I live in Seattle and unlike many people, I have never been a big music fan. I listen to some favorite stations on the radio — mostly classic rock, but that is about the extent of it. Growing up I never bought any record albums (dating myself) or CDs and now I don’t even download or stream any music. I mostly listen to what my wife has playing.
Recently there was an article in the Seattle Times about music that caught my attention titled, “Belltown’s Studio X, Witness to Some of Seattle’s Greatest Music Milestones, Makes Way for the Wrecking Ball.” It went on to talk about all the famous people and bands that have recorded or produced albums there like, Soundgarden’s “Superunknown,” Nirvana’s “In Utero,” Alice in Chains untitled “dog” album, R.E.M.’s “Automatic for the People,” Pearl Jam’s third album, “Vitalogy,” as well as parts of four others. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis have recorded here. So did Chance the Rapper, Death Cab for Cutie and the Dave Matthews Band.
Not being a big music fan, why was this article so interesting to me? A little more history — the studio was started by performer, Danny Kaye, in the 1970’s and some early acts included The Temptations, The Spinners, and singers like Dionne Warwick and Johnny Mathis. Elton John recorded an EP there. And Steve Miller recorded two of his biggest records, “Fly Like an Eagle” and “Book of Dreams” there.
In 1989 producer, Steve Lawson, bought the studio and called it Lawson Productions. In 1992, sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart wanted to build a studio in Seattle and Lawson agreed to partner with them and opened Bad Animals, which included three post production rooms. Five years later, the sisters sold the studio to Charlie Nordstrom, and the adjacent soundstage was turned into Studio X.
Again, not being a music fan, why was this interesting to me? Starting in 1994, we used the Bad Animals® studio to create original music soundtracks, sound effects and the audio editing for all the infomercials I produced from 1994 through 2013. One of the things the article did not mention were the huge commercial successes created there for products like, Sonicare, The George Foreman Grill and OxiClean.
A composer and sound engineer at Bad Animals, named Tom McGurk, created the music tracks for all the George Foreman infomercials, with over 100 million units sold, it’s the largest selling infomercial product of all time. I believe the music played a big part of that success. You can read about all the the marketing behind these products in my new book, “Building Billion Dollar Brands,” available on Amazon.
Great music tracks underlying direct response copy in all these shows helped produced spectacular sales results. Even though I’m not a big music fan in my personal life, I consider excellent music to be the secret weapon for making videos much more interesting for the viewer.
There are several ways to acquire good music for your videos. One of the cheapest and fastest is to use “Library” music that has already been composed. You try to match the music selections to the video you are creating. One that we use all the time is Premium Beat.
I didn’t do this for the 30 minute infomercials mentioned above — instead we used composers and created original soundtracks for these shows. The cost to do this was more expensive. For the Sonicare show we hired a composer in New York City that did all of the music for ABC television — his cost was about $20,000. But the usual price to compose original music is around $3,000 to $5,000 per 30 minute show. Two people that we still use today are Pat Rickey from Downpat Music and Bryan Miller from Sensory Overload Music. It sounds expensive, but the payback can be huge both in product sales from the success of the show, and also in music royalties that are generated from the repetitive play of the video and underlying music sound tracks.
A little known segment of the video production industry is about the collection of these music royalties from the governing bodies like BMI and ASCAP. It is a very complex system which I don’t understand, but simply know this — there are two sides to every piece of composed music: the writing and the publishing. As an agency we actually owned a music publishing business, so we could collect the publishing side of the royalties, the other side went to the composer. We then used an agent/lawyer who understood how to collect the royalties from the governing agencies. If you are a music composer and want to know more detail about collecting these royalties, you can go to CDBaby.com or just Google “Collecting Music Royalties.”. If you are a video produced and are looking to do this, contact one of the composers mentioned above they will help you collect royalties on any music they create for you. Again, there are other options you can find online as well.
Was it lucrative? In our best year as an agency we made over $200,000 in music publishing royalties alone. This is the same system that pays recording artists their fees and explains why music libraries like the one Michael Jackson owned sold for hundreds of millions of dollars.
How does this affect you? You can get these same royalties for music that are published for online videos on YouTube and other social media channels. Again, if you want to find out more there are many services that you can find online that will help you with this.
Probably one of my favorite stories when it comes to music and video production related to GoPro’s founder, Nick Woodman. If you have have ever watched GoPro videos one of the things they do best is have really cool music tracks running under the footage. It really enhances the energy and emotion you feel when watching them. When the company was starting, Nick did not have a lot of money to get original music done for all the videos that were being created. Instead he asked his college roommate to help him with the music and in return he would give him 10% of the company if it ever went public. Fast forward eight years — the company did go public and the 10% was worth over $229 million dollars! You can read a great article about this here: https://www.businessinsider.com/gopro-ceo-nick-woodman-returned-229-million-2015-5
When you are taping your next online video, look into creating original music. The extra time and expense can pay big dividends!