Michael Walker: If you’re listening to this then you likely already know that being an independent musician is a lonely road. And maybe your friends and your family don’t fully understand why you do what you do, or why you invest so much time, energy, and money achieving your music goals. And especially early on, it can be hard to find people who really understand what you’re trying to accomplish and how to make it happen. So, that’s where Modern Musician comes in!

My name’s Michael Walker and I can understand and relate to that feeling. I’ve been there myself, and so has our team of independent artists. The truth is that basically everything good in my life has been a result of music. It’s the reason I met my wife, my 3 kids, it’s how I met my best friends. And now with Modern Musician, we have seen so many talented artists who started out with a dream, with a passion, without really a fanbase or a business. And you’ll take that and turn it into a sustainable full-time career and be able to impact hundreds, maybe even thousands or millions of fans with your music. We’ve had thousands of messages from artists who told us we’ve helped change their lives forever. It just gets even more exciting and fulfilling when you’re surrounded by a community of other people who get it, and who have shared their knowledge and success with each other openly. So, if you are feeling called into making your music a full-time career and to be able to reach more people with your music, then I want to invite you to join our community so that we can help support your growth and we can help lift you up as you pursue your musical dreams. You’ll be able to interact in a community with other high-level artists, coaches, and industry professionals, as well as be able to participate in our daily live podcast, meet these amazing guests, and get access to completely free training. If you’d like to join our family of artists who truly care about your success, then click on the link in the show notes and sign-up now. 

Ashley Neumeister: You have to understand who owns the song. Sometimes I'll get pitched a song and they'll tell me that they control 100% of the song, which means they control 100% of the publishing and the recording/the master. And then, down the line, I'll find out: Oh, this other co writer owns 10% of the publishing. That's horrible! That is probably the worst mistake you can make in this industry is not having clear ownership

Michael Walker: It's easy to get lost in today's music industry with constantly changing technology, and where anyone with a computer can release their own music. I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician and it's only getting better. If you have high-quality music, but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so that you can reach the right people and generate a sustainable income with your music, we're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month without spending 10 hours a day on social media. We're creating a revolution in today's music industry and this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.

All right. I'm excited to be here today with Ashley Neumeister. Ashley has played a key role in all aspects of music production, clearance, music curation for numerous series and films including shows for CBS, Netflix, Paramount Plus, Disney Plus, and many more. She was actually nominated for Guild of Music Supervisors Award for best music supervision in a television drama for working on season 1 and 2 of American Soul. And so she does a thing or two about sync licensing and how to have success in that world. And so she's shared some of her insights and knowledge through a platform called Sync Secrets, which helps musicians get their songs synced in TV and film. And I know that there's a lot of folks who are here who are very interested in the world of sync licensing. And it's great to have you on the podcast today to be able to connect and share some of the nuggets and wisdom with our folks here. So thank-you for being a part of it.

Ashley Neumeister: Yeah, my pleasure. I love sharing and teaching.

Michael Walker: Awesome. To kick things off, I would love to hear from you maybe just a quick introduction. If someone's here right now and they haven't met you before, maybe you can share a little bit about how you got started and you had the opportunity to get your music placed on CBS, Netflix, Paramount Plus, Disney Plus and whatnot. 

Ashley Neumeister: Sure! I’ll try to keep it brief. I have a background in music production and I play some instruments and I've always loved music and loved soundtracks growing up and so through my journey of going to Columbia college in Chicago, discovered the job of a music supervisor. And moved out to LA to pursue that in 2006. Started out on the pitching side of starting a catalog and pitching artists’ songs to try to get them placements in TV and film. And then over the years, eventually moved more into being a music supervisor myself. And I've worked on many TV shows and films by this point and also managed, like I said, a library and a catalog. So I have experience from the sales and pitching side of what kinda songs get a lot of placements and then also on the selection side of being the music supervisor. So both sides of that part of that business.

