If you’re a composer of royalty free music or a potential customer, there are a few things you need to know about these, what I call, music farms. I’m going to explain what they are and what the pros and cons of using them are and how they differ from other royalty free music sites.
Let’s take my site as a baseline. It is not a music farm. All the tracks on my site are written by me and the process is a slow one, so you won’t come here on day one and find X number of songs and then on day 10 find X plus 1,000 songs, or some other crazy number. The site grows gradually and naturally.
Also, when it comes to custom scores, I am a one man operation. I do all the writing and producing myself. So if I’m in the process of doing a job, you’ll have to wait until I am done with that job before I can get to yours.
That’s a basic, one man operation, royalty free music site.
Okay, so what’s a music farm, as I like to call them? These are sites that, while owned by one person, do not feature just one composer on their site. The largest music farms can feature hundreds if not thousands of composers. They are, in a word, massive.
With a music farm, you can very well go there on day one and the next day go there and find 1,000 more tracks uploaded. The reason for this is because the way these farms work is simple.
They have a link on their site where you apply to be a writer for them. You probably have to send them a sample of your work in some cases. Other sites don’t really care. They’ll take anybody.
So now you have this site with say 2,000 writers. If each one wrote, recorded and uploaded just one new song a day, that’s 2,000 more songs than what were on the site the day before.
Okay, so what are the pros and cons of such a site as they relate not only to the composer but to the potential customer. Let’s take it from the composer’s point of view first.
For the most part, these sites usually get a lot of traffic because they appear near the top of the search engines. That means that these composers have the potential to get a lot of exposure to their work. Notice I used the word potential. I will explain why shortly. This also means that they can sell a lot of songs or even get custom work. Add to that the fact that they don’t have to maintain their own web site like I do, you can see how on the surface this appears to be a pretty good deal.
The downside is this. Because these sites are so huge and because they have so many writers writing for them, the chance of any one writer getting exposure is slim. Let’s say the site has 2,000 writers and each month the site sells 10,000 songs. That means, on average, each writer sells about 5 songs a month. Some will sell more and some will sell less.
Let’s say each track sells for $20 and the writer’s cut is 70% with the site keeping 30%. That means the writer gets $14 per song. Multiply that by 5 and each writer gets, on average, about $70 per month. Certainly not enough to live on. In fact, the total income for the year comes out to less than $1,000.
That’s the problem with these music farms as far as the writers go. It’s really a no win proposition for them. There is too much competition. The site makes tons of money while each individual composer makes very little. If you have any marketing experience, I’m sure this situation sounds very familiar to you.
But what about the pros and cons as they apply to the person looking for music?
Well, on the plus side, there is a lot to choose from. Certainly a site like my own can’t possibly give you the amount of variety that a music farm can give you.
However, this has a huge downside which you will soon come to realize once you start actually going through these sites looking for something.
Because these sites are so huge, it takes an extremely long time to go through all these songs. And because of the nature of these music farms (composers not being really committed to them once they see how poor they are for income earning) the quality of a lot o the material is sub par. The tracks that you see pimped on the front page are the ones that have been cherry picked by the site itself. If you don’t find anything useful in them, not so much in quality but because they don’t fit the kind of music you’re looking for, you are then relegated to sifting through the mess. That can turn very discouraging, very fast.
On top of that, you’re supporting a site that is essentially exploiting its composers for pennies. They don’t care about any one composer’s welfare. All they care about is that there is enough music on the site to make the money they expect to make.
Again, this has to sound very familiar as it pertains to a lot of other businesses as well.
It is for these reasons that I would never join a music farm. I know that the chances of me earning any money through them are slim to none.
I would also never purchase royalty free music from one of these music farms because I don’t feel it’s fair the way they exploit their writers and don’t want to support their business model.
So there you have it, the pros and cons of music farms. Forgetting about the moral issue with them, I’m pretty sure that you’ll find that if you go to one and try to find something to use for your project that you’re going to come away from the experience quite unsatisfied.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim