Licensing your music is a marathon, not a race. In this episode, host Bree Noble’s guest is Jody Friedman, a seasoned and accomplished Music Supervisor and Songwriter/Producer. Jody talks with Bree about how you need to know your business if you want to succeed at it. Take the time to get the foundation of your career before you can enjoy the fun, sexy stuff. If you don’t know much about what you’re getting into, you won’t be able to protect yourself. Jody shares lessons he had to learn the hard way. You can avoid the difficult mistakes he experienced by listening to this episode. Tune in!

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Practical Tips On Licensing Your Music The Profitable Way With Jody Friedman

I’m excited to be here with Jody Friedman from License Your Music. Licensing music is such a hot topic. It’s been the hottest topic for the past few years, with a lot of my students. I get a lot of requests for information about that. This is not a thing I am an expert in, which is why I bring in other people. Jody is such a great person to talk to about this because he’s seen it from multiple angles. He’s not only an artist who has had music licensed. He’s also a music supervisor and understands the business of it.

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Jody, let them know a little bit about your background.

Thanks for having me, Bree. It’s good to be here. I started as a guitarist. When I was young, I learned to play guitar and sing. I was in a youth group. In my youth group, I became the regional song leader because I always loved entertaining as a kid. I was in and out of bands in college. I could have majored in music but I chose not to because I wanted to get paid for work so I majored in TV production, which was my other love was entertainment, film, and TV.

I came up in Clearwater, Florida and then I got a job at CNN in Atlanta out of college. That whole time I was working, I was scribbling lyrics on the back of scripts and rundowns, and I was working with the teleprompter. It was 2003 when American Idol Season 1 had just happened. CNN decided to replicate American Idol. They had something called CNN Idol.

It was CNN International Talent Search in 2003. A bunch of us entered and I won first prize. I wrote a song called the Prompter Song, which was an Adam Sandler stick type of song about working your way up the corporate ladder, being a prompter operator, an audio op, a TD, then a director. I got to perform it at the Tabernacle in Georgia in front of the entire company and all the executives. It’s probably about 3,000 people. It’s on YouTube. I put it out. It lives on.

If you search Jody Friedman Prompter Song, you will see me when I was much younger playing a song at the Tabernacle. The thing about the story and why I mentioned it is because, for me, at my core, I’m a songwriter. I started as a songwriter even before I was singing and performing. There’s such great power in having a great song. It all starts with the song. Even with licensing, you have to have a great song to get it placed. It doesn’t have to be a hit to get licensed, but it has to be a great song. It can’t just be garbage.

 

In my story, I wrote a song and it got me this grand prize, which the next day the president of CNN called me in his office and I had applied for a job in New York. He said, “I see you applied for this job in New York. How would you like to go?” I’m 22 years old, “Yes, please. I’d love to go to New York.” I got the job in New York and that was in January 2004. They brought a bunch of us up from CNN Atlanta to CNN New York to transition from the Penn Plaza Center to the new Time Warner Center.

I was a part of that team. I was an audio op. I was still gigging in New York. I was playing in shows, coffee shops, and bars. On my way to one of the shows, the executive producer of the show I was working on Nancy Grace, stopped me in the hall. We started talking about music. She said, “We need a song for this theme song for a segment in the show.” I went home and I threw about five loops and cut it in GarageBand. It became a theme song in the Nancy Grace Show. It ran for about two years. Not the theme, but one of the themes for one of the segments is called the All Points Bulletin theme.

The power of a song got me in a meeting with Jim Walton, the President. It got me to New York. The power of music that I had with this executive producer, who then said, “We need a song,” so I wrote them a song and it got on the show. Without the Prompter song, I would’ve never been here.

When that happened at CNN, I knew enough to know that there were some royalties I’d heard about. On my breaks at Time Warner Center, there was a Borders Bookstore. I would go to Borders and I started reading about publishing and licensing. I didn’t know until that time that you could make money from songs. I had no idea. I thought the only way to make it as a musician was to get signed to a record label, be touring, have thousands of fans, and sell merch.

