* The opportunity costs of recording are still too high. Even though it’s cheap and easy to lay down tracks, the focus and attention you need to produce something memorable takes lots of energy. If you’re going to get that focused for even a single day, why not lay down as many tracks as you can? They won’t all be perfect, but even a 3-song EP could get you three times as much revenue for the same day in the studio.
* The EP remains the minimum threshold for bargaining with taken buyers. Even though many fans still settle for buying one or two tracks online from a band they love, talent buyers want to hear how you might stretch a set together.
* A series of EPs builds a foundation for your branding and your merchandise strategy. A physical EP works more as a souvenir of a great show than as a recording. Craft an artifact with great packaging, and you’re building a mythology based on quality. String a few together in a short amount of time, and new fans will think you’re extremely accomplished.
* EPs are very spreadable. Lori has a habit of buying 5-6 EPs when we see a band age likes, show she can mail them out to her friends. For the same price as a major label album in a chain store, you can sell a bundle of EPs. It’s like getting paid to let your fans promote you.

As always, it’s important to balance frugality with craftmanship when planning your release. I never advise bands to go into debt when producing records, and I’m a fan of small runs (collectors’ editions!). Think about your release strategy as a 9-18 month timeline, so you always have something new to talk up, plus stuff you’re working on.

Does this all mean I think you shouldn’t work on an album. No. If that’s where your passion lies, and you have the songwriting and production chops to pull it off, go for it. Just remember that audiences’ biggest criticism of musicians over the past two decades has been the lack of depth on most albums. If you’re not ready to compete with the Arcade Fire, don’t sweat it. Remember that the Beatles were pretty much singles-oriented for the first 2/3 of their career, and they turned out okay.

Photo by Thomas Hawk, under Creative Commons License.

It dawns on me that the music business went through this trend a few decades early. Our leaderboards? Billboard, R&R, SoundScan…

Except now, thanks to digital distribution and market fragmentation, our scoreboards look a lot more like the back pages of the Wall Street Journal than the leaderboards at the Masters. Digital charts change daily, so does it mean the same to be “#1″ now as it did then? Plenty of strong companies have stock prices that will never land them a feature on CNBC, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to close.

If you’re going to start keeping score, try using some of the metrics that will really determine whether you get to keep making music for a living:

* Number of fans on your mailing list
* Number of tickets sold to your next gig
* Number of gigs on your upcoming calendar

And, unlike games where you’re competing against someone else, all you have to do to succeed is to keep beating your own high score.

Photo by Flickr user joyosity, under Creative Commons License

The other day, a colleague asked if I’d ever consider getting back into the label business. Remove the fact that I’m busy with about eight other projects, and I still struggled to come up with a clear way to express the kind of value I could add if I launched an indie label in 2012.

However, after rolling the idea around overnight, I settled on a few reasons why a tightly-run, artist-focused music label could still succeed in the 2010s. After all, I’d never counsel an artist to sell their master recordings (still a standard industry practice), which was the reason why we dismantled Handwritten. (At the time, securing those copyrights was the only way to keep a small label viable. We didn’t have the heart to go through with the deals on the table.)

1. Relieve artists of “promotion and distribution” duties. It doesn’t sound like much work to manage a CD Baby account, but all the fringe “stuff” involved in actually selling albums and MP3s can eat away at an artist’s creativity. A successful indie label handles all the e-commerce and wholesale fulfillment issues on an artist’s behalf, in a way that amplifies fan service.

2. Cultivate in-house production and session talent. Hearing John Oates talk about all the cross-pollination of Philly artists making cameos on each others’ records in the 60s and 70s reminded me that a handful of great labels still do this really well. Signing to an indie label today should feel like gaining admission to a society of peers, ready to help each other succeed. (See: Mumford & Sons.)

3. Curate a stream of “modal” releases. Saddle Creek probably does this better than any label right now, just as 4AD and Mammoth did in the 80s and 90s. A curator-driven label can create a meta-fanbase that carries support across multiple acts. Atlantic had this mojo in the 50s and 60s. Wouldn’t it be exciting if they found a way to get it back?

So if I actually lost my mind and launched a record label in the near future, I’d make sure it hit all three of those points. What else do you think would define the successful labels o tomorrow? Tell me in the comments.

Photo by Steve Hardy, under Creative Commons License.