Michael: Awesome. I love the fact that you have experience in different roles and that you can speak to the perspective as a music supervisor who's probably received a lot of submissions and what to look for. I think that provides some really helpful perspective for all of us in terms of what a music supervisor is actually looking for and how to have success in that world. So I'd love to hear from your perspective having both done this yourself, and having worked with a community of artists helping them to do this, what do you see as some of the biggest challenges or mistakes that artists commonly make as it relates to sync licensing?

Ashley: I would say starting out, it is a very competitive industry right now. Every artist obviously would love to have their song placed in a television show or film and so there is a lot of competition, and so it's important to set yourself apart. And some of those mistakes that you're asking would be just simply not understanding how the business works, and what does that mean to get a placement. What kind of paperwork is that? Or what kind of fees could I expect for that? Just an overall understanding of that process is really important. And then high quality music, obviously. So really only sending your best. Putting your best foot forward and making sure that you're going through the process of fully mixing and mastering your songs before you even pitch them, and having an instrumental version, having your a capella. A capella is not as important, but the instrumental is essential. And having clean lyrics, for example. If you have profanity in your songs, having an alternate version with clean words, instead of just dropouts or beeps, because you can't really use those in TV shows. Dropouts might, maybe if it's just one word, but if it's often through the song, you want to actually have a separate word that replaces that. And then also, the biggest thing, I think, honestly, is just being easy to work with and getting back to people quickly. Our careers are defined by deadlines because a lot of the times we're needing music for set, and so you can't miss a deadline. For example, when I'm starting out and giving an artist a shot that I haven't worked with before, and they miss a deadline, I'm probably not going to give them another shot. It's such a big deal and I have to only work with people that I know that I can rely on and when they say they're going to do something, they actually do it. So that's the biggest thing that I see with artists that are coming from working in the record industry, to then wanting to work in TV and film, iss they don't understand the importance of those deadlines and often, even if they're really talented, maybe even a major label artist that's got some notoriety, I'm not going to work with them if they can't make deadlines. So that's a really important thing to remember when you're getting into this.

Michael: Yeah. So it sounds like, especially in the sync licensing world, deadlines are extremely important because if you miss a deadline, it doesn't reflect well on you. The whole production of the show runs behind, and they have deadlines to meet as well. So one of the things that you mentioned that I think is a really important point that sometimes is tricky nowadays, especially, to dial in is around the music production and the quality of the production. Especially nowadays, it's so easy to record yourself in a home studio. I think we have a lot of artists who are just getting started maybe, or they've been working hard to produce themselves and the idea of finding a producer or finding the right team to work with is something they haven't quite gotten the hang of yet and maybe they're looking for: how do I improve the quality of my music when I feel like I'm on a budget and I don't know how to get high quality productions without spending an arm and a leg for it. I'm curious what your recommendations would be, especially in the music licensing world where the baseline needs to be extremely high production quality. What would your recommendations be for artists to think about in terms of investing in themselves and production, and how do they find the right producer that is the right quality level to be successful in sync?

Ashley: It's a great question. I would say become a part of a community of musicians that have a common goal and vision. So Modern Musician, or my platform Sync Secrets, there's musicians that want to collaborate and work together and not charge each other money. We'll share the writers and the publishing on this song and we'll just come together. You have your skills of producing and mixing and I can do the top line or the track or whatever. You come with your skills and then reach out to everyone that's in that program and see if they want to collaborate and listen to their music, check out their quality and say did you mix this? Who mixed this? Just asking and utilizing your relationships within those communities. I'm sure they would be surprised by how easy they can find people. That's one of the things that's been so amazing about Sync Secrets. I have a monthly gathering as part of it, and they're from all over the world, and they're collaborating. Every month we do listening sessions and I can just see the quality going up because they'll hear someone playing a song and they're like: Whoa, that was really good. And they'll reach out and be like: okay, who mixed that? And they're willing to not charge each other and just share in any profits that are made from those placements. So I would say to start there and there's so many classes you can take online to up your production skills and mixing skills a little bit. Even on Udemy and a bunch of these other online courses, or even on YouTube. It's just about taking the time to learn those tips and tricks to up level the quality of it, but anyone can do it on their own. You just gotta take the time.