That was eye-opening for me knowing that I can write songs, license them and make money. I didn’t get paid upfront for the CNN deal. It was a gratis deal because I worked there, but I did maintain my royalties. They tried to do a direct license. I luckily had read some books and I knew enough to say no. For those who don’t know, a direct license is when someone directly licenses your public performance royalties.

Your song doesn't have to be a hit to get licensed, but it has to be a great song. Click To Tweet

As a writer with ASCAP, BMI or SESAC, you can non-exclusively license those rights to a client if you want and say, “You don’t have to pay ASCAP instead, let’s do a direct license and you can pay me directly.” Luckily, I did because when I moved out West on the trip out, I got my royalty checks for the two years of themes that were running. It was about $30,000 in royalty check. That was how I started my licensing business with that money. It was a lot for my first royalty check.

The mistake I made was thinking that was going to happen every quarter. I thought, “I’ve got $30,000 from this theme. I’m going to get it next time.” That didn’t happen. When the next payment came, it was $9. I was calling ASCAP. I’m freaking out, “What’s going on?” Lynn over there was helpful and explained to me how it all works. I was already set up in LA at that point. I was freelancing on CNN’s Larry King as a stage manager.

While I was freelancing, I was starting my licensing business. I started meeting with music supervisors around town. After two years of setting up a shop, I started getting placements. Once you start getting placements, it spirals from there. It takes about two years for people to know that you’re a professional, sticking around, your music is good, and you have something to offer for them to say, “I recognize this person. They reached out to me two years ago. Let’s see what they have to offer.” It takes time. Nothing can replace time.

It can be very frustrating in those first two years to people to get started. It’s natural. It takes a while to become familiar in the business. That was how it began for me. It then spiraled out from there. In 2008, a friend of mine asked me to music supervise a film. He asked me to act in the film. I asked him if he needed a supervisor. He said yes. I got to supervise that film. Most supervisors do not also do licensing. They’re not also pitching. There’s probably about 5% of us that do.

When you reach out to supervisors, don’t assume that they’re looking for music to add to their catalog or pitch you because most of them are not. My career grew in tandem as a supervisor and a licensing person. That’s how it started. I got into music supervision, licensing, and I’ve been doing it for many years. It’s been a lot of fun. I’ve had a lot of trailers, ads, TV shows, films, and video games. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

 

Once you got that job as a supervisor for the first time, it is because you already knew the person and were already involved in the project. Was it hard to get your next supervising job? How do supervisors get jobs? I don’t know this.

The next two jobs came from a music editor that I met on that first job. She brought a bunch of us on with some other projects she had picked up. We worked as a team with the composer, the sound designer, and the music editor. I’ve worked 3 or 4 other jobs with the same team.

You want to bring in somebody that you can work with and all of that, but if one of you that has worked together before gets a job, they’ll probably ask them, who do you want to work with?

That’s what you hope for. Music and audio happen in post. Unfortunately, music supervision is typically an afterthought. It’s like, “We’ve got the film shot. Now we need to edit. Let’s go get that Coldplay song that was written into the script.” “How are we going to do that?” “We need some help. Let’s hire an attorney.” “No, they’re too expensive.”

I’ve heard about these music supervisors on what do they do. Let’s look into that. We get brought in to fix problems. If you know someone and you build that relationship or you meet someone who has a script, that’s the best time to get in as a supervisor because you can go through the script with them, make recommendations, and advise them like, “You should consider that a song is going to cost $1 million. You might want to choose something else in this scene.”

Sometimes, they’ll shoot scenes with the song in mind and it’s good to prevent what’s called temp love. They fall in love with the temporary track that they have in their mind. They’ve edited even they don’t know what it’s going to cost, so they just put it on there thinking it’s going to be $20,000 or something. It ends up being $200,000. It’s good to get in there early and help them with that.

