JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Brian Austin Whitney Blog Wednesday, May 30th, 2007

Well, there's as much negative as positive with those sites you listed. Including:

1. They've driven the prices and value of music WAY WAY WAY down. When there's droves of people wanting to give it away, the hope of making some money from your music dims and dims.

2. With all these sites looking to really make money from stuff being hosted on their site rather than simply from licensing, they seem to welcome any level of crap into their library. As they swell and get clogged up with crap, the value of their site becomes pretty limited. The whole point of being a great licensing site is having an outstanding collection of music, with pre-cleared usage rights available, for a price that meets the needed budget. If you have to sort through loads of crap to get to something useful, the site is worthless. If the site itself directs a music supervisors towards a specific collection of songs over the others, then they are screwing the folks who paid to be on the site and get a shot. Bad situation all around.

3. Though I certainly like the idea of "non-exclusive" there may be a problem with it. If 10 different sites are all available to a music supervisor and he uses them and the same song is on there because there's no exclusivity, that puts the supervisor into a bad place. Does he just find the cheapest version of it? Does he support the company he likes most? And what does he do when one of the companies says "hey.. you heard that song on our site.. we should get the fees." Don't think that will happen? Think again. It IS happening and there are supervisors who will already refuse to work with non-exclusive sites. That's a problem because I wouldn't suggest anyone sign with an exclusive site unless they have a quick "out" for you and a good track record of placements. Too many cooks are spoiling this soup.

4. With all these folks in the game, the people who are actual experts in this field are being hurt and that means that the quality of the entire process is damaged. If everyone is selling t-shirts for next to nothing, and the quality is bad across most, and the people with the good quality ones go out of business.. who wins? Nobody.

5. With all these folks in the game, it's harder for people to vet out the scam artists and the honest folks. It's also a haven for incompetant idiots. We've already found some really unprofessional companies who clearly should not be in business. But with all this rush to sign up for all the services, people are forgetting to make careful decisions. You may find your music being used somewhere you didn't want, you may find your music being used for way below fair market value, you may find your music is being used and you never get paid at all. Some of these places close down and disappear before you can even go after them.

Food for thought.

Brian