Are you missing the long-tail?

First of all, what’s the long tail?

In the digital age, there’s a different, often overlooked side of music licensing, the long tail. While traditionally sync has been defined by high-profile, multi-million dollar deals, there are thousands of micro-license deals for smaller projects such as podcasts, social media, or internal corporate projects worth anywhere from $25 to $100. While these deals might not be as shiny and coveted, these opportunities represent a large part of an untapped market for low-value sync licenses that just isn’t being fulfilled.

Why are they being missed?

Traditionally, the cost of human resources and administrative overhead makes pursuing these small deals financially unviable. By the time a query is received, a call takes place, a discussion is had, a competitive pitch is won, a license is produced and then the music is delivered, then all potential margin in the license is no doubt gone. However, technology can be transformative in this area. If you have the rights to do so, you can automate this whole process, eliminating any ‘cost’ in the low-level license and thereby ensuring that anything received is pretty much immediate profit for the licensor.

How does this work? In the media world it’s called sweating the long-tail. Basically you make more and more money by selling the same asset over and over, also know as leveraging your assets. You own it,  so your costs are pretty fixed, and any incremental money made from it doesn’t cost you more, it’s just pure profit.

So how does technology help you sweat the long-tail?

Simply put, you can create an e-commerce model for licensing your music. These can vary per artist, per track, client, audience, it all depends on how detailed or simple you want to be. The core of this model is the dynamic pricing matrix. This pre-determined system can be configured to instantly generate a license fee based on a variety of factors, for example:

• Usage: Internal corporate video vs. social media post vs. independent film festival submission.
• Duration: 15 seconds vs. 30 seconds vs. 1 minute.
• Geography: Single-country use vs. worldwide.
• Audience Size: Internal team of 100 vs. a social media following of 5,000.

In this way, when someone requests a track online for, say, “corporate presentation to internal audience of 100, single use” the system queries the pricing matrix and says – “great, that’s $25” – credit card in, license delivered, MP3/WAV delivered, cash received, tracking and documentation internally automatically sorted. A $25 transaction straight to the bottom-line, net cost $0.

The Strategic Impact

If you have the rights to do this with a catalogue then it seems only right to have the option (i.e. income stream) to open the way for potential clients to have this “self-serve” option. (Quick disclaimer: while this works really well for the micro-licensing world, we don’t really believe high-value sync should be handled this way, for many reasons, but generally they’re also much more personal in nature.)

While one or two of these deals may seem insignificant, their power lies in numbers! Think of a music catalogue generating hundreds, or even thousands, of these micro-licenses each year. This high-volume, low-cost strategy creates a significant new revenue stream that diversifies your income and improves your overall profitability.

The long tail of sync licensing isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about market capture. It’s about serving a new generation of content creators who are desperate for legal, high-quality music and are ready to pay for it. With the right technology in place, you can finally connect your catalog with this huge, untapped market and unlock its full value.