Interviewed live during TAXI’s Road Rally, 2021
By Michael Laskow
Hello, Deano. How are you, buddy?
I am doing good. Thanks for having me here.
Thanks for doing this! Who better to talk to about production music libraries than you? I want to give the folks a little background on you before we get going.
Dean Krippaehne is a veteran songwriter, musician, author, artist, music producer, and highly successful TAXI member. His music has been heard on hundreds of TV shows, films, and new media around the world—probably thousands by now. He has also earned gold and platinum records when his song “Do Your Thing” appeared on Stephanie Heinzmann’s album, Master Plan on Universal. Dean is also the author of the Amazon best-selling books Demystifying the Cue and Demystifying the Genre, both of which are must-have books. If you’re watching this and you haven’t read these books. It’s not a matter of, “Should I?” It’s a matter of if you don’t, you are only hurting yourself—I cannot stress that enough. He also wrote Write, Submit, Forget, Repeat, which was inspired by the often-heard TAXI member mantra Write, Submit, Forget, Repeat. If there’s anybody who can explain what production music libraries do, and why they can be valuable partners for indie songwriters and composers, Dean Krippaehne is that guy.
So, Dean, for people tuning in here today that really don’t fully understand what production music libraries, are, can you please let them know?
Production music libraries are… Well, it’s a business, it’s a company. What they do is, they seek to sign songs or [instrumental] cues from artists, composers, and songwriters, and build up a catalog of different styles, different genres for the purpose of giving their clients the right songs, the right cue, the right thing—the clients being films, TV shows, and advertisers. So, yeah, that’s basically what they do. They are a kind of the in-between. They find great music and great cues and great songs, and put them into their catalogs, and they act as a publisher.
So let’s tell folks what the difference is between a production music library, which, like you said, is a publisher, and then a regular publisher, like Sony ATV or Universal or Warner/Chappell would be on the record side of the industry.
Yeah, the old-school publishers—old-school, it’s still going on—they’re looking for songs for artists, whether it’s a Justin Bieber or Garth Brooks, or whoever the people are. They’re looking for songs for those artists. In the case of a production music library, the artists are a TV show, a film, or a TV commercial, so they’re getting the music for those people, only we—the creators—are actually doing the masters and fully producing it, whereas in the old days of songwriting, you could do a vocal song demo, you get it to somebody and then their amazing producers and musicians cut the thing. But actually, now, especially in this day and age of home studios, we’re doing all that stuff.
And the deals are a little different, in that like a traditional publisher on the record side of the industry, would sign a songwriter to a staff-writer deal where they might give you an annual stipend/advance of $25,000 or $50,000, or maybe back in the day if you are somebody who is kind of important and already successful, $100,000 or more. And they basically work the “push” model, which is, they hear that Ariana Grande is working on a record, they look through their catalog to see what they’ve got, then they then go knock on her producer’s door—figuratively speaking—and say, “Hey, check out these songs. We think they might be good for her,” or whomever the artist is. The production music library model is more of a “pull” model, in which they come to you and say, “This is what we need,” in the form of a brief or a TAXI listing. “This is what we’re looking for. Do you have anything like that?” So, it’s sort of filling orders on the production music library side, versus pushing your wares or shopping the material on the traditional record industry side of publishing.
Exactly.
People often ask me, “I can’t believe that they want 100% of my publisher share,” or “It’s basically a 50/50 deal; is that fair?” Can you kind of give an overview of what typical production music library deals look like?
Yeah, it’s a 50/50 deal. And I’ve heard that before too, you don’t want to give away your publishing. Well, you know, yes, I do! And the thing is, to the people that say that, I’d say, “If you want to start your own production music library, if you want to be a publisher, then you will spend all your time getting connections with music supervisors and ad companies and all of that, and you’ll do all the legwork.” I don’t live in L.A. or New York. I live in Seattle, and so I don’t really have good access to that, although I considered doing that about 10 years ago. But really, the music libraries are doing all that work, they have the connections, so they are getting 50% of the monies that are collected, and that’s typical. With a 50/50 deal, we [the creators] keep all the writer’s royalties, and the libraries get the publisher’s share because they’re doing all the publishing work. And we just get to sit here and create and don’t have to do all that other business stuff—the legwork and developing and maintaining all those great connections.