Michael: Awesome. Yeah. And I know we've had quite a few folks on this podcast who are in the world of music production and teaching artists how to be successful with it. And I can definitely give a shout out to HyperBits and their masterclass and illgates for electronic music, are fantastic. But that's awesome. I love that recommendation to really lean on the people in your community and other artists and figure out a way to do a trade of service, especially where you come together and you share in the profits. Awesome. Other things in terms of success with sync and in the world of sync licensing, one common question or challenge would be: how do I build the relationships or find the people that are looking for the music? How do I cut through the noise? Like you mentioned, it is so competitive right now. Let me put it this way: from the perspective of a music supervisor and having you've been on the other side and helping artists with it, what distinguishes the best relationships that you've built, the best submissions, the best pitches that you've received from the absolute worst ones.

Michael: Everyone asks that way. That's a really good question. I would say the best, it's going to tie in some of the things I've already said, would be high quality and on time or early, and when I ask for something, don't send me something totally different. If you don't have the thing that I need, just say that. Just say: sorry, I don't have this. I'll get you next time or, I know this artist that could create something in a short amount of time if you have more time, or something like that. Just be honest. That's really important. And then also, a little thing to know which makes this kind of challenging for a lot of artists and catalogs is that every music supervisor is different as far as how much we want to be checked in with. I'm totally fine with artists that I have relationships with just checking in with me every two weeks being like: Hey, are you looking for anything? And, not necessarily always expecting a response, but it actually does keep those people like top of my mind, cause I know that they're consistently checking in with me. So that's something that's really important. Other music supervisors might get really annoyed by that so it's important to ask each supervisor separately: how often can I check in with you? Or is it okay if I send you my new song releases? Just ask before you just send out these blanket cold emails or an email to everyone. More personalized is definitely better. So on the other side of that, the worst thing is going to just be horribly mixed songs. Like I said, sending me something I didn't even ask for. Part of being in this industry is that you're going to have to really be able to identify clearly what moods your music evokes and because we're often sending information in what we need like a happy song or reflective or this is what's happening in the scene and we need to portray that this character is having a really hard time with this decision so they're really like trying to think about something and be contemplative. You have to be able to identify what you're wanting the listener to feel from your songs. Not every artist does that very well, and so they'll send me music that I'm like: this is not happy and uplifting at all. Why would they send that? [both laughing] So being able to identify that is a skill that's needed for sure.

Michael: That's super interesting. It seems what one of the biggest things you're pointing to is just the relevancy and the self awareness to know your music and where it would find the most value and specifically what people are looking for, not sending them something totally unrelated. Awesome.

Ashley: Oh, one other thing I thought of on the mistake side is: You have to understand who owns the song. Sometimes I'll get pitched a song and they'll tell me that they control 100% of the song, which means they control 100% of the publishing and the recording/the master. And then down the line, I'll find out: Oh, this other co-writer owns 10% of the publishing. That's horrible! Probably the worst mistake you can make in this industry is not having clear ownership ahead before you pitch anything, which means you have all your paperwork signed, you know exactly how the money is going to be split up. You even have your work-for-hire agreements if you hired some musician to play on it for a fee. All of those; that's so important. And I definitely have had a couple of situations where independent artists have backtracked and been like: Oh, I'm sorry, this person needs to sign off because they own this little percentage, and I will never work with them again, because I can't trust them anymore. And that is probably the worst thing that could happen to a music supervisor is that you put a song into a project that's not fully cleared. I could get fired for that. So, that's a really big deal that a lot of independent artists don't think about because you're like: Oh, we're just working on this song together. We'll see what happens, but you've got to really treat it like a business when you get into the sync licensing.