Also, to advise on creative direction for the project. The part of supervising that I enjoy most is that part. Unfortunately, it’s not usually what I get to focus on. Probably 20% of the job is creative. A lot of it is clearance, coordination, reaching out to parties, negotiating, advising the producers and the directors on the budget. There’s some creative influence that we get to have, but it’s not our project. It’s the directors, producers, and the writer’s project. We’re serving them.

Licensing music is a marathon, not a race. Click To Tweet

Getting them to trust your musical sensibilities is sometimes a challenge. You have to be willing to adapt. That’s why it’s not always about the music that I love to listen to personally. It’s what works best for this project. You have to be versed in various genres and do critical listening, even if it’s something you would never listen to. I don’t go out of my way to listen to C-Pop or Bollywood music. It’s just not my jam, but I need to know what it is.

I need to study, understand it and know that market, so if I get a project, I know that, “This was like a 1970s spy-ish type of project, maybe some ’70s Turkish Anatolian funk might work here.” I didn’t know about that genre until I was on another project. I listened to it, and I’m like, “This is cool.” It’s almost like something Quentin Tarantino would put in a film. 1970s Turkish Anatolian funk. Check it out. It’s bad-ass.

This brings up a good point that I’m always making about licensing. People think, “My music is not a mainstream genre.” That makes a great deal of sense for licensing because a lot of times, if you watch shows, the choices that they make, first of all, are not songs you’ve ever heard before. They’re almost against hype as far as genre sometimes. You’re like, “What made them think to put this crooners style song here when people are being killed?” It works well. There are many opportunities for people that aren’t in “mainstream genres” when it comes to licensing.

The mainstream genres are mainstream for a reason. The people who do that are already in the mainstream and they’re doing it very well. If you make pop music and you are a mainstream artist then you better make sure that your masses are competitive on the same level as those that are on the radio and charts because that’s your competition. If you were making stuff that’s in a niche, sub-genre within a sub-genre, that’s fantastic because it’s hard to find those types of genres when you’re doing licensing.

That’s why I mentioned the ’70s Anatolian Funk, C-pop, J-pop, K-pop, or Celtic music, even rockabilly. There’s a lot of rockabillies out there, but you get a sub-genre of rockabilly, psychobilly, klezmer music, or something. There’s not a ton of that. Even Wikipedia genres and sub-genres, if you can identify with one of those and say, “I can make something like that. That’s something I could totally do.” You might be filling a niche that not a lot of people are viewing. If you can go there, do that, package your album in that way, market it to the production music community and the licensing community, I think you’d find great success.

I wanted to go back to something you said that you got those big royalty checks at first but then it took you about two years to get those royalties rolling. I did want to point out that’s true for most businesses. Musicians think that if they don’t get stuff coming in right away from this that they’re doing something wrong or they need to abandon it because it’s not working.

I would say in my business, where I teach musicians, marketing and business, it took a couple of years to get that traction and recurring income where you felt comfortable like this is an actual business and not just like an attempt at a business. Do you have any advice or things that artists can look at along the way to keep them motivated that this is going in the right direction, even if I haven’t made a lot of money yet, even if it’s been a year or two?

 

There are milestones you can look at. With licensing, it’s a marathon. It’s not a race. It does take a while. There are going to be many successes along the way in those two years. You want to be sure to recognize and celebrate those milestones. They could be as simple as getting a response from a supervisor. If they’re responding to you, that’s a success.

If you’ve got your website done, everything packaged, and you’ve created a product, that’s a win. If you’ve created a database of all the shows that are going on and who the supervisors are and their email addresses if you can find them, if you’ve set a goal in making five phone calls a month, whatever it is, those are little successes that are taking you closer and closer towards getting licensed.

I watched Shark Tank. They talk about that on there. It’s two years and if it’s not happening after that, they call it a hobby instead of a career. They’re sharks. That’s pretty extreme. They’re investors and they want it to go fast. I think two years is a good gauge. You have to be committed to the business that you’re starting and it is a business. You have to be al- in. You can’t be doing it five hours a week. That’s not going to cut it. I know that’s tricky because a lot of artists have day jobs. They can’t quit their day job and you shouldn’t quit your day job.