In front of an audience of industry veterans and aspiring students from Temple’s communications program, Oates revealed some candid details about his perspective on the past, present, and future of the music business. Five moments stand out:

1. The album’s dying. Oates acknowledged that audiences no longer invest the time it takes to absorb a whole album, admitting that splitting up the album into two sides during the LP era made it easier for listeners to digest a string of connected songs. Even though that sounds discouraging artistically, the shift frees up musicians to focus on pouring their energy into recording powerful singles instead of weak and watered-down albums. A single bad track can lead to poor reviews and lackluster sales, while a string of “hot” EPs can build real audience support over time, Oates said.

2. Embrace support wherever you find it. Oates recalled how early support for Hall & Oates singles from R&B radio in Ohio spread across the nation, enabling them to become what he called “the first modern R&B crossover act.” A traditional music marketing campaign probably wouldn’t have targeted specialty radio this way, but this grassroots support gave them the foundation to keep making records.

3. Don’t spend too much money making a record. Oates joked that the entire budget for his album was under $30,000, and that half of that was spent on hotel rooms in Nashville. While Oates remarked that he’s in the desirable position of having the means to self-fund the recording, he reminded the audience that working out songs and arrangements in pre-production can save a significant amount of money compared to projects that “evolve” in the studio.

4. Mastery of your craft makes recording so much easier. On Mississippi Mile, Oates hired a producer to enforce a “Dogme 95″ recording style. (It’s not unlike what we used to do at World Cafe in the 90′s.) The rules: lay down the entire album in under a week, with no more than two takes on any track. Recruiting experienced engineers and musicians may have cost more “per hour,” but enabled the team to wrap up recording in less than a week.

5. Never surrender your master recordings. Oates warned emerging musicians in the audience to refrain from signing record deals that include copyright assignments. Although he intended to sell his new album “out of his trunk,” a chance meeting with an executive from Warner Nashville opened up a conversation about a new model for record labels. Taking “P&D” to a new level, Oates’ arrangement with Warner focuses the label’s efforts around promotion and distribution. The label fronts the cost of promoting the new album through its in-house team, but Oates retains ownership of his masters. When tracks start selling on Tuesday, both sides win.

Artists sometimes ask me why I focus my books on earning revenue from touring and merchandise sales, instead of from boosting album sales.

In response, let me introduce you to Arizona State University Economics and Finance major Hasan Siddiqui. The school’s newspaper just profiled the website he created, SongCatch.com. It’s a search engine that hunts down free MP3s from any artist you put into it. I clicked on the Google-esque search bar, typed in “The Beatles,” and pretty much the whole catalog came right up. Clicked on “Hey Jude,” and a perfect digital copy’s on my desktop. No torrents or P2P software, either. Just a straight MP3 download.

Forget the arguments around what’s “right,” what’s “legal,” or what’s “fair use.” From a user experience perspective, this is what young audiences have come to expect. A simple search box that lets them grab whatever they want, right now, for free:

“This is a positive because it is more convenient and you don’t have to download it like Limewire, which causes viruses,” business sophomore Daniel Cano said. Downloading the artists’ music is not going to devalue their success, Cano said.

With that attitude growing among young listeners, it’s becoming more important than ever to think about how to turn that initial interest into real, lasting, audience support.

Whether he likes it or not, Siddiqui’s going to end up getting schooled, sued, or worse by folks who really won’t appreciate the simplicity of his code. Hopefully, he’ll tell investigators that it’s just a “proof of concept,” and he uses this to get a sweet programming gig. However, if a college senior can do this in his spare time, how much longer can the music business hold off audience demand for easily found, free MP3s?

And are you going to build a revenue strategy for your own work based on trying to get money for something audiences clearly expect for free?

It’s hard enough to find music managers you can trust. Once you’re earning enough money from music to think about helping others, you’ve got to find managers from other disciplines who can carry out your mission without embarrassing you in the details.

That’s the frustration Madonna’s dealing with right now, having sacked the management team from her Raising Malawi charity. Madonna expressed interest in building a school for girls in a part of Africa where two-thirds of women lack secondary education. The initial grant for the project was enough for local managers to draw up blueprints and buy land, but fell short of actually building any facilities. After further review, accountants, auditors, and local activists realized that the management team was still able to afford new cars, luxurious office space, and a golf course membership.

