliates, etc. Many of these policies can also affect independent 3rd party production companies that produce shows for these networks.

3. Don’t under estimate the opportunities that an exclusive library has to leverage their catalog with content aggregators in secondary markets. So the market share that can be closed to non-exclusives can be farther reaching than might be anticipated.

4. One publisher shares: “I can honestly tell you that the only works of mine that are extremely under-performing are the ones that were unfortunate enough to land in a non-exclusive library.”

5. Basically the quality of content, market, and sales/marketing determine how many licensing buyers are attracted to any given publisher, catalog or licensing store.

6. Having the right piece of music for the right (corresponding) scene.

7. Having strong relationships with the clients. (Music supervisor, editor, licensing buyers, etc.)

8. Having a qualified sales staff that knows the catalog inside out. This means the sales person has heard all tracks in the catalog and knows everything about them. For example, if there are 3,000 tracks, he/she needs to have heard them and be familiar with each one. For smaller publishers, usually this is the owner or primary composer.

9. What is the company’s international footprint? Sub-publishers come into play in a big way when attracting buyers in foreign territories. Also, how many foreign territories is the catalog represented in and by who? Do the sub-publishers only collect or do they actively exploit?

10. A strong international presence with sub-publishers that are firmly entrenched in their market and exploit catalog greatly increases your customer base.

Conclusion:
As you can see, the factors and criteria are many, inter-related and complex. Though not meant to be comprehensive, this is a good and realistic list for any serious publisher to consider when first shaping their business model, pricing rate card, terms and customer service plans based on their catalog type, size, resources and unique situation.

Bottom line, each publisher with a unique catalog/library must create their own path to success for the marketing and licensing of their content.

There are several ways to ensure that your audio, tracks meta-data, licensing profiles, sales and other files are backed up. Besides overcoming human errors, this may come handy when migrating  to a new LicenseQuote account, doing routine backups or when wanting to share specific files or documents with a partner, staff  or other members on your team, etc.

Backing up specific file types

Audio files – If you select a Files Hosting included plan, the MP3 and WAV or AIF files you uploaded will reside in our Amazon S3 cloud storage service which are redundantly backed up there. And of course your source files should also be backed up on your local computer or external hard drive, so your audio files will be very safe.

Tracks meta data – On the Tracks/Songs admin page you can Export your songs meta data file and download them to your local computer. Regardless of the number of tracks in your catalog, it’s wise to occasionally  export & download your catalog as an additional backup.

Contracts and Receipts – On the Sold Licenses page you can download the Contracts and Receipts (if needed) for any previously sold licenses. For each license, click the “View” link which opens the Licensed Track page, then click the “Save” links (at bottom of page) under Licensing Contract and Receipt. This will open the download dialog.

Licensing Profiles – On the Pricing Matrix Edit page, for each of your Licensing Profiles, you can also Export the licensing profile pricing matrix. This way if you ever delete anything or something gets lost or corrupted, for any reason, you can easily Import your licensing pricing settings again.

Sales Reports – On the Sales Report admin page you can generate and download your sales report data. This a convenient way to get a summary of any of your previous sales reports. Filters include: brand, price, date, retail and license sales.

Buyer contact data – On the Buyers admin page you can export your list of registered store users. This includes all data the buyers used to register to your store including their name, title, address, phone, email address, website address, registration date, and Promotion/Referral code, if entered by the buyer.

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