Michael: Awesome. I'm so grateful for the ability to have conversations like this and to learn from mistakes that others have made because that's the kind of thing that I think a lot of folks, you have to learn one way or the other and you either learn by making the mistake yourself or by talking to someone or hearing a conversation like this with someone like you that's had some of those experiences or someone slipped up and made that mistake, so we can learn from it and not make that mistake. So maybe, as a next step to help not make that mistake, how would you suggest that people who are doing collaborations or co-writing, I think for some people it might be a little bit of a tricky subject. They feel a little awkward bringing it up. Let's say that they're co-writing songs and they're not sure what's the best process to be able to really clear ownership with those people that they wrote with. Do you have any recommendations in terms of best practices or habits or ways to bring this up so that they don't run into that mistake later down the line?

Ashley: Yeah, it's something that is useful to just bring up from the beginning. When you're first establishing a collaboration relationship, just treating it like it is a business and that you're taking it seriously. When you have an idea that you might want to be trying to place these songs in a television show or on an album or whatever it is, have some sort of idea of the intention of where these songs could end up. I always encourage artists to just have their standard contracts that they always use, whether it's just like a simple split sheet, which is how you're going to split up the writers and the publishing, and then who's going to own the recording once you get to that point. And this is all something I dive a lot deeper into in my course, and I give everyone the contracts to use; the templates, just to make it easy, because this is something that I've come across so much over the last 15 years of working with artists. I'm like, okay, I need to make this easy. So I just created the templates for it for them. And then at that point, you can just get it out of the way, cause there's never having any weirdness after that. There is one thing that can change that is if you're not going to be splitting everything evenly. Most artists do that, if there's three people in the room, they each get a third of the ownership, but if you're wanting to wait to see how much each person is going to contribute to the song and then maybe it won't be equal percentages, that's fine too, but just say that up front. Just say: we'll see how this goes and then at the end of the song, production, the demo or whatever phase you want to do with it, let's talk about the percentages so we can just get that out of the way. But for the most part, I think I've noticed that artists just split everything evenly.

Michael: Got it. At one point, I thought that I heard there's a few different lines of thinking around it, and in Nashville, it's usually evenly split, but maybe in LA it's more of a thing where sometimes they'll be more selective with who gets what. I love the idea of just like the simplicity of just saying: Hey if you're in the room, you're a part of it. It's hard to quantify how much of an impact you made if you just sat in the room and then you had that one idea that literally changed everything. Maybe that was the thing that made it. It sounds like the recommendation is just to be upfront and clear from the start whichever one that you choose so you're on the same page. You have a bunch of templates and resources to help make that decision easy, which is awesome. Are there any software tools that you'd recommend for managing a portfolio of your own songs or co-writers and stuff like that? I feel like I've heard of a few that are pretty useful.

Ashley: One that most people are using within the sync industry is called Disco. It's a place where you can store all your songs and do all the metadata, which is also very important: making sure you have proper metadata on all your songs before you send them anywhere. And you can put the writer splits in there, publishing splits, everything, make playlists, that's how most people will send me their music is just a link to a disco playlist, and then it has everything in there, so I do recommend that one, because it's become pretty much the standard that we all really like. There are other things. I think there might even be like song splits, I think, is the name of one online thing you can use to catalog all of your writer percentages and publishing and all of that, and have it in one spot. Disco is definitely the main one though.