Director Phillipe van den Bossche left the organization in October amid accusations of improper use of funds. Now, news reports indicate that Madonna and her manager will lead an interim oversight team until new, local directors can be found.

Even if you’re not the kind of artist who’s puling in enough revenue to support a $4 million charity campaign, you should still think about the personal and financial benefits of setting up a foundation, a trust, or at least a donation program. Just make sure you’re as authentic in your giving strategy as you are with other parts of your music career.

Most often, I see Christian artists facing some of the hardest ethical challenges related to giving. If you collect a love offering from a church gig, how much should you return to your host church? I’ve watched some artists divide that stack in half, some “tithe,” and some head out of town before the money’s even counted. Are you deducting expenses for clothes and shoes from your non-profit ministry because you intend to wear them at a church fundraiser, or are you just trying to hide income from the IRS?

Tell me about some of your own challenges in the comments.

Fred Wilson shares the story behind Airbnb (a great startup that I’ll write a full post about soon), especially the strategy the founders used to raise $25,000 in emergency funds to keep their business afloat.

Whenever someone tells me that they can’t figure out how to raise the first $25,000 they need to get their company started I stand up, walk over to the cereal box, and tell this story. It is a story of pure unadulterated hustle. And I love it.

The Airbnb folks talked a private label food maker to print up a few hundred boxes each of “Obama O’s” and “Cap’n McCain’s” cereal during the height of the 2008 presidential election.

Sometimes, the best fundraisers for your band have nothing at all to do with tickets or albums.

Instead of worrying about promising folks the world in a Kickstarter campaign, think about the things you and your bandmates can do right now that can score extra cash. Some of the best “side hustles” I’ve seen include:

• Bands that hosted “beef and beer” dinner events with tickets at $20-30 above the per person cost of catering.
• Bands that handle “small moves” on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, so they can play out on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.
• Singer/songwriters that design websites or write copy for small businesses.

Leaning on a “side hustle” lets you get a quick influx of cash when you need it, without leaning too hard on your emerging audience. Think of it as a transitional phase between giving up your day job and making music full time.

What kinds of side hustles have you seen, or are you trying? Tell me in the comments.

Techcrunch profiled Nimbit, a “band-to-fan” e-commerce platform that seems to roll up all the services from CDBaby, HostBaby, and Fanbridge into a single service. According to Rip Empson, the service has already rolled up $5 million in venture capital it plans to use to hire application developers and other key team members.

The company that launched Nimbit started out as a CD pressing and fulfillment service. Just as DiscMakers’ acquisition of CDBaby allowed the merged company to roll up a vertical solution for independent music production, promotion, and sales. By 2007, they were experimenting with viral media tools, like plug-in media players.

Today, it looks like they’re positioning themselves alongside Tunecore and Bandcamp as multi-platform band commerce enablers. Unlike those services, the company aims to offer one-stop shopping for both digital and physical goods. They even handle the shipping on merchandise like T-shirts and vinyl.

Nimbit offers a free plan that includes a branded widget that can help you sell your music on Facebook. Upgrade to the “Indie” plan for $12.95 per month, and you add basic e-mail list management, a merchandise store, and the ability to accept credit cards at your gigs. The “Pro” plan, aimed at music management agencies and indie labels, offers the ability to run campaigns for multiple artists.

• Nearly every venue contract sets revenue share based on a fixed set of ticket prices. (For instance: $100 for the front row, $50 in the orchestra, $25 in the balcony.)
• Once those tickets get printed, the secondary market determines their real value, no matter what anybody’s Attorney General says.
• Everybody knows this, and they use their own tricks to squeeze extra revenue from ticket sales. Artist management teams reserve blocks of premium tickets and quietly resell them to premium concert brokers. Box offices tack on “convenience charges” that would make airlines blush, none of which have to be shared with artists.

It’s super-frustrating when you try to buy tickets to a big show that sells out right away, only to see the same tickets pop up on StubHub and Craigslist for eight times their face value.

But it’s also super-frustrating when you’re a music management agency or a venue owner that has a struggling show on its hands. Bad scheduling or awkward booking could have put your artists in too-big of a venue on a night that knocks your core audience out of contention to fill the auditorium.

ScoreBig wants to solve this problem.