I freelanced while I started my business. I had 6 hours, 3 days a week. I had eighteen hours at CNN while I was starting my licensing business. I did that for a couple of years. I had other odd jobs that I could do from home, like blogging, HTML coding, and stuff. You’ve got to do that stuff to pay the bills, but you’ve also got to commit time to what you’re starting. It’s going to take time. It probably doesn’t help much. I am going to launch a quiz at some point on my platform that will help you figure out those steps. I’m working on that. Those milestones are part of the process.

That’s helpful to know it from people that have been through it, and you have to stack those small wins in order to stay motivated and to keep going. I’m glad you said don’t quit your day job because you can’t just go all in. How long did it take you to get those checks that you got from the Nancy Grace show? As soon as they licensed your song, you weren’t getting paid right away. How long does it take to filter through all the PROs and all royalty systems?

That was about one and a half or two years before I got that. Domestic payouts happen nine months later and then international payouts happen two years later. If you get your song in a show or in most projects now, you should see royalties within nine months of the cue sheets being submitted. That’s always different too.

I finished a Netflix film called There Someone Inside Your House. It’s a modern-day Scream. Netflix is handling the cue sheets. They should have submitted it. If there’s not a company like Netflix on board, it’s up to us as a supervisor to submit it, but we’ve got to make sure that we’ve gathered all the right data. Sometimes that doesn’t happen until after it airs, but that doesn’t mean you won’t get paid. It just means it gets submitted and then the PRO has to process it. They have some administrative things they have to go through. It’s usually nine months after it airs that you get paid.

As an artist, are we just supposed to trust that this is all getting done in the background? Should we be checking to make sure that whoever is supposed to submit the cue sheets? Is that annoying and we shouldn’t do that to the supervisors? We should assume they’re doing their job.

You have to take the time to get the foundation of your career before you can enjoy the fun, sexy stuff. Click To Tweet

That’s a fine line. If you’re a composer or a songwriter, you’re your publisher. It’s completely fair to ask for a copy of the cue sheet and I do that. I will not hassle supervisors and say, “Have you submitted this?” That’s their business. If they give me a copy and if I notice there’s something missing from my royalty statement, months down the line, it hasn’t been reported, with ASCAP anyway up to two years to go back and get paid retroactively. You do have to keep an eye on it. I have a database keeping track of all my placements and has the cue sheet been submitted? Yes or no.

You can find out if you log into your dashboard on BMI, ASCAP or SESAC. I think SESAC has that. They might not. You can find out if the cue sheet exists because it’ll show up in your account if it’s tied to your title. There have been instances where the wrong title gets submitted and I have to go back and correct the supervisor and say, “You submitted the title like this. That wasn’t the title. It’s this. I’m not going to get paid if you don’t submit the right title.” It is an important part of the process. As a publisher, you’re chasing down the pennies. It’s all about those fine details. That’s a big part of the administration.

This is why I know you’re a big proponent of artists who need to understand the business side of licensing. The sexy part is, let’s get our music in shows, connecting with supervisors, all of that, but there’s all this backend stuff that we have to be doing as artists and as our own publisher to make sure that this stuff is getting done. Do you want to go over just a little bit of that?

We’ve already touched on a lot of it, but we can talk about any of it because that’s what I did. I was an artist who didn’t understand the business and I thought, “If I’m going to find success in this, I need to treat it like a business.” I started learning about the business and then I got into the business. It’s like going to school before you start a career. You have to take the time to get that foundation before you can enjoy the fun, sexy stuff.

If you have that foundation, basic understanding copyright, PROs, cue sheets, what most favored nations are, or the difference between a record label and a music publisher, these are all things I teach about. If you don’t have that foundation, then other people that you interact with when you’re talking with them and they ask you questions, you’re not going to know how to answer them. Professionals like working with other professionals because when that happens, if I’m talking with an artist, I’ll know quickly if they know what they’re doing or not just by asking simple questions.

