I have lots of students who have had massive success doing this. And it’s all comes down to there’s no magic button. And it’s not like this secret. It’s a series of steps. There’s like five specific steps that it takes to do this. Now I broke it down into steps because it was easy to sort of understand and figure out why you know, how to go about doing this stuff. And the, the number one thing that, that you as an independent, musician in doing your thing, the number one thing that you need to, to have happen for you is you need to earn the trust of music supervisors.
And there’s two ways of doing that. You can earn your trust with music supervisors in two ways. Alright? So one is going the path of music, su going with licensing agents and publishers and Libraries and so on to get up there. And the other one is straight to the music supervisors. So I have a little white, I’ve got a whiteboard here, and I’m gonna give you an example, to, so show you the lay of the land in, in the sync world.
Like basically, you know, what it is, how it works, and, why you need to earn the trust of these people. Alright, gimme a sec. Just stretching my leg out here. You know, doing this on a boat is a lot of fun. It’s also a little challenging as you can see. Alright. Okay, so here’s the deal. Here’s the deal, alright, in this sink world, let’s start here.
You can see that right up to about there. Okay? Awesome. Alright, here we go. In the sink world, there are mountains, right? These are big mountains. Mountains, you know, that are, you can climb these mountains. They, they’re pretty mountains. They’ve got snow peaks on them there. now above these mountains or float is basically a cloud, okay? This cloud is cloud nine, okay?
You wanna get to cloud nine, that’s where you want to be. That’s, that’s the important part. Now, what is cloud nine? Cloud nine are where the music supervisors live. Music supervisors, as you know, are the people who basically help music get into TV and film, right? So they’re the people that make this happen. They’re the people that either clear the music or they’re the ones who get it out there and, you know, go find the music and then bring it to the show runners, bring it to the producers and the directors and so on.
Alright? So basically, this is where music supervisors live. This is where you want to go. This is where your music wants to go. Now, just because of physics, in this land of music supervision, the, these tops of the mountains are the closest to cloud nine. Now, who lives at the top of the mountains?
Who are the gurus? The top of the mountains? Well, they’re not gurus, but they’re people like labels. This’ll all make sense in a minute. By the way, labels, publishers and like licensing, licensing agents and libraries, okay? La we’ll call it. So essentially these are the people who are closest and like physics, as I was saying, with physics, lightning strikes the peaks of the mountains much easier than it strikes anywhere else.
Where do indie songwriters live? Where do you live? You live down here in the valley. You guys are the valley people now it’s really, really pretty down in the valley, it’s green. There’s rivers. It’s a really nice, it looks a little like a hobbit land down here. And these are a whole bunch of you down here, right? So you got two options, all right? Two options. One is you can try to climb the mountain and get yourself a label deal, right?
You can try to do that and try or maybe a publishing deal, or you can convince a licensing agent or a library. Let me emphasize a good licensing agent and a good library. Anybody can upload their music to a library. I’m sure you guys know that. You can go online, like right after this call, you can look up music library and you can like load it up there for like a non-exclusive deal. And your music will be in there with like a million other ones, right?
A million other songs, and you’re like a needle in a haystack. So that’s a no go. It’s gotta be a good library and a good licensing agent. So you can make that climb. Okay? There’s, you, you got a little backpack on and there you go. Oh, don’t forget your guitar. All right. So there you go. Heading up the mountain, trying to get a deal. You can totally do that. You can get up to a licensing agent, label publisher, get that deal. They can help you get to cloud nine.
to the music supervisors route number one, very difficult. It’s cold. It’s a hard climb. Not many people make it. Lots of people fall off and die. Okay? So that is the typical industry, traditional way that you would do it. The second way to do it to get up here is that you wanna start with these five steps that I told you. Now, you might be say asking yourself, well, why do I have to be a valley person? Why can’t I be up here? The problem is music supervisors don’t trust you.
They don’t trust you. There’s like, basically, they, they feel like, you are an unproven commodity. So the, a lot of things are like, for example, say you get, they place one of your songs. What if you’re like bass player or your friend, whoever comes outta the woodwork later and says, oh, I, I wrote part of that song. It wasn’t cleared correctly. You also don’t understand what needs to be in a song in terms of the writing, what works in sync, what doesn’t work.
There’s no hard and fast rules, but there’s certain things that work a lot better than other things. What about the production? What’s important in the production to get your music into TV and film? Well, I can just name a just a couple off the top of my head. A lot of people do things like cut and paste their chorus all the way through the song. There’s no build, there’s no change. Supervisors hate that. They like to be able to chop the song up and use it as build. You might have used horns in the wrong spot.
Horns are very high, mid centric. Get in the way of dialogue. They can’t use it. These are all different production things that you need to know when you’re trying to syn your music to TV and film that you know, how you’re gonna strike out without you even knowing it kind of thing. And then, you know, so anyway, it goes on and on and on about why the supervisors do not want to deal with you. They want to deal with labels, publishers, and licensing agents because they know they vetted the music ahead of time.
They’ve basically gone outta their way to collect the right music, vet it, and make sure that, that it is worthy of getting to cloud nine. So how do you earn their trust without going through these people, right? Well, you need to get to the top of the mountain. And those were the five steps that I was talking about. So the first step is targeting, all right, targeting now, so I don’t have to drop my whiteboard and pick it back up again.
Actually, I’m gonna screen share after this and show you the most basic way to target your music very well. and it’ll be an awesome like little homework assignment for you where you’ll be able to figure out what, where are your music, what category your music falls into, and what shows, for example, that your music will work in specific shows. Stick with me. Okay? So targeting is the, is the first stage targeting means.
What I just described is like, you’re taking your music, you’re figuring out where does, how do I get it in, into the right spot at the right time. So music supervisors are looking for people to help them do their job when they get a, you know, somebody submitting the music and they get so much music, right? Mostly from these people. And then a bunch of you guys, which often just go to the junk mail ’cause they don’t know you, they don’t trust you. So you, you know, they just kind of skip over it, right? That’s why it’s so hard now.
if you give them what they want, when they want it, you’re like in the game, right? And that is what targeting’s all about.
