Today I’m gonna talk about how to get your music sy to TV and film,
So this is Marina Delray, by the way. So this is where all the boats go out to the ocean and everyone sails out in, in Santa Monica Bay and everything like that. So I hope you enjoy the, the back, the backdrop. Nice. Okay, awesome.
So, the bottom line is that there’s so many different ways that you can license your music. Â You can get your music into TV and film through music libraries.
 You can get, you know, get your music in through licensing agents. You can get it through going direct to music supervisors. You can go direct through, you know, those paid to pay to submit sites. There’s so many different avenues that people are getting synced. I have two students of mine just in the last couple of weeks, emailed me and Chris, Ben, awesome news. I get these emails regularly. I got synced. Thank you so much for the course, blah, blah, blah. And they did it two different ways.
One did it through a a site and another one did it through basically hitting up, music supervisors as I teach in my course. So the bottom line is that there are a number of different avenues, but some are better than others. Now,  from the outset, I need to make this really, really clear,  is that  the, the avenue that’s good for you is not necessarily good for everybody else. It all depends on a few things, and I’ll talk about that in one second here.
So essentially, when you’re trying to get your music out there,  because you have these choices, they all have their own merits. They all have their own ways that they connect with the industry. So, for example, if you’re someone who writes a lot of instrumental music and, maybe you’re not quite as, you know, self, you don’t have a big self-promotion thing going for you, like you gotta toot your own horn and stand out of the crowd, then you’re gonna find, you’re gonna figure out pretty fast that  you’re gonna have to go through, a library licensing agent who can do that for you, right?
So somebody like me, for example, like I I Â started off not really being able to, to do this. This was talking to people on a webinar like this and just talking like a radio DJ was completely foreign to me. I used to work in studios. I was quiet, you know, just a little bit about me to show you about the tooting your own horn and hopefully how you can do it conservatively if you stand by the truth. I was started off in Canada and I was an award-winning music, producer and, have five junos under my belt with seven nominations, was nominated for Engineer of the year in 2012.
And then, but shortly as sort of later on, just  after that, I really focused on sync for indie songwriters. So many songwriters were not getting their music, out there. You know, we’d work on records in the studio and they put the record out and nothing would happen. And I worked with the bigger stars, you know, who, who would get platinum records, you know, sales on radio, and they had like managers and labels and agents all working behind the scenes, helping them do that.
 So that is when I started teaching people about music licensing and showing them how to do it. I’m not a prolific writer, I didn’t do it myself, but I, I suddenly cracked the code on how to, how to go about doing that and started saying songwriter not that long ago, to scale it out to, to you guys. You know, like not just the people I work with in the studio. And it’s gone crazy gangbusters. It’s been amazing. We’ve got lots and lots of s from students, in all top networks and movies and stuff like that.
So it’s not rocket science. And I’m gonna talk about that a little bit later in the webinar. We’re gonna cover first the common ways to go. So all of that to say, if you’re not somebody like me, or like, I figured out how to sort of, you know, talk about myself, talk about trying to put things out there, is you might wanna go through a library or a licensing agent, right? Those are some of the ways that they can rep represent you in the industry. Now, if you are fine with, you know, really like hitting the pavement, branding yourself as a personality and putting yourself out there, it’s really not that hard to be, be hitting up the individual music supervisors.
Now, let’s start with, why don’t we start with the toughest nut first, let’s start with the, the thing I just said, music supervisors, and then we’ll go down the chain, okay? To libraries and licensing agents. So a lot of people think that when you are gonna pitch to music supervisors, like you’re gonna take your music and you’ve decided, I’m not just gonna throw it on SoundCloud.
I’m not just gonna put it out on, on online somewhere or in a pay to submit site and hope that someone discovers it, right? I’ve talked about this before. Those of you who were on the last webinar, hope is great in a lifeboat. So lo hope is awesome. you know, you can get you through, you’ve got no choice. You can’t, you can’t be proactive. You gotta sit in your boat, do the things you can to stay alive and hope can get you through right until the rescue boat comes.
It’s an awesome attribute. There’s nothing wrong with hope. It’s built into us for a reason. Â It has saved lives. And of course, those lives have gone on to have more children and instilled that hope in them and so on. So it is, is a great, great thing. It does not work in music licensing, and it does not work on anything that you need to be proactive with, right? So if somebody said, oh, I wanna make a million dollars in the next five years, which is not unrealistic at all, there’s a lot of ways to do it, right? Â We all know that you can get into, start a small business and build it.
You can get into real estate and build it. You can  so many ways. You can go to school and become like a top lawyer. You may not make a million in the, you know, you gotta go through school and school debt. But bottom line, there’s a bunch of ways of doing that.  And the, so if you’re talking about like, how to go about doing that, you’ve gotta know that there are certain ways that you, that you, that work and certain ways that don’t work, right? So if you set that goal for yourself, I want to get synced in TV and film this year, right?
So, and, and through music supervisors, there’s ways that work doing it and there’s ways that don’t work. I just talked about one of the biggest ways that don’t work, right? Like throwing your music up there and hoping to be discovered. Now, if you are sitting in SoundCloud hoping to be discovered, and you’re just hoping, it’s a lot like buying a lottery ticket, right? So tie that into making the million dollars in five years is like you can keep buying those lottery tickets. We all know what our odds are of doing that.
Now, guilty as charged. I bought in the odd lottery ticket, and I’ve been to Vegas  three times, drove through it twice. Went to a casino once and for fun, spent like 30 bucks. I mean, I literally was like, I’m gonna spend $30 and that’s it. And I, you know, got a little lucky, it was kind of fun, and then lost it, and that was the end of it. I did it for fun. I bought the lottery tickets for fun, right? It was just a, a lark. Like, it’s like, oh man, the, you know, it’s at whatever a  hundred, you know, however many millions of dollars.
Not quite a billion dollars yet, but however, millions of dollars. We’ve gotta buy a lottery ticket and just have fun with it. You don’t wanna depend on that. You want to be proactive. So that’s the thing about music supervisors. When you’re getting your music to music supervisors, Â you have to think of it in the same way of, I wanna make a million dollars in five years. How am I gonna do this? Â So the way to go about this is to make, make sure, number one, that you, get your music in front of them. That is of course, the most important part.
Now, there are ways to, to get your music in front of ’em and ways to not get your music in front of them. So let’s talk about the ways that you do not get your ways, your music in front of them. So you don’t do things like, I’m gonna just, there’s not, like there’s so many of them. I’m just gonna list the top, top, you know, few and stuff like that about how that works.  You’re not gonna want to do something like  send your music to, to a music supervisor and talk all about yourself,  right? The whole backstory about who you are, where you live, when you started music, why you wrote the song.
 Music supervisors don’t care. They don’t care. Now, let me explain that.  It’s not that they don’t care because they’re mean or bad people, it’s not that at all. Just imagine that you’re on a side of, like, you know, the glass or whatever, and, and people, you have so many people coming to you  and everybody thinks that they’re, they’re so important because you are one person.
So in your mind, you’re thinking about, so-and-so music supervisor, or maybe you count ’em on, you know, one or two hands or four hands and you can think of all the music supervisors you want to hit up that you can easily contain, that you can even know all their names. They get hit with thousands and thousands of song opportunities, Â just one supervisor, right? So that is, is just overwhelming to them. They don’t have any time to remember anyone’s name. They don’t have time to to know who’s who.