If they don’t, then I have to be extra cautious before signing them or licensing their music. I have to make sure they’re not misrepresenting themselves because when I’m supervising something and even when I’m signing them for my own company, I’m pitching the supervisors. I need to protect my clients. If those artists don’t know what they’re doing, I’m going to be very cautious, tread carefully, and ask a lot of questions.

Sometimes I ask questions beyond those questions based on what they answer. Usually, I can tell if someone is holding something back. There’s been a few instances where things have snuck through. It happens to all of us publishers and reps. We know how to handle it, but it definitely destroys any chances of that artist having a future relationship with me.

 

One artist, in particular, I won’t mention who forged a bunch of signatures for co-writers and a bunch of songs that I needed co-writer signatures on. Probably about 12 co-writers and he forged all of them. We signed the document with them. It was about a year and a half later. Luckily, we had registered some of the titles with the ASCAP. One of those co-writers reached out and said, “I’m wondering about this title.” She alerted me to it. She said, “I never signed that document.” I dug into it and found out that he had forged all these signatures.

Luckily, nothing had been placed yet. That could have been bad if something had got placed. If that co-writer retroactively wanted to take action, they could have taken action against the production company who would have taken me to court and I would have taken them to court. It’s important that you are protected. I’m not saying this to scare you. I’m saying it to encourage you to take the time to learn the business because it’s important.

I can see why they’d be in a position where they might be tempted to do that because they need the clearance. They want their song to be placed. How can artists who work with co-writers get in place what they need to be able to be the person who signs off on clearance, so they don’t have to go out, find these people and get the signatures later on? Is there a way that they can do that?

Not exactly. Some people have what’s called a split sheet in place, where you list your artists, your writers’ splits. I’ve even seen simple split sheets that say, “I have the right to pitch you and you have the right to pitch me.” Let’s say you and I co-wrote a song. We had a document that said, “We’re 50/50 writers. We recorded this master together. Jody has the right to pitch it for Bree and Bree has the right to pitch it for Jody and do deals.”

Two years go by, I’m pitching and you’re pitching. Let’s say I get a buy and I get placement. I say, “Bree, good news, we got a placement.” You say, “Jody, I didn’t tell you. I signed an exclusive publishing deal with Warner Chappell a month ago.” It’s a problem. There are all sorts of specifics that would need to go into that contract. What you’re essentially asking is how someone can be a non-exclusive rep for their co-writers? That’s what it is.

You’re either all-in with it or you’re not. I’ve run into this a few times, where someone’s straddling that line and I have to ask them, “Is that what you want to do? Do you want to rep other people or do you want to pitch yourself?” If you’re pitching yourself and you’re focused on just pitching yourself, then you got to pitch it based on what you control.

I’m pitching this song to you, I have 50% of the publishing and 100% on the master, and I’m friends with my co-writer. I can easily put you in touch. That is an acceptable pitch to a supervisor. There’s all this talk about it being one-stop. It has to be one-stop. It’s nice and easy when it’s one-stop, and sometimes, it’s required that it’s one stop but if it’s not, it’s not necessarily going to kill the deal. If the song is good enough, if the master is well-produced, the performance is amazing, and it works for the scene, then we’re going to ask you, “What’s the deal? Who do I need to go to declare it?”

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Could someone decide to be a rep like a licensing agent for themselves and others?

Sure, why not.

You’d still need the signatures of the writers, right?

Absolutely, if you’re starting a business as a rep, that’s what I did. I learned quickly that I was not going to get a lot of placements pitching my stuff. It’s folk singer-songwriter. It wasn’t the best-produced stuff. When I had meetings, they were saying, “I need this. I need that. Do you have that?” No, I guess I should get it. I love the business. I love doing it. You have to love it to do it. If you’re going to do it, you’ve got to meet with an attorney and get a contract drafted up to fit your business needs.