So, yeah, and even beyond building the great connections and maintaining those relationships, it is, first of all, reviewing all the music, then doing all the due diligence to make sure that the music you want to sign isn’t already published. A common mistake these days is putting your music out with an entity like TuneCore, CD Baby, or somebody, checking that box that says, “Yeah, make it available for sync.” And you don’t realize that by checking that box you have just signed a publishing deal, or at the very least a publishing administration deal, and that makes that music unavailable and unable to be signed to a deal with a music library, because you can’t have two publishers on the same thing unless it’s non-exclusive, and that’s a whole other thing to talk about.
Yeah, that’s really true. And I am so willing to give up a percentage of this… I’m not making deals with Netflix and Amazon and ABC, NBC, CBS, all the cable companies. They’re out there doing that work, so they deserve that money.
Just the tagging alone… When I talk to my friends who own production music libraries, the amount of work they do to get the stuff into their system… First of all, some libraries actually choose to master everything they put in the library, they all have to tag the stuff, they have to present it to their clients in formats that they’re [the clients] are amenable to—that they will use—certain ways of delivering it. It’s a lot of work on the back end.
Oh, absolutely. There are a couple of libraries that I work with that are mastering everything. I have to send them stems that stem out everything. They master because they want their library to be consistent-sounding All the 50, 100 composers putting stuff in, they want it to be mastered consistently. So that’s a lot of work… a lot of work.
I think some of the people who say, “I’m not giving up 100% of my publishing,” don’t really understand that they’re only giving up 50%, which is the publisher’s share, and you’re keeping the other 50%, which is the writer’s share. I think a lot of people develop that mindset because they took a course in college, or they’ve got a friend who is normally a real estate lawyer who took a music law course in college or in law school, and they go, “Oh no, dude, you never give up 100% of your publishing.” Well, you’re not actually giving up 100% of your publishing, you’re only giving up 100% of the publisher’s share, and they work to get that money. So everybody who has that notion that some real estate or wills and trusts lawyer told them should realize that they don’t know how this aspect of the music industry works, and what the norms are, like an actual music attorney would know.
I mean, there are things where I’ve held on to my publishing, because I have a connection with a… I think there was a T-Mobile thing I did, and there were a couple other things where I actually have kept my publishing, but that’s because I already had the connections. But as a general rule with production music libraries, I give it up almost probably 100% of the time to get what I want to get.
For people watching that aren’t TAXI members and don’t yet know the difference between what an exclusive production music library deal is versus a non-exclusive deal is, can you please explain the difference?
Yeah, exclusive is just what it says. You sign your masters, your songs, your cues and they have all the rights—they own the stuff. With non-exclusive, they have the rights to pitch the stuff that you send them, but you can also take that music elsewhere and do other things with it. You still maintain the rights to release CDs or to pitch it other places if you want to. Although, that can get really dicey if you are signing non-exclusives with multiple libraries, there is that potential problem that both libraries pitch to the same show, they take it, well, who gets paid? Library A or library B that both had it non-exclusively? So that’s a tricky one!
Before this broadcast, I grabbed a few of my recent contracts, and was looking them over, where I’ve actually got the rights with the exclusive deal to if I want to release a CD of this material, I can, but that’s about all I can do with it. So, if you’re an artist or a songwriter and you want to produce a CD of your music, but you also want to work for film and TV, there are exclusive companies that will allow you to do that, and they’ll put that right in the contract. I like both types of deals, but I probably do a lot more exclusive contracts these days for various reasons. But I am in both exclusive and non-exclusive libraries.
“Virtually everybody who goes to their first Road Rally, your eyes are opened. It’s like going from black-and-white to technicolor.”
How many libraries in total, give or take, do you have your music in? How long have you been doing sync stuff? Is it like 10 years or more now?
Yeah, it’s more than that. Well, my first Road Rally was in 2006, and through TAXI I got lucky a couple years before that and I had gotten music into a show called One Life to Live, a soap opera that was on at that time, so I was starting to get my first taste. So, it’s probably 2005 or 2006, 15 or 16 years.
