Michael Elsner: The next thing that people do then is they just reach out and they start sending out their music. That's like getting out of your car and walking up to the door of that house and knocking on the door and being like, "Hey, man, I see you're having a party. Can I come in?" Well, no one knows who you are. You're the weird guy that just showed up with nothing to this party, and you don't even know what the party is. So most of the time, people aren't going to allow you in.

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.

Michael Walker: All right, so I'm here with my dude, Michael Elsner. He is the founder of Master Music Licensing. He's awesome. Last time I talked to him, he had short hair. Now he has long hair. It's luxurious.

Michael Walker: Michael, he's gotten over 2,000 placements of his original music onto TV shows, film trailers, commercials, personally. He's gotten placed on Fox Sports, ABC, tons of TV shows. I was looking through his credits, and to list all of them would be insane, so you can go Google that if you want to check it out. But some of my favorites there is Impractical Jokers, my wife is a huge Hannah Montana fan, so that would make her really excited, just so many other TV shows, and has this huge core experience of getting his music licensed on TV, film, commercials. Today, he's going to share some of his lessons that he's learned over years and years of learning that.

Michael Walker: Michael, thanks for taking the time to be here today.

Michael Elsner: Thanks for having me, man. I always enjoy talking to you.

Michael Walker: Yeah, absolutely. We've already met before, so you've already introduced yourself. But for anyone who's watching this right now who has never met you before, I'd love to hear a little bit about your story and kind of how you got started with music licensing.

Michael Elsner: Yeah. The short of it is I grew up in upstate New York and played in bands up there, left New York and came to Nashville in '98. I left New York in '97, and I spent a year in Orlando, then I came to Nashville in '98. I came to Nashville, obviously, trying to get a publishing deal. That was the first goal. I wanted to be a successful songwriter. Of course, I've always been a band guy, so I wanted to put together a band and go out on the road and have success, all of the dreams that we have growing up about rock stardom and whatnot.

Michael Elsner: Came to Nashville and spent four and a half years in Nashville, from '98 to summer of 2003, I came here at the end of '98, and got turned down by every publisher you could imagine. I didn't have success with my songs. Even though I was consistently writing music, I wasn't having success with my songs getting picked up, which was really frustrating.

Michael Elsner: But I was having success. I started playing guitar on projects and started producing records, learned engineering. I worked as an assistant engineer under a bunch of other guys, and so I was always in the studio environment, learning all the production aspects of it and getting my skills locked in as a guitar player and whatnot. But after four and a half years of getting turned down by everyone, I thought, "I've got to do something else."

Michael Elsner: In the summer of 2003, I moved out to Los Angeles, and when I got there, same exact goals. I wanted to get a publishing deal. I wanted to put together a band and have success with the band. Even if I couldn't put together a band, at least get a real gig playing for an artist, playing guitar and whatnot. So I moved to Los Angeles in summer of 2003. I didn't know anyone when I moved there, by the way. I didn't know anyone when I moved to Nashville either.

Michael Elsner: When I moved to LA, I had one buddy out there who I just crashed on the corner of his bedroom, and I was planning on being out there for about six weeks. I said, "I'll give LA shot for six weeks." Within that time, I ended up landing a gig playing guitar on a TV show for a composer. So I go up to his studio up in Malibu. And that was just a chance meeting at a Starbucks, by the way. I go up to his studio a couple of times a week up in Malibu, and I'd sit and I'd watch him compose to the show and then I'd play the parts he wanted me to play. That was a complete mind-blowing experience because I came from record world, where we were making records and you'd spend three or four days just on one song. Here, they're doing 12 or 13 queues, or pieces of music, for a scene in a day, writing, tracking, recording, and sending it back out. It just amazed me how fast that world worked.

Michael Elsner: Then through that, I started meeting some people called music supervisors, which everyone knows who they are now, but at the time, 2003, I had no idea what these people did. The industry hadn't changed so much that people were after music supervisors yet. So I met some music supervisors, and then one time I just asked to one, I said, "Hey, can I give you a CD of some songs?" after I kind of knew what they did. She said, "Sure." I gave her a CD of some of my songs that I'd written during my Nashville years.

Michael Elsner: Within two weeks, I had my first placement. It was a featured song. They played it for two minutes and 22 seconds or two minutes and 23 seconds or something like that, a featured vocal song, on a popular show at the time called Cold Case, which was on CBS. I made more money just on the upfront fee than I made in a couple months living in Nashville producing, the last couple of years that I was in Nashville just producing records. It was unbelievable the difference. I thought, "Wow, this is amazing."

