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Music Licensing – How to Create Revenue With Your Music

photo of the 2006 Torino Olympic Flame

Olympic Flame in Torino 2006
photo credit: barninga

December 2005 – the Winter Olympics are approaching and the Austrian broadcasting corporation ORF wants to have some fresh tracks produced.

The 3 of us (my 2 co-producers and me) go to work. I do my teaching and then spend the remaining hours of my days producing tracks to meet the ridiculous deadline so that our material would end up in the roster for the broadcasting.

We get great feedback on our tracks, but when we watch the Olympics we don’t hear any of them.

Apparently something didn’t work as expected with the new upload/online access system the broadcasting corporation was testing and the reporting crews in the field ended up using tracks they already had on their local drives or on CDs.

What’s a setback like this when you are young, having fun, learning a lot and now your foot’s in the TV door?

Nothing, so we continue.

We produce more tracks, actually, a ton of tracks. The feedback gets more enthusiastic with each release as well.

We catch our tracks on TV. You turn on the telly and there’s a slow motion summary of the Kitzbühel ski race (arguably the biggest skiing event after an Olympic or World Championship race) and in the background there’s your music providing the sound track for the winner jumping down the Mausefalle.

Awesome.

So, we’ll be rolling in the dough come royalty payment time, right?

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No Album Yet – But Guitar Yoga Instead…

Guitar Yoga Level 1 banner

What’s Guitar Yoga? – Read on…

In my 2014 post I announced that the biggest goal I was going to work on this year was my album project.

One track/month would lead me to a finished album at the end of 2014.

Go ahead and ask how many tracks I’ve completed so far?
Yep, you guessed it – a big, fat ZERO.

It’s funny how quickly plans can change. Within 2 weeks of making my public announcement, my good friend Bernie (the best guitar student I never had / until recently “Tangerine Dream” guitarist) and I decided to resurrect an old project.

See, back in 2009 we already had worked on a video guitar course together with another friend. We shot more than 600 video clips in a green-screen studio we built ourselves. More than 800 people signed up for the course and there were articles in the Austrian press about us and our course.

Still, we put the project on ice after our friend got a great job offer he simply could not refuse.

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The Epic “1,000 Hours of Practice” Project

Picture of London-based guitarist Stuart Bahn in action

Stuart Bahn in action – © Brian Cottam

One of the unexpected awesome fringe benefits of running a site is that you get in touch with some really cool people. After publishing my initial 12 Great Android Apps for Musicians article I got contacted by guitarist Stuart Bahn.

Stuart wanted to know if I’d be willing to test an app that he had developed. I checked it out, it worked great (really useful for any improvising musician) and featured his app in my follow-up post More Great Android Apps for Musicians.

We stayed in contact via e-mail and recently Stuart mentioned that he had a project going on of 1,000 hours of practicing in a year. Initially I thought it was some sort of New Year’s resolution and the cynic in me immediately thought, “Yeah, right, let’s see how long you’ll be able to keep it up.”

But to my surprise, shame and delight (I’m always happy to see people succeed) I found out that it wasn’t something in the beginning stages, but rather a project close to the end.

I immediately asked Stuart if he’d be willing to answer some questions in some sort of interview for AdvancingMusician – since I find the topic of how to optimise practising fascinating.

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Improve Your Rhythm With GrooveMaster Pro

old mechanical metronome

A good ol’ metronome – © savayou

Back in the stone age of the pre-digital era when I started with piano lessons, a metronome was a weird device.

First you had to turn a key mechanism at the back of the device – like in a music box to wind it up. And there was a small weight attached to a pendulum where you could set the tempo by adjusting where the weight thingie would snap into place on that pendulum-like stick.

The lower you put the weight, the faster the metronome ticked.

And all those Italian terms engraved onto the backplate to help you set the tempo to the desired speed sounded so exotic and suave – Adagio, Andante, Allegro, Presto, etc…

Even as a kid I could appreciate the craftsmanship and the thought that went into this little contraption.

But once you had to practice with that damn thing, the relationship turned sour rather quickly. It had the annoying habit to change tempo on you. In easy passages it always got slower, while in difficult passages it increased the tempo “forcing” you to mess up.

A device constructed by the devil, indeed. 😉

But we all know that developing good timing is essential and well worth the pains you have to go through. So, a love/hate relationship with metronomes, is that what it boils down to?

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Where’s That Sound Again?

300 – Wolf Scene

Back in the good ol’ days when I was a kid and had to walk endless miles, fighting wolves and snow storms just to get to school, it was easy to find the sound you needed for your music project.

You put your microphone in front of the guitar amp or the piano going the acoustic route, or auditioned the whopping 32 presets of your sound module. Then you hit record on your 4-track tape recorder. After your first take you maybe quickly fiddled with a couple of knobs and buttons to shape the sound the way you needed.

There were limited options and this “forced” you quickly back to making music.

Today, you have multiple hard drives filled with Terrabytes of exquisite samples – the finest instruments played by the best musicians in awesome locations, recorded on incredible gear by talented engineers. All that awesomeness right at your fingertips – and what do you suffer through?

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