The folks behind that site envision a service that matches last-minute, casual buyers with cheap seats to concerts and sporting events. A decade ago, you fixed this by reaching out to radio promotions directors and offering blocks of comp tickets for station giveaways. You might not have the perfect audience, but your gig would look a lot more like a sold-out show. Its founder used to work for the NBA, where filling the nosebleed section could cost you some prime television dollars. (Fail to fill seats, and blackout provisions kick in.)

The challenge might not be as prevalent for music venues. I watched one venue owner erect curtains on tension rods to make their room about half its usual size, so as not to offend a national touring act who didn’t know their gig was only 50% sold. Other venues might drop in theatre seats or tables into the room to fill out the space.

Getting into a hot show is no problem if you’ve got plenty of money. But if you’re an artist manager or a musician concerned about making your gigs accessible to as many fans as possible, consider some neat alternatives to the status quo that don’t mean eroding the value of your tickets:

• Stagger your pre-sales. If you’re really reaching out to fans, you can set up waves of pre-sales at prices you know your market will bear. Posting a $200 VIP experience might not work on a generic Ticketmaster page, but it can absolutely work on your own website or in an announcement e-mail. Making VIP tickets available at a hyper-premium rewards true fans who’d be just as willing to pay a scalper for premium seats.
• Reward fans that bring friends. I went to a Good Old War gig last week with a great gimmick. Buy a block of four tickets for about a dollar more than buying just two. Live Nation’s been trying this out at a few venues across the country, and it works. We would have just bought five tickets, but ended up bringing three more folks to that gig who wouldn’t have come.
• Put everything into the auction. Someone, someday, is going to have the courage to try this. As I told Jay in our conversation: “some venue owner should just put their whole inventory up on StubHub and see what happens.” You’d have a HUGE spread from the most expensive ticket to the least. You’d probably even have some folks spending just $1 to get in. You’d make your accountant crazy. But you’d have a fully sold-out show and the artist wouldn’t have to surrender a cent to scalpers.

Whether you’re booking your own gigs or you’re relying on venues for help, it’s important to have these kinds of conversations. I’ve never met a talent buyer that wasn’t open to finding new ways to get a sold-out show in their house.

[ Image courtesy Flickr user nayrb7, under Creative Commons license. ]

Ian Ayres, author of Carrots and Sticks: Unlock the Power of Incentives to Get Things Done, chronicled this kind of behavior in a blog post for the New York Times. He lost a significant amount of weight in the last year, and he’s determined to keep it off.

Let’s contrast Ian’s experience with that of the typical independent musician.

If you’re still at the point of building up your perfect audience, it often feels like you’ve got nothing to lose. You’re probably shifting time and money from other parts of your life into your music business. Paying for rehearsal space just comes from the money you make at the day job, or maybe even the money your spouse or significant other makes at their day job. Woe upon you if you fail to pay that rehearsal space rent, by the way.

When you’re not making money, It’s easy to cop out with the excuse that you’re all about the music right now. Thinking that way forces you to cut corners and to make sacrifices that hold you back.

What if your job–even your life–depended on your ability to make money from your music right now?

Imagine you’re running your band as a real business, with cash flow, salaries, and bills that have to get processed every month. If you’re paying yourself just $10 an hour to “be a musician” part-time, that’s $1,000 a month you’ve got to cover. Otherwise, you’re going to start feeling pressure to earn that kind of money in a different job. You may not feel it now, but it’ll come–especially if you’re in a serious relationship.

In Grow Your Band’s Audience, I challenge readers to budget out the amount of money it would take from your music business to quit your day job. How much longer can you afford to shift that kind of cash from your other accounts before you admit you’re just bankrolling an expensive hobby? To make a living making music, you’ve got to find some revenue sources, like:

• Booking the twelve gigs a month it takes a typical independent act to generate a full-time salary.
• Orchestrating some house concerts to help you raise cash.
• Updating your merchandise regularly, so your fans have reasons to become repeat buyers.
• Setting up a support campaign to pay for the production of your next EP or album.
• Finding some patrons who are willing to foot the bill for your artistic awesomeness. (It worked for Beethoven.)

Just as Ian’s putting some major cash on the line to maintain his weight, this could be the year that you let yourself get motivated by the fear of losing money.

Start holding yourself accountable to a weekly or monthly “cash out” cycle. Pay yourself a basic part-time salary and clock the hours you’re working on your music. If your music business doesn’t have enough cash to pay the bills, you’d better rustle some up. Want to really motivate yourself? Pick a month when you’re going to pay your “salary” to a charity instead of yourself. That can really force you to focus on your revenue strategy.