You’re going to have to get signatures from anything that you signed. Anybody who controls the master or the song, you’re going to need them to sign off on you being their rep, so that when you pitch to supervisors or anybody, your rights are protected that you have the right to work on their behalf and to represent that copyright on their behalf for placements.

I’m getting a lot of things clarified that I think I know, but it’s helpful to get them definitively answered. There is a lot of data involved. When we’re dealing with these songs and pitching, how do you recommend the artists keep track of this thing? Should they have a spreadsheet of all of their songs and where they’ve been pitched? How do you recommend that they administrate this in the background?

Excel is your best friend. Some people have one master spreadsheet. I have several. I have my registration info, which has the song title, the first names, the last names, which PRO they’re with, their IPI numbers, the percentage splits, and publisher name. I have a separate sheet. That’s my metadata sheet. It has anything from song title to mood genre, sub-genre, tempo, BPM, keywords, lyrics, and lyrical themes. There’s much metadata.

You can do it on Google Sheets if you need to or in Excel. It’s sortable by album number 1, 2, and 3. Assigning each song a code. That’s something I wish someone would’ve told me upfront to have catalog management as you’re building your catalog, even if it’s your own. It could be that your ISRC codes, ISWC codes or any type of code that’s unique. A unique identifier to that song is good to have from the get-go. You can put that into a spreadsheet and then sort by the code and it’ll organize it based on the date that you did it. You have all your metadata in one place and ready to go when someone asks for it.

I figured that Excel or a spreadsheet would be the best way. Some musicians’ eyes glaze over if you tell them to start a spreadsheet.

There’s software now that will auto-tag songs, but you still need to do it. If you don’t want to do it, get an intern. It’s a business. If you have a job to do in a spreadsheet, find an intern or get a virtual assistant at $7 an hour from the Philippines if you need to. It’s available. If it’s something that you don’t want to do, there are ways to delegate that responsibility where you can focus on the music.

 

The most important point is you need a centralized place for all of this because you’re going to have to be using this metadata all the time. You want to be able to go back, easily cut and paste, and all of that stuff from a centralized document, so you know everything that you have. Some people don’t even know all the songs that they have out there.

You have to get it organized, which brings me to thinking long-term. The songs that we make now, they’re not just for tomorrow. They’re for 40 or 50 years from now if we’re lucky. There’ll be vintage one day. Someone is going to ask you, “Do you have stems for those? Those are from 2021. I want that track in this project.” That could happen. You want to have all of that centralized in one place.

Do you recommend a certain way for people to catalog their different mixes and stems and stuff for each project?

I don’t tag my stems. I don’t have those in the spreadsheet. I have my mixes though, full mix, instrumental mix, bed mix, or 30-second version. I just tagged them as the next coded song. If it’s full mixes track 001_01, that’s track one, version one, then I’d have the instrumental as 001_02, so it’s track one.

Do you store all of that stuff in cloud-based storage like Dropbox or something?

I have a program called Soundminer, which is the standard for publishers and libraries. I have an iLok key that has to be plugged into USB for it to be activated and then you load it up. It’s about $1,000 for the software. It’s like iTunes for professionals. It’s catalog management. You can embed it directly in that program.

Do I use it for searching for music? No. I use it for cataloging it and embedding files. I use Apple Music for searching for files. If I build it in Soundminer, I can organize it and embed all of that information, the codes, the moods, and the genres are embedded onto the waves. That’s a solution. That’s not a requirement when you’re starting out, though.

Those files can get big. Also, if you have all the stems and everything, it’s useful to have some solution where you can store all that’s not on your computer. I’ve heard many of my students with stories about their computer getting hit by lightning or their studios’ computer hard drive broke or whatever and they never got all their stems. You want to make sure that you have all of your stuff in a place that you can always access.

