Do you really love your music? Really? Not just liking it, listening to it, digging it…… but REALLY loving it? Loving it to the point you care about it, you pitch it, you promote it and you make it easy for others to find and disover it. Do you love your music so much that you tag it?
Every catalogue owner is looking for new revenue, all the time – being dramatic it can be life or death. Everyone ‘loves’ their music (you need the energy to develop, pitch, nurture and curate it), yet time and again we come across catalogue owners who have not yet fully grasped the importance of organisation, information and meta data to this process. We believe there is a direct connection, certainly in licensing, between how big your love is, how good your meta data is and how much money you can make.
Imagine the scenario where you are selling to a broadcaster. These guys use a lot of music, day in, day out – they see lots of music that other people also have ‘loved’. They don’t have the luxury of time to select music through pure listening and development of their own mutual ‘love’ for your track, they just need to fit the brief and get to the heart of the matter – time is always of the essence. The difference between becoming a regular supplier and one off sale to them is your ability to fill their briefly quickly and accurately. If you can get them tracks that fill their required brief in minutes you will get the business. Whats more, one guess on who they will ring tomorrow when they are trying to put the next programme to bed (pardon the pun)?
This means that for each track you have you need to make sure that all the data that is associated with the track is 100% accurate, is comprehensive and makes that track really easy to find. Whilst systems such as ours can provide a very good tagging base for an entire catalogue, there is no replacement for manual love and care on your most important assets. As a basic you have to make sure all the MP3 tags fully describe the tracks as you would like it used. You need to enrich them with subjective emotions – love, christmas, sunny. Make them relevant. Think about how others will perceive your music. All to make it easier to find and easier for someone else to love. Lyrics can be a killer search item – grabbing the lyrics and making your music discoverable through such can be amazing (imagine a search: female vocal, 1970’s, mid-tempo, ‘love’ in the lyrics – could you do it?).
You also have to make sure that there is no rubbish in there from some previous process (we often see comments in MP3’s that ask you to call Bob in sales to license it – or worse referring to Bob who has left the company). Call it a hangover from previous relationships or the ex-girlfirend hanging around on Valentines day. It’s not going to get you extra business!
Sales 101 in Sync – make sure that every tag it right and the way you want to be seen. Love your music by loving the data. Love it and it’ll love you back. It’s going make the difference between you nailing a $10,000 sync or someone else because it was easy to catalogue and search their tracks.