Forcing yourself to post a profit every month helps you refocus your energy on what’s working. It also “puts the wolf at the door,” by floating the idea that you might not get to do this thing you love every month if you don’t find a way to pay for it. Otherwise, you’ll sink into financial debt (when you pay for gig expenses with credit cards) and emotional debt (when you tell your loved ones you can’t spend time with them, but you have nothing to show for your efforts).

Making money from your music isn’t selling out. It’s seeking validation from other people that enjoy what you do so much that they’re willing to sponsor you to make more. Embrace that idea, and you’ll discover plenty of ways you can accept financial support from an audience you’re ready to grow.

[ Image by Flickr user Zack McCarthy, used under Creative Commons license. ]

By the math in the article, the average “signed” musician makes $23.40 for every $1,000 of revenue earned by the label.

Think about it in terms of downloads. Get signed to a label, and sell 1,000 downloads in your first week of release. That’s still pretty respectable for most acts, and can even get you on some charts. With a coupon code, you can now have two pizzas delivered from Papa John’s.

So why bother? What can a record deal do for you that you can’t put together yourself?

hey whats the diffrence between royalties and publishing revenue..

please help……….love your site also

We’re actually talking about a few different kinds of ways that labels and artists make money, and Cash Money Records is a pretty interesting case study of how a company can grow from the ground up into a vertically integrated entertainment conglomerate.

First, let’s talk about royalties. Depending on your role in the recording, you could dip your hand in the cookie jar a few times:

• Mechanical royalties for writers and publishers (often called “The Publishing.”) Record labels have to pay a fixed fee every time a song gets pressed onto a CD or downloaded to a music player. That fee gets split between the writer and the publisher, usually 50/50. This fee gets paid out regardless of whether or not a project has turned a profit.
• Mechanical royalties for artists (which is what we often mean by “royalties.”) There’s no statutory fee paid for performers in the United States, though some musicians are fighting pretty hard to get this enacted here. A typical record deal will set a mechanical royalty per “unit,” and crafty negotiators will lobby for terms that base the amount on units “pressed” instead of units “delivered.” (With digital downloading so prevalent, though, it seems like this distinction is disappearing.) Most record deals withhold this amount to the artist until all expenses are cleared, which usually means never.
• Sync licensing. If your song lands in a commercial, film, or television show, everybody gets some cash. Land on something that gets replayed in reruns or sold on DVDs, and everybody can make a LOT of cash.
• Performing rights royalties for writers. As your song gets played on the radio, in clubs, or on streaming music services, you’ll enjoy a cut of a “royalty pool” administered by ASCAP, BMI, or SESAC. There’s no truly effective way to measure exactly what gets played where, so agencies sample radio stations, club playlists, and concert setlists to determine what seems “about right” from quarter to quarter. If you’re riding a Top 40 wave, expect a big check. And if you’re not maintstream, but you’re lucky enough to have a song on the radio during a sampling session, you’ll get a nice, little check.

Let’s say you’re a singer/songwriter, and you’ve got an album of ten original songs. The accounting’s pretty easy. Sell a million records, and you’ll bring in your half of the “publishing.” You may also have been clever enough to set yourself up as the “publisher” to collect the other half. So that’s about $100k right there. Your record company will probably find some way to tell you that you’re still “upside down” on the expenses of selling a million albums. That means they won’t pay you any additional royalties, but you’ll console yourself with a solid check once you’ve got a song on Grey’s Anatomy.

If you’re a high profile artist (or producer), you can even demand an advance against your future royalties. Let’s say I own a label and I want you on my roster so badly, I’m willing to give you your first $30 million up front. For instance, when R.E.M. signed their second deal with Warner Brothers, they got an $80 million advance. (It’s arguable that Warner Brothers lost that bet, with slumping record sales keeping the band from ever hitting that level on the second deal.)

Now, let’s look at Cash Money Records. They signed a deal with Universal Records that brought a whole lot of talent to that major label under an integrated production company. Instead of a single singer/songwriter, there’s a stable of artists, producers, and writers, essentially working on staff. By most accounts, the Williams Brothers that started the label used the Universal deal to cash out, leaving a business template in place that some folks like to compare to Motown Records. A factory-style setup, with a collective of artists signed to deals that give them exposure while depositing most of their signed-away royalties into the label’s accounts.

