Yes – performance royalties are what have real potential for long-time earning. You can’t earn a years salary on production libraries alone, but it can definitely be a great source of supplimental income. Of course it does require lots of work to produce great tracks in a variety of styles. More on that later in the series…

What it comes down to is – any income is better than no income, and letting your music work for you again and again over time is well-worth it.

At this expense, I really don’t care if I just make .14 cents, sometimes we can just take pride in watching our work whether on the big screen or small screen.

A self-fulfillment of sorts.

Some may think the money is big here but if you haven’t noticed there are a bunch of micro payment sites sprouting. I don’t really think you are going to make to much from charging a buck and taking 50% off that buck. So if you can make 1000 tracks that all sound great and willing to let it slave a gazillion times, then i guess you can make some spare change (note that even stock images don’t sell a gazillion times so you can imagine music). Some composers even think that their music may get picked up by a record lable or they may get a good gig or get signed, let me tell you, that almost rarely happens (remember I mentioned I own a popular site). I;ve seen this probably only twice in the 9 years I’ve runned the site.

Having said all that, if you don’t sell to micro sites, then maybe you can make some money with royalties from ascap, bmi etc. That is where the real moo is. I of course welcome as many music submissions (mind you only good music as they is way lot of crap out there and I get submission requests as many times as I blink a day) as that is how I grow my library to sell new music to others.

Another thing, some may feel that they can create a couple of tracks and let it sell for years, that is not the case. Some music do get outdated and most customers or libraries list by newest so older stuff (which returning customers have heard) get dunk down the line. So you really have to keep producing to make money. On an average, a composer under my list gets about 5 tracks sold a month. I have several other network sites too but some don’t even sell 10 tracks a month so it is a numbers game. I believe many sites are owned by a few players in this field as getting ranked is tough. My rants…