Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Music license quote quest part 3

The quest to wrestle a price quote from the music industry for a license to two Pink Floyd songs continues. I got an email today from one of the two companies involved. I was actually somewhat surprised that they got back to me at all. They said they needed more information, including the time period and the territory, which I don't know because the film I want to use the songs in isn't even in production, let alone in distribution.

I sent back a response asking for quotes for various permuations of periods and territories. Haven't heard back.

Still waiting to hear anything from the first company.

If anyone in the music industry is reading this and wondering why your business is in the toilet, it's very simple: your problem isn't pirating, your problem is that you treat your customers like shit. What could you possibly be doing that makes it take days or even weeks to generate a price quote to use a song in a movie? It's not like I'm the first one to do this. And even if there really is a reason for it to take this long, how hard would it be to shoot me an email saying, "Sorry this is taking so long, we have to do X and Y and Z, expect to hear from us in N days."

I can't help but wonder what it is the industry is hoping to accomplish by making it this hard to do business with them.

2 comments:

Michael Borges said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Michael Borges said...

Ron,
Great post and example of what's often gone wrong with the big corporate music industry. Good news though! There are alternatives and one of the best upcoming ones will be LicenseQuote.com which you can check out here:
http://www.licensequote.com

This will help solve the problem by giving both major and indie labels (i.e. artists & publishers) a means to provide instant quotes for any songs they want to license from their websites, email, MySpace or other pages.

The price quotes will be based on standard usage scenarios at industry average (online) pricing, though some publishers may offer discounts or license at slightly higher (premium) prices depending on the mix of songs in their catalog.

You can also see an intro video and learn more from this site:
http://www.musiclicensingcalculator.com

Things are changing!
Michael Borges c/o LicenseQuote.com
http://www.michaelborges.com/products.html