I’m going to go back a few years to the beginning when I started putting MRDC tunes online. There was a site that I used, it was the original mp3.com. I have not seen a place that has been able to combine all the artist promotional tools with results like it since they sold mp3.com and completely ruined it. The chart system was fantastic, I received requests from real radio stations for my songs that at the time were #1 on one of the genre charts. Artists were paid $0.005 by mp3.com per stream as I remember. These days it’s up to Sound Exchange to track and collect it for you. This was before high speed Internet so yeah, 2000-2002. They had CD’s on demand like Amazon now does, no download store. Point I’m getting at was it worked for me. I was starting to make money. It all looked promising then poof! Gone, killed by Vivendi. Then sold to downoad.com. No longer artist friendly. 

MRDC came together a couple years after I had split with my then writing partner. I had been writing and recording music for visual media. My friends suggested I put out an album online and see what happens. I never intended to take the songs live. I had recorded all the tracks on my own. There was no band. So I conceived that I would be a solo Artist / Producer in this strange eclectic electronic landscape I had created, put the songs online and see if there was an audience. After all, at this time Moby was not touring, and neither had Enigma. Was the internet going to allow all the artists out there like me to post our songs, yes, be discovered, yes, earn a living, maybe. This blog is my journey thus far on what worked, what I’ve tried, and what I’m doing now living in maybeville.

After mp3.com was gone my revenue stream stopped. Fortunately I still had my day job and SOCAN was starting to send me checks for all the AV cues I had on TV. I decided that for the time I would stick with what really worked. Licensing music to television shows.

All new artists and bands out there recording tracks need to get registered with your local PRO such as SOCAN, BMI, ASCAP etc. This is the first step. When doing this also start your own publishing company and make sure it is registered as well. Next is building a relationship with people in the visual media arena such as video production and motion graphics houses. They all need tracks to go with what they are doing. Just look in the phone book and make some calls. Don’t call the big guns right away they might not need you. Call the little guys offer them a track for free, even if its just a corporate presentation. Providing the track free and ensuring you are in the credits at the end gets you out there. If people like the music this little guy will come back for more. These little guys want to advance their careers as well and if they like working with you they will take you with them, and eventually you will get on a TV production or commercial they are working on. At this point you should be paid something up front and you definitely want to collect an AV Cue sheet to send into your PRO. If no cue sheet is created (common in small video houses) then even if the production air’s on TV nothing will happen financially for you. Being an Indie you own 100% and the cue sheet should split 50% to the artist and 50% to your publishing Co. This is very important because in the USA you won’t get the publishers share of the royalty if no publisher is listed on the sheet. The USA uses a 100% + 100% system where here in Canada it’s a 50% + 50% system. So you could be outing yourself 50% of the royalty revenue owed to you. I’ve just recently found this one out the hard way. All of the Cue sheets from the early days and even some of the new ones were wrong because I did not have my publishing company set up and registered with SOCAN. Fortunately I have cut a deal with an Administrator to fix my catalog. I’ll be posting the results of this when I get them. It could take a full year to get corrected.

So can you make money off of your music ? Yes, licensing works once you get it rolling. It will pay you much more than the small amount you are going to get form the one download every 3 months from iTunes. I’m going to get into that much later though. 

This is an example of a group of people I worked with over time. At first I gave them my music free. Eventually it became huge.