Ok so if you’re here you’re probably a music supervisor, ad agency creative or producer, editor, marketer. The truth is anyone who knows people in those roles or has good ties in to companies that license music for advertising purposes can spend a little time with us here and see fantastic rewards…
The premise here is that we’re offering a way to licence premium music, from budding artists with a bonafied following, discovered quickly and licensed without complication. Working through this platform is the closest thing to dealing directly with the artist.
So we all know the deal with non-exclusive music licensing now its gathering traction as a viable if not the best way to discover new artists and create brand partnerships that explode the success of both artist and product with compounding effect. But historically there’s a whole host of negatives that come with that.
THE PROBLEM
Volume Artists:
Typically non exclusive catalogues are overrun, and sorting the wheat from the chaff becomes a task that outstrips the resources of the music company in question.
Finding Music:
The catalogue and review process is complicated. Each individual music company has their own “language” of music and performing a search for a specific genre often yields disappointing results.
Pile it High Sell it Cheap:
Rather than focusing on artist integrity and the creation of high quality music, driven by artist passion and inspiration, with some catalogues pressure is put on the artist to produce music covering a variety of bases with almost a factory style, meaning lack-lustre catalogues filling up with music that is “technically” answering a certain brief, while the heart and soul of the music just isn’t there.
Now lets look at the other side for a moment. Okay so you’ve got your major record labels, the big 4 (or three depending on how you look at it) Sony, Warner, Universal and the recently dissolved EMI, still trading in name. Now they all operate in pretty much the same way, and from their perspective it does make sense. An investment in time and money is made by the company in;
- Finding the artist (the job of the A&R dept.)
- Co-creating a brand for that artist, producing the music, producing promo videos, supporting in a variety of ways
- Promotion and marketing of that artist, PR releases, promo releases, media wrangling, you name it.
… so its understandable that by the time the artist has a recognised body of work, the company wants to see a high return on investment when it comes to using that music and indeed existing artist following to promote a product or brand. So the process of clearing the license for use on the advert becomes expensive and complicated as all interests are considered.
So just to summarise;
On the one hand you have Non-Exclusive licensing companies with fiddly catalogues, obviously not curated to the degree of a major label, no doubt some good gems in there but very difficult to find what you want. And no social proof. To your ear it may sound good, but is it going to vibe with the audience? Its a risk.
On the other hand you have established artists that cost a fortune and are already known by your audience. Great if your campaign is just tying into that established message as bargains roll across the screen to Slade’s “its christmassss” for the umpteenth time, but truly effective advertising with that “sit up and take notice to something new” quality depends on finding something truly original.
OUR SOLUTION:
We’re the worlds first community driven music company. We overcome the size capping problems of A &R and catalogue and review by using the power of crowdsourcing.
There’s a host of information on how exactly this works (did I mention we’re transparent) in the “I Know Music” section. But for now trust us to say the system averages hundreds of crowd sourced votes to achieve the same results as highly trained, and highly paid musicologists without the price tag of a major independent. Also because the music is “backed” by real people, the music tagging & review comes with a degree of social proof.
We started as a music company run by artists, for artists, so as such we put the quality of the music first and the power in the artists hands as to what they want to licence at (obviously with a good deal of real-world advice from seasoned music professionals) but the buck stops with the artist as to value, usage and exclusions. And we don’t belive in the factory line approach, but moreover it just won’t work here. Through our rating system, we’ve basically created our own economy, so if a song doesn’t have that X-factor, quite simply, no one in their right mind is going to “back” it
And in terms of finding the right music, for the first time we’ve taken an elemental approach to music categorisation. If you’re interested in the tech side of how this actually works they check out our “know music” video that breaks down the categorisation process. Suffice to say here that our method of seeing through the music to its core elements is a process born out of hundreds of years of combined experince in musicology and music supervision by industry proffesionals and allows the proverbial cream to float to the top, as it were.
But don’t take our work for it, get registered as a “desire music” user with us by following the link below this video and start searching straight away.We want to pair the right artist with your brand today ;)