Michael: Awesome. Yeah. I've heard that one before too. I'm not personally super deep into the sync licensing world, but I've heard that come up a few times. It looks like a really cool software. I think I have one more question I'd like to ask before we open up the floor to the live audience, and maybe you guys can ask any questions here that you'd like to fill in the blanks, but I'm curious to hear your perspective on: right now, it seems like we're entering a new era of creativity as it relates to AI and generative music. There's one line of thinking that says that these are tools and just like any other technology, it's going to amplify our creativity and it's not going to replace our music or creativity, it'll just augment it. And then there's also, I think, a fear for a lot of musicians of what happens. Am I going to be replaced? Especially as it relates to certain industries, like sync licensing, where a supervisor like yourself might be able to type in or just copy and paste their brief and it just auto generates the thing that they're looking for and they can tweak it automatically right away. I'm curious to hear your perspective on AI generation as it relates to music licensing and how someone who's listening to this right now, who's like an artist can align with the tidal wave or align with the upcoming wave of that so that they don't drown in it, but instead they're able to surf on it and get the most value from it.

Ashley: I think you've touched on it just even in the question. It is a tool at this point, and it can support artists and maybe creating more content faster, even just with lyric ideas and stuff like that. One area with it specifically in the sync industry that, as far as I know, hasn't happened yet, but that I could see happening is AI-generated music for instrumental background cues: Just simple tension cues or something like that. A lot of the stuff that's used in reality TV, for example, that stuff is still created by humans, but I could see that that could move into being created by AI pretty easily. Cause it doesn't have to be anything… it'd be easy to replicate through AI because it's just one emotion through the whole thing. And so I do wonder if that stuff is going to be replaced completely by AI by production music libraries. I've heard talks of that happening. But I don't know, at least in my generation, we're still going to be pushing for hiring humans, and it's going to get back to needing to just really have high quality music that surpasses anything that AI could create. So I would say for now, just focus on it being a tool. If you even want to use it, to help you create quicker and maybe build your catalog faster, that's a bonus of it for sure. But it's hard to say what's going to happen in 10 years from now. Honestly, my job could be replaced by AI at some point. It is the Wild West with that whole part of the industry. We'll just have to see what happens. And those of us that are in decision making places can still advocate for humans being involved in every step of the process.

Michael: Awesome. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It comes to mind is: I wasn't super involved in the music industry before and after this happened, but I've heard enough people describe the revolution of in-the-box digital audio workstations. When they first started evolving as a tool, there was a lot of fear and skepticism and people who were saying that it was not real, or it's not valid music, it's actually dangerous to use, it's going to harm your ears permanently. And then there was also another group of artists that jumped in and learned how to use digital audio workstations and saw it as a tool that allowed them to be more creative and to be able to use the tool. So yeah, knock on wood, hopefully that's the case with AI as well too is that: it is the root of our human creativity that is the thing that matters, and this is just like a tool that helps us to achieve an outcome. But it does seem like it's important to start getting familiar with it, to start playing with it just because it doesn't seem like it's going anywhere. It seems like it's only getting better and smarter and faster in the last year that it really is hard to take off. All right. With that, I would love to invite anyone who's here live to raise their hand and come on to the stage if you have any questions you'd like to ask to Ashley. So I see Voz raised his hand. Hey, VoZ, how are you doing today?

VoZ: Hello, Michael. Hello, Ashley. Thank-you. Thank-you. Thank-you so much for coming on here and sharing this with you and bringing up some of the very, very important issues, not just in sync licensing, but in the paperwork necessary for being able to adequately have a professional career with other professionals and to keep it out of the courtrooms, so to speak. So I have 3 questions. And Asheley, can see the chat? She can pick any one of them she'd like to answer or you can, Michael. I don't want to take up a lot of your time. Thank-you. It is an honor.

Michael: Appreciate you. So I'll choose one of these questions. We don't have time to answer all three of them for you Voz, but I'll start here. So he asked, one of the questions was: Are work-for-hire musicians signed agreements or requirement? And what would your recommendations be in terms of: if there's someone that you're hiring to perform on the music what kind of paperwork would you recommend for that?

Ashley: I would say they are a requirement because you might as well just do everything to the T and leave no room for error. It's a simple one sheet that I have, and like I mentioned, that I usually give people that I consult during my training. And it's basically, you just say what they did, like what instrument they played, on what song or songs, and how much you paid them, or whatever it was to exchange and that they are not going to own anything else beyond that. It's a one-time exchange. You might as well do that for everyone that you hire to play drums or whatever it is on your music. So yeah, I would encourage that.