Even though publishing royalties are statutory, there’s nothing saying that you can’t sell or trade those payments away in exchange for a lump sum. A label can also act as a publisher, pulling that “publisher’s share” off the top. Although I don’t know the specifics of Cash Money’s deal with Universal, many imprint deals involve the larger label funneling mechanical royalties to the smaller label. The small label becomes a middleman, funneling royalties down from the major to artists and producers. A deal like this means Cash Money acts as if it were artist, publisher, and producer, collecting royalties and redistributing them to its talent based on their individual development deals.

In the 1990s, we often looked at deals like these as easy ways for labels to screw over artists. In the 2010s, we’re seeing artists run their own labels this way, actually maximizing their profits.

It’s a good time to run your own publishing company AND your own record label.

One of the interesting things that slipped by me when things were happening in real time: Jill Sobule set up a Kickstartr-style fundraising effort that pulled in $85,000 toward the production costs of her new album. Meanwhile, Public Enemy tried to launch a project on Sellaband with a $250,000 budget. They raised only about $75,000.

Those results say more about an audience’s expectation for what albums really cost to make than they do about overall fan support. It’s actually getting relatively easy to find 1,000 fans willing to give you $75 or $100 toward an album you haven’t made yet. Ten years ago, this would have been nearly impossible. (It also speaks to the idea that Jill’s fans understand that this is her income. Public Enemy’s fans might not feel like they need the money.)

However, fans have become more savvy about what it really takes to make an album. You can get relatively inexpensive gear and make your record at home, or you can travel out to a small town and hole up in an affordable recording studio for weeks at a time. If anybody should be worried, it’s the folks who own really expensive recording studios in places like New York and Los Angeles.

When fans foot the bill, a $50,000 producer’s fee is simply unacceptable. When fans foot the bill, they’re also expecting that about half of their donation is going to sustain you for the time you’ll be off the road, making the record. Take a year to make that record, and you can live off $35,000, as long as you can spend less than $40,000 to bring the record in on time.

Jill wrote on her blog about the accountability that fan involvement brought to the project, especially when she invited some of her supporters into the studio. It was a different experience from having meddling label executives and producers fiddling with the knobs and poking at her lyrics. When fans invest in you, it’s because they want more of what they already love, not because they’re concerned about what they might be able to market to today’s hottest demographic.

[ photo credit: "Warm and Happy," by Flickr user jurvetson, used under CC license. ]

The article’s centerpiece: Bon Jovi fans paid $1,875 each for a luxury event package that includes a leather bag, a “catered meal,” and a front row seat in a logo-embossed folding chair. You get to keep the chair. When you think about it, this is awesome if you’re the promoter: your audience pays you for the privilege of clearing folding chairs off their field at the end of a stadium gig.

I’ve written before about the power of variable pricing. It puts more profit into the hands of artists instead of into the pockets of scalpers. Set aside any bitterness you might have against large concert promoters. It’s not about whether Live Nation or AEG Live can justify charging $2,000 for a concert ticket. It’s about rising audience expectation about what they’re going to get for their money, even if you’re only talking about a $10 or $15 cover charge.

If you’re creating custom merch for each gig, or for each circuit of your never-ending tour, you’re creating added value for your fans. If you’re creating memorable experiences by hanging out at the bar before or after your gig, fans are much more likely to remember how you made sure they had fun. (Though, after nine bottles of Jager, John’s fans might not remember.)

[photo credit: Laser cut folding chairs, under CC]

It’s interesting to see how that discussion played out. Jampol, whose job is to protect the heritage of his legacy rock estates, cautioned acts against licensing just for a paycheck. Fans might think you’re cheapening your music if you accept the wrong deal.

Patsavas countered, as I would have, that today’s generation of music fans is a little different. After all, Of Montreal has an Outback Steakhouse ad, and they’re doing fine.

With anything you do, it’s important to maintain integrity and credibility. It’s also important to remember that reality shows and other entertainment programming (like the series that license from Pump Audio) have a tendency to come and go, while beloved albums hang around for decades. Nobody’s going to remember if your song was in “The Biggest Loser,” but the check you earned from that placement might have been the cash you needed to convince yourself to keep writing music.

(Remember, David Hooper is still enrolling folks into his new, hybrid tip-sheet/licensing course.)