I have been selling royalty free music for more than 10 years now. I receive composer submissions and demos on a daily basis. I also see what sells and what customers are requesting everyday.
I don’t often give advise to composers but thought I would post some basic observations in case it is of any use to composer looking to get into the royalty free music industry.

1. Be Prolific
If you want to make a living at selling your production music the first thing you need is a large library of music.
The composers who have large catalogs on our sites earn the most and earn very consistently. 75-300 tracks and up is considered a large library.

2. Create edits and loops with your full length tracks.
The customers on our websites love the fact that we offer not only full length tracks but edits, loops, underscores and alternate takes. You can also sell the whole package of full length track, edits for a higher price than the full length track alone.
This coupled with a large library will practically guarantee steady sales (as long as the music is top quality of course).

A typical package would be:
Full length track 2 to 3 minutes
60 second edit
30 second edit
15 second edit
2 or 3 loops.

3. Write What You Know
Professional production music composers are a very versatile lot. They can write music in many styles and can do it convincingly. However many of the demos I receive are from composers who are trying to be all things to everybody, writing in as many styles as possible with the majority of the track coming across as mediocre. We pass on these types of demos 99% of the time.
If you are an excellent New Age Music composer don’t try your hand at Nu-Metal just to fill out your catalog, write more New Age Music instead. Write the music you love to write, not what you think will sell.

4. Add Something Real
In this day of laptop studios, garageband and reason it seems that everyone is now trying their hat at being a “composer”. I may be old skool but back in the day musicians used to practice their instruments for hours everyday and went to school to study harmony and composition. Today it seems that anyone who can download some free drum loops from the web calls themselves a composer.
All this to say when you compose try adding something real to your compositions. Instead of only relying on your loop library (the one that thousands of other people are using) try adding some real guitar parts, or a weird vocal part, or a sax, get your friend to play harmonica, pick up any simple percussion instrument, even a tambourine, and record it live. Give your standard loop library composition a soul by adding something real.

5. Melody
Just like in popular music melody plays a big factor in royalty free music. Sure there are lots of instances where you want the music to sit in the background and not attract too much attention but according to our sales stats music with a good, strong, uplifting melody outsells all other types of music.

6. Holiday Music
Would you like a Christmas bonus every year in your royalty free music paycheck? Then do Christmas and holiday music in whatever style your composition skills are strongest. A hip hop version of Jingle Bells, an ozzy osbourne version of The First Noel.
This would go for all types of public domain music, a Nu-Metal version of God Bless America, a jazz version of the Star Spangled Banner, drum n bass Auld Lang Syne, etc.
Our customers just love this kind of stuff.

7. Structure
Make sure to think about the listener when your are putting together the structure of your royalty free music tracks.

a. Don’t have a 2 minute intro before getting to the main melody. You need to grab the listener quickly, get to the point as soon as possible (within reason of course).

b. Give them an ending. No fades. Give them a proper ending with a chord and cymbals that ring out. This is very important for the ends of commercials and radio spots.

c. Give them a B section, also known as a bridge. You can do the same thing with a breakdown if it is dance music. You need to give the customer some variety in the track, something to play with in editing.

Hope this helps. Let me know what you think.
I’ll be posting more tips for royalty free music composers in the coming weeks.
-Mark

Partners In Rhyme is a US corporation but we are based in Barcelona, Spain. We are currently visiting family and friends and taking care of misc business in California. We are fortunate to be staying at a nice bungalow right on the beach at the end of Topanga Canyon Rd.
We have been catching up with some of our LA based composers while staying here.
Our first visitor was Bob Mann who I have known for almost 30 years now. He is the composer for our Auraspheres ambient music collection and a contributor to musicloops.com.

Mark and Bobby

Tonight we met Gayle Ellett and his wife who had just flown in from New Zealand. We had a wonderful chat with them over a bottle of wine. Gayle has been part of Partners In Rhyme for a very long time now and has been a steady contributor. His latest collections are Exotic Acoustic and Dreamscapes.