Michael: Awesome. Smart. And if you do it right, you can also maybe sneak in a little clause in there about owning their soul too. [both laughing] If you just put it in really small print, then sometimes squeeze that one out. So if anyone else has any questions, feel free to raise your hand and come on here live. I'd love to hear your voice and you have an opportunity here to connect with Ashley. In the meantime though, I'm going to go through these other questions that VoZ asked as well.

Ashley: Okay.

Michael: So he asked: in terms of proving ownership, are copies of paid and cash checks for services satisfactory to establish ownership or is there anything else we need to do to confirm that we do have ownership?

Ashley: Ownership of the song, I assume he's talking about.

Michael: Looking at this, I wonder if he meant ownership of the song. And it looks like it might've been related to the question that we just answered around work-for-hire musicians. Maybe he was asking: is it okay if I have the receipts and the paychecks?

Ashley: That's helpful, but you still don't have anything that says what they played and on what they played. This is all up to your own discretion too. You don't necessarily want to have to go backtrack, if you have all this music you've already recorded. I wouldn't necessarily say to hold that up from pitching it unless someone that you may have hired in the past is really difficult and you have a concern that they could come up if they see that it got a place on a TV show and say something like: Hey, I owned a piece of that song. That's what you're protecting yourself against. So it's up to you to decide if you want to go back and get proper paperwork for all these people or not, but at least moving forward, just use a one-sheet, simple work-for-hire agreement so you don't even have to worry about it.

Michael: Smart. Yeah. It does seem like the easy thing to do there too, would just be when you're about to send their payment, require that they sign off to get the payments. And that way there's something that… rather than you come in afterwards where they've already gotten the payment, there's not really a value in it for them. Okay. Awesome. I see also David Patrick Wilson raised his hand, so let's bring on David. Hey David, how are you doing today?

David: Michael, I'm gonna try this again. Can you hear me?

Michael: We can hear you loud and clear.

David: Oh, my God. I've been trying to get on for three days in a row. It's unbelievable. Anyway, I'm having so many technical difficulties here. You know I'm really concerned about AI, but I don't even know if anybody knows how AI sampling is done. How do they come up with, when you give them a directive about what you'd like to hear or something that you'd like to have created, where are they going for their source to get that? Are they sampling from other artists? Are they taking bits and pieces and reassembling them in some way that they resemble what it is that you're talking about but based on the work of others? Where does that base data come from that they're using to create that entity?

Michael: Thanks, David. All right.

Ashley: Do you know the answer to that?

Michael: Lets break down machine learning for us and the algorithm. I'm pretty sure the makers of it don't fully understand it, actually. It's another reason to be a little bit concerned about it. Yeah, I don't know.

Ashley: My understanding is yes, it does pull from anything ever released online. So the minute you put out a song, it is now being fed into a lot of these apps and things that are being created. I know there's certain companies… I went to a conference a couple of months ago where they're trying to create an AI thing that you can opt into, meaning that you can choose whether or not your art is then pulled from, because that's a problem right now is that there is no permission happening anywhere, and you have no idea where it's pulling it from. Yeah, my understanding is that once your art out in the world, it is then able to being stole from in a way.