Michael Elsner: It piqued my curiosity, and I started sending out some more CDs to a couple of supervisors who I'd met. Within the first year and a half that I lived in Los Angeles, I had my entire song catalog from my four and a half years in Nashville, that got turned down by everyone, placed on all these shows. You mentioned Hannah Montana earlier about your wife. The track that I got on Hannah Montana was a song that I had written in Nashville and gotten turned down. That song was also used on High School Musical, by the way. Then the song that got placed on Cold Case, which I was really proud of that song, that got turned down by every publisher in Nashville. And then that song has been placed a boatload as well.

Michael Elsner: That was my introduction to music licensing, and I thought, "This is amazing." I get turned down by everyone in the music industry, and in the licensing world, they're so happy and thankful and grateful for my songs, and then they're utilizing them and then they're getting them placed on shows and I'm getting paid for them, and then I'm getting royalties. I was like, "This is amazing." So yeah, that's my short story of how I got into it.

Michael Walker: Sweet, dude. I've heard this before, too, you might've been the one who told me this, that music licensing, it's really about the film industry. It's really about TV and that industry, as opposed to the music industry. It's a very important part of that industry. But because of that, there's a lot of abundance in terms of, like you said, the one placement that you got was more than you had gotten over five times as long in the music industry.

Michael Walker: It sounds like this is a potential opportunity for musicians to have a supplemental income stream in addition to their original music that they're probably passionate about, because they're musicians and they have original music, just like you. But it's maybe something that, if they haven't explored yet, is a huge opportunity to have an extra stream of income, to get more exposure, get on these TV shows, have credibility, that even if they have been turned down by publishers and by people in the record label industry, there's still a place where it can be really valuable.

Michael Elsner: Oh, sure. The thing is, I'm very passionate about the music that I write anyway. I don't sit and write songs for... I don't write songs for briefs. Now, there are two paths that people go down in the licensing world. There are people who want a brief. A brief is basically like a request. If there's a particular show, say a music supervisor is working on a show and they need a song that is, I'm just going to pick something off the top of my head, '70s-era throwback to Aerosmith, like a Walk This Way kind of thing, I'm just making that up off the top of my head because I've got an Aerosmith album on the back wall, that would be a brief. Then somebody will be like, "Oh, okay, well, now I have a couple hours or a day to write a song in the style of '70s Aerosmith AKA Walk This Way-ish." Some people do that, and that's awesome. That's not the path that I go down.

Michael Elsner: The path that I have chosen in my licensing career is I'm a big advocate of just writing the music that you're passionate about to start with. I don't want to always be chasing something. For me, I like to come into my studio and I like to just write whatever I want to write. I think that's the way that most musicians want to approach their career anyway. If I want to come in here and I just want to write a pop track, then I'm going to write a pop track. If I want to invite some friends over and write maybe even, I live in Nashville again, so a country-ish track, which is really just '70s rock repurposed, then we can write that.

Michael Elsner: For me, I like to just write the music, because there will always be an outlet for it. Other people are adamant about being like, "Hey, listen, you should always follow the briefs and write what the briefs are requesting." That's just not what I'm passionate about doing. I don't want to sit and be like, "Okay, what do I have to write today?" That, to me, is more like a job. I want to write the music that I just feel like writing. If I want to come into my studio tomorrow and I want to write a symphonic epic trailer piece, then that's what I'm going to do. If I want to take the day off the next day, then that's what I'm going to do.

Michael Elsner: That's the path that I have chosen to go down in my career, and that's the path that I really kind of advocate for other musicians. Licensing your music doesn't mean that you have to give up any other pursuit. It's just another outlet for your music, just like radio. If you write a song that you're passionate about and you want to get it on the radio, then you go down the channels that you need to go down in order to get it on a radio station and on radio stations all throughout the world.

Michael Elsner: It's the same thing with licensing. It's just the difference is that the end users who use your music in the licensing world do not follow the same rules that we're used to when it comes to promoting our music in what I call the traditional music industry. When we write a song in the traditional music industry pursuit, and we want to get it to a publisher or a radio person or even fans, we follow a certain set of rules to get there, because they absorb and utilize music in a specific way. In the licensing world, it's completely different, because when you're licensing your song to a TV show, the people who are working on that TV show don't work in the music industry. They work in the TV industry. If you're licensing your music for a commercial, the people who are working in that world work in the ads and promos industry. They don't work in the music industry, et cetera, as we go down into film and video games and all that kind of stuff. So we have to understand that our end users are absorbing and utilizing music completely different in those industries than they do in the music industry, which means that our path to get it to them and the process to get it to them is completely different.

