Re: ul
Sanora Ngueyn
We have all wanted to have a killer song we love in one of our films or projects, that perfect song that makes the scene pop off the screen. When you begin to investigate how to get permission for the song you soon discover the maze of red tape and crap you need to deal with in order to have the song in your film.
From getting film festival rights to broadcast rights to VOD rights, Music Licensing is a headache and a half. Today on the show with have Chris Small, a music licensing professional here to demystified the ridiculous and antiquated process of licensing music for film. Chris breaks down the way to properly license music without falling into legal pitfalls.
Alex Ferrari 3:52
Like a 40 with Sun is like, Oh, you know, it's Yeah, it's rough. Yeah. 40s and 50s. It's not it's actually been a really cold winter for us. But again, everybody and then in the north are going to shut up Alex just shut
Alex Ferrari 4:10
So we're gonna talk today a bunch about the wonderful world of music licensing and how interesting of a process that is. But before we get into it, you you come to us from more of the music side as opposed to the film side. So how did you even start going down the road of being in the music side of the business?
Chris Small 4:32
Yeah, yes. So I actually I've been a musician pretty much my entire life. I started playing guitar when I was eight years old and grew up playing in bands, you know, doing the, the the rock thing and and I you know, I think probably was around 10th grade really started thinking Alright, somehow I have to turn this in this passion into Like a career, so I kind of knew that that was the direction I wanted to head down. So I ended up going to school here in Nashville, there was a, there's a school called Belmont University and I studied music business there. And as as are probably like, 99% of the hopeful artists that go to school at Belmont to get involved in the music industry, you know, you come in pretty naive and have no idea what you're doing. But I was fortunate enough after school to get a job at a record label. And it was one of the one of the record labels in town is actually a Christian subsidiary of Warner Music Group called Word entertainment. And I kind of cut my teeth there for the three years doing really not sexy things in business, like making sales, phone calls, and work in spreadsheets, and doing really not fun things. But I learned a lot and, and that was kind of my first, you know, my first foray into the business of music. And, you know, one thing led to another through my own personal music pursuits, and through connections that I had got involved in the music licensing space, and, and eventually, through my own music actually wound up at sound stripe. So that was an that was in 2016. And, and I was originally a composer on the site. And and that eventually led to an opportunity for me to exercise the the other part of my brain and and work on the business at soundstripe. So that's what I've been doing since 2016.
Alex Ferrari 6:41
Yeah, a lot of a lot of even artists in general, they always look at the the sexy part of the business and they never really look at, there's a lot more unsexy stuff in the film business in the music industry in whatever artistic endeavor you have. There's always a business side to it. There's always grunt work, there's always stuff that is just not what they show on TV.
Alex Ferrari 7:28
Can you discuss how a filmmaker normally has to license music for film or video because I know, me being a filmmaker. I've tried to license film, music for films. And, you know, even if I go after an obscure song, where it's, it was like, it was a hit back in the 50s. And nobody really knows about it. And my last name is in Tarantino. So it's a it's just a convoluted process. So please explain to the audience what that process is.
Chris Small 8:01
Oh, man, that is a that's an art. So this is a very complex answer. Or it's a really difficult thing. And I think that's why they're, there's so much like, disruption happening in that space right now. But usually, they're traditionally there are a few different ways that a filmmaker would go about licensing a song. And, you know, you may do it by connecting directly with a composer. And this is still I think, like a really viable solid way, especially for those kind of like a narrative base. People that are creating films that are, you know, maybe more dramatic or documentary or you know, anything like that, we are working directly with a composer to kind of score your piece. And that that usually, I think, would be everybody's choice, right? Like, they have an awesome friend who's an amazing musician, who understands the story and is super talented, all self contained, sits down next to them and just writes for the piece. But very few people know that friend, or have that connection, or have the budget to hire a composer or a team to sit down and do it. So that would be that would be step one. But outside of that, you know, you if you're trying to license a song that's like a top 40 track, like a Katy Perry tune or something. The challenge is that not only is that like, just super expensive, but it's very come complicated to acquire the license for that you got to contact a publisher, negotiate a deal, half the time that publisher does not care who you are. And if you're, you know, if you're an independent, or somebody that's like, just now working on your craft, like, forget it, that's gonna be that's gonna be a tough game. So what most filmmakers do that have any type of budget is they hire a music supervisor. And this is somebody who kind of already has those connections. This is somebody who can tap into their network of publishers or their Network of Libraries and actually negotiate those fees, negotiate the licenses It's a very arduous, and frankly not sexy job. And these music supervisors are really difficult to find. And, and, and kind of expensive. So there's that that's the, that's the way it's operated traditionally, and I think, up until recently, maybe 2010 2012, we started seeing really high quality music, being licensed online for the first time. And, you know, stock music or music libraries kind of have this, this reputation of just being terrible quality music,
Chris Small 10:37
It's just so and, and rightly so, because most of them were, and most of them still are, unfortunately, because it's very difficult to kind of curate a library of music that is that actually has heart. It's actually real, that's made by artists who are like, passionate about what they're doing, and not just trying to make money. So there were a couple of companies that kind of that kind of jumped into that, you know, you can you can music online, and the highly curated for intentional, you know, quality control, but also it's accessible to filmmakers. And, you know, I think what happened in that time period was the model, what that looked like, and how relationship between the company and the artist and the company and the filmmaker was still getting ironed out and soundstripe enter the picture in 2016, and really said, you know, with, with a lot of this content that's being produced, people need access to high quality music, and they need access to it in volume. And so that's really kind of where I think things are headed now is the paradigm shifted to be able to provide fordable quality music for film?
Alex Ferrari 11:53
Yeah, it's, I've noticed that myself just trying to get songs and I have that I have that relationship with a composer who I do call and every time I call him, he's just like, Oh, god, it's Alex. Again, he's gonna want me to do something for like, next to nothing. But he is a friend that I do call. And, and I do have occasionally been able to license a song by calling the artists directly. Like for my latest film, I called an artist directly because it was a very, very specific kind of song. But it's, you know, it's still a process. And it took me weeks to hunt people down and get it, it is a complex process. Can you also talk a little bit about the different rights that filmmakers need? Because a lot of filmmakers just think, oh, I'll just get the rights, you know, just license something, and I'm good forever. And whatever I want to do with it. Like, no, it doesn't technically work that way. Correct?
Chris Small 12:43
This is it? Yeah. So it's a complex scenario. But you know, when you need a piece of music, what you actually what you need is a synchronization license, and that allows you to take that piece of music and associate it with film with video. And that license, you know, grants you the right to, to marry that piece of music, that, that composition to picture and, and that's that's really, you know,the the most important license that you need, and it's, it's required for every piece of music that you want to put in your film. That's not in public domain.
Alex Ferrari 13:21
And then the public domain is a whole other bag of tricks that we don't want to get into at the moment. That's a whole other world of crap. Don't want to jump into but yeah, but the synchronized license for a film, it works, I completely understand what you're saying. But there's also different styles, like different levels of licenses. So like, you can get the film festival rights. You can get theatrical rights, you can get VOD rights, you can get trailer rights to use it for the trailer. And and then how long are those rights associated with it? Sometimes, you know, I'm actually talking, I'm actually trying to license something for ifH. tv. And it's an old show. And the guys were like, Look, when we did this back in the 90s, we didn't think about VOD, so we technically don't have the music rights for that. I'm like, we'll pull the damn music off, man. But yeah, so it is a complex thing. But that's something that a filmmaker shouldn't need to really look after. Like, don't just get the film festival rights, I think, do you agree? Like that's kind of foolish, if you're going to get up get them for the whole thing, at least. Yeah.