Now that I had built relationships locally I wondered if there was an online audience for licensing music. The idea was instead of finding fans to buy albums, maybe I could find more video production people on the internet that needed to license my music for their productions. The more avenues I could find to earn a living from music the less time I had to spend working another job. The first thing I thought of was music for flash presentations. So I set my site up with loops for Flash and had downloads for sale. This worked sort of. There was huge competition out there called “Royalty Free”. These libraries crossed over between film, tv, and the web. They had so much music there was no way I could even come close to competing with them. The killer was it is all buyout, royalty free. This kills licensing for real artists because when a production house uses this music they don’t have to fill out cue sheets etc, they pay once and its usually not more than $19.99 for a CD of about an hours worth of music. Their attitude is why would I pay you for each sync when I can get this so cheap & have multiple usage? Well that’s a bit insulting, if you’ve ever heard some of those tracks, to think they can’t tell the difference makes you wonder. So I stopped trying.
I continued with the relationships I had and started to offer custom scores for productions. This was one way I could compete and justify my fee. Licensing them something unique took what they were giving their clients to a new level.  This continued to work for me. Still I felt the need to find a replacement for mp3.com so I had been looking and trying things out. One of the things I tried was Magnatune. At the time I found them they were so new and cutting edge I had to submit some tracks. Long story short I signed up with them. There was quite a buzz around magnatune.com because of what they were doing. Letting the fans decide how much to pay the artists for their music. Giving 50% of all proceeds to the artists really worked and I was making money again just from the sheer traffic they were getting. They had online licensing that also worked and most of the money I made at Magnatune was from licensing the use of my songs to things like fashion shows, web presentations and video. The buzz lasted about a year or so, then slowly seemed to fizzle as the Internet got faster and P2P got more popular.

At the time there was a site starting to get attention but I didn’t see how it could really help me. Social media in its infancy was myspace.com. Good for exposure, definitely, hard to use absolutely. The site was and still is so slow I was convinced it wouldn’t last. I was wrong and I still don’t get it, every time I am there it doesn’t load something on the page I am trying to see.  I don’t use it much but I think you need to be there. It does show up in my logs as sending traffic to this site. To compare I was doing well on the myspace charts too, but a strange thing happened called “nothing”. Myspace would not replace mp3.com and neither would Magnatune things were changing fast. Still the most my music career had contributed to supporting my family was Licensing the use of my music to other people. The relationships I built before I started using the Internet were what was working best so far. I think online Licensing is a hard thing to crack. On a site with a huge catalog you are a small fish in a big sea. I'm not even sure if these sites are really working for anyone. There is no human contact. its much easier to talk to someone and explain the cues needed than to search aimlessly with keywords that the right song may not have listed.