Michael Elsner: I feel like that's the biggest hurdle that the musicians that I speak to and share this with have to overcome. They still approach them, the end users in the licensing industry, the same way they approach a radio station or possibly a manager or a publisher or sending their music to a record label, and then they wonder why they haven't had any success. "Aw, sync licensing sucks. I sent out my music, and no one's calling me back." Yeah, because you delivered your music to them the absolute wrong way. They can't utilize it the way that you delivered it to them.

Michael Elsner: A great analogy would be this. Every single one of us who's watching this right now is used to getting in a car and commuting to and from work or to the grocery store or to church or whatever. If we're driving to and from those places that we're used to going all the time, we're used to driving a car that we bought at the dealership anywhere between maybe 15 miles an hour in a school zone and 70 or 75 miles an hour if you're on the highway, or maybe even 80 if you've got a radar detector or something like that. That's what we're used to. But if we wanted to then compete in the world of NASCAR, we can't show up to the racetrack with a 2019 Hyundai Sonata, because we're racing against these cars that are specifically built to go 200 miles an hour, and our car, we're going to tootle around the track at like 80, 85, and they're going to lap us every time.

Michael Elsner: When we look at that scenario, just imagine that, you kind of laugh, but you think, "That guy is going to get destroyed. If he shows up at a NASCAR event in a Hyundai Sonata, he's going to get destroyed." That's the same thing as following the exact same path that we're used to with the traditional music path and sending our music out to those end users in the licensing arena. That's the reason why you're not going to have success.

Michael Elsner: Can that person who's in the Sonata on the NASCAR, can he have success? Yes, he can have success maybe once, maybe twice in his entire career, assuming the fact that while he's on one side of the track and everyone else is on the other because they're going so fast, the first two cars wreck and they create a pileup, and he's able to finally go and tootle around them and navigate around them and complete the race because he's the only car left standing and win. That's the reason why people who have success maybe one or two times licensing their music can't do it repeatedly, because they literally just had luck.

Michael Elsner: The biggest thing with musicians when it comes to licensing is learning that this is a completely different world that follows a completely different set of rules, and you have to deliver your music in such a way that satisfies those rules. Those rules are completely different than sending your music out to a radio station, sending your music out to a publisher, et cetera.

Michael Walker: Amazing. Yeah, I'm a sucker for analogies, so I love the race car analogy. To pile another analogy in the mix, I've heard this from, might've been from Chris SD-

Michael Elsner: He's awesome.

Michael Walker: He is awesome. I know YouTube just collaborated on something and did an amazing network together, so that's really cool.

Michael Walker: But I think it was either from him or from someone else who was talking about this idea of it's just a different language. It's like have to learn how to speak the language of supervisors and learn how to communicate with them and use the words and use the different ways that they know how to communicate.

Michael Walker: I don't know if you've ever heard the, I don't know if it's a parable or a story, of the blind monks. They're feeling an elephant, and each of them is feeling a different part of the elephant. And it's all an elephant, but one of them is like, "The elephant is like a tree trunk," because it's feeling the leg. Another one is feeling the tail and is like, "No, the elephant, it's like this." It's the same elephant, but it's all just a different point that you're connecting to.

Michael Walker: It sounds like what you're saying is that that's really kind of how it works in terms of this specific industry. It's the same songs, and you can do what you're passionate about and actually just write... You could write for briefs, and there's not necessarily anything wrong with that. But if you're really passionate about your original music and you want to just show up and you don't want it to feel like a job, you just want to create music, then you can do that. Then it's just about taking what you already have and figuring out how to communicate it and put it in front of the right people who can get the most value out of it, and to communicate it in a way that they understand so that they want to use it.

Michael Elsner: Right. You're 100% right. One of my very good friends who's actually a business partner of mine and a co-writer of mine, he loves writing for briefs. He loves that challenge. That's just one of those things that I particularly don't. But he's an incredible musician and his stuff is amazing. He's an incredible guy.

Michael Elsner: Our backgrounds and everything about us is different. We get along, work together great, but just our pursuits and our desires and all that stuff are just different. It's just one of those things where I don't particularly like that. I think that's more chasing something, and that's just, to me, not enticing to me. He loves it because he likes that challenge. For me, I like to come in and kind of just do my own thing and get into my own world. I like to create something without any rules or boundaries. Other people love having the rules and the boundaries and the parameters that they have to work within.

