Today's post is a guest post from Pat Finnegan who is one of the founders of the music library, Fliktrax.  I've worked with Pat and the Fliktrax team for a couple years now and have watched them grow from a small startup to a library that is starting to gain some serious traction in the industry.

Learn more about Fliktrax here:  http://www.fliktrax.com/ 

Ok, Pat, the floor is yours! 

"There you are,12 years old, with a brand new, candy apple red, electric guitar strapped around your meek shoulder. In just a few short hours you've managed to successfully master a Pete Townsend-esq arm windmill and produce what kind of resembles a G5 power chord. You are ready to conquer the world! All those girls that ignored you at the school dance, all those older kids that picked on you at recess, the teachers that made an example of you for day dreaming... they'll  see!! You may me a kid with limited virtuosic guitar skills now but before long, you'll be setting the world on fire with your explosive "Corporate Industrial" music placement!!!

 Cue obligatory record needle scratch.....

 Wait... What? Corporate Industrial music placement? You mean the fruits of your angst ridden, soul bearing, artistic tour de force are going to be a mere back drop to an internal training video? The videos that instruct new hires how to properly change the copier toner? This can't be right! You want your dream back...

Hello? Is this thing on?

It's safe to say that very few of us began our musical endeavors with the intention of one day writing jingle music for a mega appliance store, or to have our carefully crafted songs end up hawking vacuums. However anyone making a living as a working musician or composer can tell you that it takes invention,persistence and yes... compromise to survive. The notion of "selling out", whether that means playing a wedding gig or licensing an original track to be used in a commercial, can be a gut wrenching rite of passage that all of us have likely grappled with. Lofty aspirations are a necessary ingredient in any ambitious  person's life, be it creative or not, but sadly the landlord and credit card companies don't get paid in screenplays and independent EP's. It's a bitter pill but responsibilities aren't going to stop invading your "creative space" until they get what they want.

Enough of the doom and gloom eh? Let's flip this thing around and look at the positives to the notion of licensing your music to multimedia. The most obvious and immediate upside is that if you have a professional quality recordings, you already have a viable product. It's no secret that the music industry as we knew is slowly limping to its grave. Music licensing has become a replacement for some aspects of what record companies used to represent; allowing independent artists the chance to get their music and name heard. There are a myriad of ways to get your music out there to be considered for placement in everything from  TV show, films and documentaries to advertising, media presentations and web based programming.

For the record, I too had started out as a kid that was obsessed with becoming the next Neil Peart (drummer of Rush for those that just wrinkled their noses). It didn't happen, in case you were wondering, the guy just didn't' want to give up the job! Fortunately though, in addition to playing drums, I had also played piano and studied music theory and as years went on orchestration and composition. After college and a few years leading a double life as a session drummer and staff composer for a NYC production company, I got involved in a upstart music licensing company that also specialized in custom music and original scores.

When I say "got involved" I mean I became a 1/3 partner in a company that had nothing but a concept. I learned more than I ever thought I wanted to know .....

Read the full post here:

http://www.howtolicenseyourmusic.com/blog/music-licensing-placements-and-other-dirty-words

Happy Songwriting!
Aaron Davison