Virtually everybody who goes to their first Road Rally, your eyes are opened. It’s like going from black-and-white to technicolor. You learn so much, and I went, “Wow, this is actually something in the music business that you can build a career on,” and you can’t say that about some things in the music business. You know, you’ve got to roll the dice; am I gonna be an artist and a superstar? Well, you can’t build that career, per se. But with film and TV, I saw that you can do these steps and build a real business out of this thing and have a real career out of it. So yeah, 15, 16, 17 years, somewhere around there now.
I knew you were going to ask me how many libraries, so I was trying to go through them. It might be more than this, but I found contracts for 39 libraries, but there may be some more.
That’s a lot of libraries, congrats. Do you know how many pieces of music you have out there in the wild in all those libraries, give or take?
It’s somewhere around 1,400 pieces of music that I have in those libraries.
I don’t know what it is. But I know enough TAXI members who are succeeding at the level that you are at. Once they get up over a thousand, and it takes a couple of years obviously for the money to start to flow—and it takes several years, maybe many years to get up to a thousand tracks out there in the wild—once they get over a thousand tracks, then up to around 1,500, it’s like you have a real business, and you are going to retire with a retirement fund built on what I affectionately call “stupid little instrumental cues.” Sometimes the placements pay pennies—but it’s cumulative and it builds up each year, and it keeps growing and growing. And man, if you’re at 1,400 pieces of music out there making you money, congratulations, dude.
My brother wanted me to tell you this, because I told him we were going to do this interview. When I first started doing this 15 years ago or so, I opened a Charles Schwab account just to see how much… I’ll just take the money I didn’t need to live on, I wasn’t buying beer with it, I wasn’t doin’… It was just from royalties. You know, just an extra $1,000 here, an extra $1,500 there, and invest it. And that account now—and this is not a lot, but I’m gonna make a point with this—that account now has over $200,000 in it, and for doing nothing, it makes me… at 8%, it makes me $16,000 a year for doing nothing. That’s not my main retirement account, but I just wanted to see over the years what would happen if I just put my extra money and invested it conservatively in stocks. So yeah, and if I was dumping all of it in it would be a lot more. But, you know, I buy things. [laughter]
Years ago—probably five years ago or more now—we had one of our members who is a certified financial planner do a thing onstage with me, laying out basically an Excel spreadsheet that showed, and using very conservative numbers, on what you would earn and how it would grow each year, and if you started at 35 years old and did it until 65, and let’s assume that you retire at 65, which there is no reason to if you are a musician, you’re gonna keep making music anyway. But if you did retire, I think you would retire with like $1.7 million in the bank, taking real conservative… Like the first year you make no money, the second year, maybe $1,000, maybe the third year $1,500, the next year maybe it drops down to $1,200, the next year maybe $2,400. And it just keeps growing like that, and by the time you have reached 65 years old, you have got $1.7 million in the bank.
Yeah, even with this account now, I’m not doing any more music, not putting anything into it. If I didn’t touch it and invested all the dividends and just let grow, yeah, in 10 years it would be double of what it is at now, just doing nothing.
“One of the things I love about music is, as long as I can make music that sounds like a 19-year-old or 40-year-old, it doesn’t matter how old I am.”
And the money came from doing something you love.
Yeah, and I’ll continue. I mean, one of the things I love about music is, as long as I can make music that sounds like a 19-year-old or 40-year-old, it doesn’t matter how old I am. So yeah, I’ll keep doing music as long as I physically can.
Yeah, you know, musicians don’t stop making music, you’re right. Until you physically can’t, you might as well, and what a great retirement. Let’s say you chose to retire at 65 or 70 years old and go buy a sailboat and sail the world for a couple of years, if you didn’t make another note of music, you’re still gonna make a six-figure income every year from the music that’s already out there in those 39 catalogs. Like, who wouldn’t do this?
Yeah. That is an amazing thing about it. When a song or a cue that maybe hasn’t done anything in five years and is just collecting dust, and then boom, all the sudden it pops up and makes you a couple thousand bucks, or a couple hundred bucks, whatever. You know, it just keeps on working for you. It’s great, man.
Don’t miss Part 2 of this interview in next month’s TAXI Transmitter!