You need backups of your backups. It’s part of the business. It’s an unfortunate part, but it’s part of your initial investment in yourself. I learned the hard way too. I lost a lot of files. Now I have solid-state drives. I’ve got 4 drives and 2 of them are 20-terabyte drives. One is rating to the other, backing up. That one 20-terabyte have all my files. It’s rating to the other. If that one dies, this one still lives on and I can just swap the drives out.

All my sample libraries are on a separate solid-state drive so that I can process them fast when I’m producing. Those are backing up also to that 20-terabyte. They’re cloned to the other 20-terabyte. It took me about a week to get it all dialed in, where I’m comfortable working day-to-day that if something did happen to one of my drives, I have a backup of that backup.

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There’s a company called Backblaze. It’s like $60 a year. You back up over the internet to Backblaze of everything however much you want. If you ever need it, you just call them up and say, “I need to pay that $150 to get all my data.” It’s important, especially when you have a large catalog, to have those files. Even if it isn’t a large catalog, even if it’s a ten-song album, it’s important to have backups of your backups.

I’m glad we talked about that. It’s very important because I’ve heard too many horror stories of this. It’s the worst. It’s so frustrating. Let’s talk about your upcoming Sync Fest. Do you want to tell a little bit about what that is?

We’re hosting an event it’s on November 8th, 2021 at 5:00 PM Pacific and it’s called Sync Fest. It’s going to be myself and two other supervisor friends of mine, Jennifer Smith from Rat Dance Party Music. Jennifer worked on projects like American Idol, Ellen, Lip Sync Battle, and Why Women Kill? She’s an overall bad-ass music supervisor. Brian Vickers, who’s worked for a small company called Disney. He’s worked on projects like Black Panther 2 and Avengers. He’s in the marketing department, so we’re going to talk about trailers and marketing with Brian.

We’re going to talk about all sorts of things. Ways that you can be in the top 1% of artists who break through and get heard by music supervisors. We’re going to talk about networking during the COVID era. The three things you need to go from 0 to 20-plus syncs in one year, covers, trailers, and originals. It’s going to be a lot of fun. We’re going to do a listening session and there are going to be two artists from everyone who registers that get selected. They’ll be contacted ahead of time to send their songs in. We’re going to do a live listening session during the event. We’ll have Q&A with everybody, some giveaways, and all sorts of fun stuff planned for Sync Fest.

You guys can sign up at ProfitableMusician.com/syncfest. I highly recommend you do that. You guys have read this and know how knowledgeable Jody is. He’s bringing in his very knowledgeable friends as well for this event, so go sign up. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you want to talk about as a parting idea to artists that are thinking about getting into licensing?

Have patience with yourself and when you get down on, “I haven’t had a placement yet,” remember to focus on the little things and set small attainable goal goals. Don’t shoot for the stars out the gate. It’s good to have that long-distance vision in mind where you’re heading, but it’s going to take little steps to get there. It’s good to accomplish those little steps first and celebrate them because if you’re not enjoying yourself, what’s the point?

I want to reiterate what I said. When you start working on something, if you’re working on it in earnest because you don’t have huge wins even in the first year, it doesn’t mean you’re not on the right track. It’s the case for most people in any business. As you said, have patience. It’s very important. Thank you much, Jody. I appreciate all that you’ve talked to us about and answering all my very nitpicky questions. I love being able to use this show to learn all the things that I don’t quite have dialed in yet.

This was a lot of fun for me, so thank you.

You’re welcome.

 

Important Links

• License Your Music
• ASCAP
• BMI
• SESAC
• Soundminer
• iLok
• Backblaze
• Rat Dance Party Music
• Brian Vickers
• ProfitableMusician.com/syncfest

 

About Jody Friedman

Jody Friedman is the founder of License Your Music, where his mission is to share with artists everything he knows from his many years working in Music Licensing. He’s licensed over 10,000 songs to all sorts of media, has grossed over 1.75M in license fees and over 500k in Royalties. Jody wears many hats in the business and brings many perspectives including songwriter, publisher, label owner and Music Supervisor for Film, TV and Ads.