Michael: Yeah it's super interesting. It's one of my favorite topics to think about and to see what's happening with AI and certainly ownership and who owns what, especially when there's like training data that's feeding the AI. If I remember correctly, there was a pretty big landmark case that happened in the last few months related to copyright and AI-generated artwork. The judges sided with OpenAI saying that… I think it was maybe like Sarah Silverman had led like the charge and she was very like upset that her material is being used to like train these AIs, and what the verdict was that regardless of whether the AI was trained up on this other data, as long as it was generating unique content that wasn't directly plagiarized, then it wasn't a copyright infringement. It's interesting because I think there is a case to be made that as humans, the way that we create music and artwork is totally influenced by our favorite artists and what came before us. It's just very difficult for us to quantify that and say: I am 7.2% Coldplay, because I loved them when I was growing up and this song was influenced by that. And certainly, in the sync licensing world, there's briefs that say: we want a song that sounds like this. That's coming from somewhere, right? Like we have to reference that. We have to create something that sorta steals. “Steals” has some strings attached to it, but it certainly references and speaks to its train. So it's a tricky one. It does seem like with AI, if there was a way to basically document the training data and the training source, and if there was a way to say: okay, when we created the song, it actually did get influenced 2.1% from Coldplay with this song, it would be great if we were able to properly compensate the owners of it.

Ashley: Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. 

Michael: Yeah. Well, thanks David. Don't get me started talking to AI or else I'm going to hijack this conversation. So I see Steve Cuban raised his hand. Steve is one of my favorite people, so let's bring you on live. Hey Steve, how are you doing today?

Steve: I'm good. Ashley, thank-you so much. The information you're sending is invaluable. I just wanted to make a comment, maybe you can update it, but I've had a couple opportunities that I missed because I didn't have the correct means for music people, and I've lost the opportunity for my music to have been on, in one case, just because recently, I missed out the opportunity for my song to be seen by millions of people because they were doing a Halloween show and one of their clients, talking about the deep and demonic things said: yeah, there's a song that I like to sing and then they started singing my song. So this was being interviewed and then the show producer contacted me, sent me my email and said, we really want to include this song in this show. It's going to be seen by millions of people, but I didn't get the email because it went to a secondary email and I missed it. And by the time I saw it and contacted her back. She said: I'm sorry, we already aired the show. It was for Halloween and we only had a couple of days' notice. So there were other things I've missed too, because I didn't make it easy for people to reach the real Steve, I'm the guy that owns the song. Help me. How can I fix that?

Ashley: That's a really good point actually. Yeah, thank-you for bringing that up. A lot of people go to use Instagram now, so we're just making sure that you have an Instagram page that has your contact information, that has a direct email and phone number would be great too. Or some sort of a website or something online that people can easily find. The main place that music supervisors or people that handle the actual clearance go is going to be ASCAP, BMI, or SESAC, so making sure that your songs are properly registered and that your current contact information is linked with how you're registering that song, because that's where we start. So that would be the best place to make sure that you always have updated, and that they have your current contact information, because that's always where I start. And then I'll go to other places like Instagram and things like that. There's been many, many times when I've wanted to use songs, but I can't reach the artists. So that's a big one.

Michael: Wow. Yeah. I can see that being something for a lot of folks that we just might not even think about. If people want your songs and they're not able to reach you and connected and ask for it. Yikes. So I think that probably wraps up for today. Ashley, thank-you so much for taking the time to be here and to share some of the lessons that you've learned, some of the mistakes that you've seen that you can help people avoid here. For anyone that is interested in diving deeper and learning more about Sync Secrets and the community that you've built, what would be the best place for them to go to dive deeper?

Ashley: They can find me on TikTok. I do a lot of videos on there teaching about this kind of stuff. It's IAmAshNeu, so three letters of my last name. And then also SyncSecrets.biz/training and that has a discount code for the people that hear this, you'll get $200 off if you do want to do the training. It's a 5-week training to really dive deep into learning everything you need to know about placing your music in film and TV.

Michael: Amazing. Thank-you so much for doing that. And like always, we’ll make sure that we put all the links in the show notes for easy access. But yeah, I think that sync licensing is one of those things that I personally have very little experience with, but I know that it's incredibly valuable and there's a lot of artists in our community who are making a really good income and have a great career that's sustained by sync licensing. So I would definitely recommend checking out what you've built as a resource. Let's go ahead and let's wrap up for today for the actual recording. We'll do a good, old-fashioned yeeeaaaah!

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