Mark and Gayle

www.freesoundeffectsandloops.com is a great sound effects site from another one of our contributers to the constantly growing royalty free sound effects collection at www.sound-effect.com.

Here’s a site I ran across from a potential PIR composer.
There are 17 cool sound effects for you to download on this page:

Free Sound Effects from Soundsage

There are also thousands of free PIR sound effects in the sound effects section of our website.

As of January 1st 2008 Partners In Rhyme has become incorporated to Partners In Rhyme, Inc.. We have also hired Carl Hebeler as our CFO, he will be taking of all financial matters concerning Partners In Rhyme, Inc.

January and February have been record breaking months in terms of sales for us. Nearly triple the revenue from the same time last year. Our composers are benefiting from this boom as well, our total composer payouts have been over $10,000 for each month with our highest paid composer earning over $3500 in a single month.

Our policy of not requiring our clients to report the use of music from our catalog to performing rights agencies and depending more on frequency of sales seems to be working. Our composers are actually making a living and their checks are bigger and more regular than any back-end payments might have been (had they been reported properly which is rarely the case).

If our clients want to submit cue sheets we of course supply them with all necessary information but we do not require it.

Looking forward to another great year for us at Partners In Rhyme, Inc. and for our roster of 38 (and growing) composers.

I ran across this site that has a list of free music tracks available for download to use in your commercial projects:

Free Music Tracks

Pretty cool stuff.

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You can also get free royalty free music on our Partners In Rhyme free music loops page here:

Free Music Loops

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One of our visitors mentioned our free music loops page in his blog here
Caddickisms
He also has links to other sources for free music and describes his experiences in using the different formats and types of free music.
Very enlightening.

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Partners In Rhyme is now actively looking for sound designers who have catalogs of sound effects that they would like to distribute through our network of websites.
We have been working very hard for last year on our www.sound-effect.com site and it is now working really well and has been moved to a new faster server due to the traffic load it has been receiving.
We have uploaded 5000 sound effects into the database and would like to hear from any sound designers who might be interested in contributing.
We offer a 60/40 (in favor of the contributor) non-exclusive deal.
Please contact me via the www.sound-effect.com contact page if you are interested.

As December comes to a close business usually slows down as people go on vacation or generally take a break from work. I know from our websites and from what our composers tell me that the last 1/2 of December is a bit of slow across the board.
This December however we have done very well with our royalty free Christmas music sales. I am sure other royalty free sites have a spike in their Christmas genre sales as well.
Below is a review of some of the sites and prices where you can purchase and download royalty free Christmas music, starting with ours.

Christmas Classics
This is a new collection for us and it sold really well this year. It is a large collection of Christmas music for producers who need more than just one holiday tune. The collection includes 24 tracks some with edits and loops. It comes with a variety of genres including hip hop, techno, traditional and classical.

Royalty Free Christmas Music
This is our standard collection of Christmas music at an affordable price of $29.95

If you only need one or two Christmas tracks our musicloops.com site has a wide variety from many different composers: Christmas and Holiday Music
Prices range from $14.95 to $39.95, edits and loops are available.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is basically just a plug for my friend’s website at
Nature Library Stock Footage.
You can download free video footage and check out the large library of beautiful nature footage including incredible time lapse shots.

I am a fairly heavy user of royalty free image sites with all the creating of product labels, websites, newsletters and mailings. For a very long time I used the subscription service www.clipart.com. They were a bit pricey and didn’t really have the variety I needed for our big publishing pushes. The other major royalty free image sites I looked at were way too expensive or had complex licensing agreements.
I somehow stumbled onto www.Dreamstime.com and gave them a go. I have been using them ever since and am very happy with the cost, the licensing, the quality and variety of images and the usability of the website (it takes a bit of getting used to but it’s great once you figure it out).
I also like that they have the same ethics as we do at www.partnersinrhyme.com, their catalog comes from photographers from all over the world and the profits are shared.
The clipart.com site is a Jupiter Images entity, more of a Big Brother / Microsoft type set up. I’d rather give my money to the struggling artist than the big corp.