Michael Elsner: It just kind of boils down I think a lot of times to personality. I'm very much a rule breaker. I've always been. I think it's probably just always been the long-haired rock-and-roll guitar player side of me, that I like to just do my thing. Other people tend to be very much like, "These are the rules, these are the parameters, and we stay in the lines." That's fine. I tend to be one of those people where I don't like that. I like to see how far I can take things.

Michael Elsner: Not every piece of music that I write is going to be licensed or am I actually even going to finish. Sometimes I go down a path, and I'm like, "Man, this is just getting too far out there. Too many odd time signatures. This was fun, but let's just call it what it is." But I enjoy that because success, to me, isn't just having a song placed on a TV show. A big part of success to me is just being able to do what you want to do that's personally fulfilling and that you're proud of for a living. But other people have different, I guess, indicators of success.

Michael Elsner: There's no one path to get there. However, you do have to understand the rules of the game that you're playing. The licensing world has its own set of rules, and they are completely different, for the most part, than the music industry path. That's the reason why so many musicians who just go, "Well, I'm going to start licensing my music, so I'm going to blast all these music supervisors with my album. We're going to send my album to all these people." That's awesome. It's easy to do that.

Michael Elsner: Since you like analogies, I'm going to make one up right now. It's easy to find supervisors. It's easy to find people who work in the licensing world. Google is your friend. You can find any of this stuff on Google in under a couple of minutes. But that's like going out on the weekend and driving around some neighborhoods and looking for a party maybe on a Sunday during football season, going and seeing where all the cars are parked in front of someone's house and going, "Oh, that person is probably having a party." That's like finding a supervisor. It's not that hard.

Michael Elsner: The next thing that people do then is they just reach out and they start sending out their music. That's like getting out of your car and walking up to the door of that house and knocking on the door and being like, "Hey, man, I see you're having a party. Can I come in?" Well, no one knows who you are. You're the weird guy that just showed up with nothing to this party, and you don't even know what the party is. So most of the time, people aren't going to allow you in. That's the reason why people don't have success.

Michael Elsner: The process that I show people, and why I do Master Music Licensing, think of it like this. If you're having a Super Bowl party or a football party and you've got a bunch of your buddies over, your friends over, and someone shows up to your door, they knock on your door, you open it up, you don't know who it is, but it's some guy holding a big platter of spare ribs and chicken wings that they grilled out and already did, and then maybe a bunch of fruits and vegetables and stuff like that, and they're like, "Hey, I'm your neighbor down the road. I saw you're having a party, and I figured maybe I'd see if I could come and hang and bring all this stuff," most people are going to be like, "Hey, guys, look what the neighbor guy brought." Everyone's going to be like, "Neighbor guy!" Neighbor guy is going to be invited in, because you showed up with something. You showed up with something of value that allowed you to walk through the door. Anyone can go and knock, but now you've been invited in because you showed up with all this value.

Michael Elsner: That's the problem when people just send out their music. They're sending out their music in a way that's just like knocking on the door and someone opens up and goes, "It's just another CD. I can't use this. Doesn't have any of the information on it that I need. I don't know anything about this. I have no idea who even owns the masters and the publishing and all this other stuff," all this stuff that's involved.

Michael Elsner: How do I describe the songs? Is there metadata, all that other stuff? What else is coming with it? Is it coming with stems? Do I get alternate mixes? All the things that editors and re-recording mixers, the people further down the line, will need. When you don't show up to that, you're just blasting people, they're going to close the door. But when you show up with all this stuff, all the goodness, that big platter of fruits and vegetables and meat for everyone at the party to eat, then yeah, they're going to welcome you in with open arms and be like, "The neighbor guy has brought all the cool stuff." So there's an analogy for you on licensing and showing up to the party with actual value.

Michael Walker: That was a great analogy. I might steal that from you at some point. It's so relevant to just building relationships in general. And yeah, like you said, one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of artists make is just throwing their music out there, spamming people as much as possible, and that's knocking on the door of a party without having anything, not focusing on them and building a real relationship.

Michael Elsner: Yeah. I mean, you don't even know what the party is. You're just knocking on the door and someone opens up, and maybe it's a crocheting party. You're like, "What the heck?" You've got to know. You've got to know what's going on here. Again, it's just different rules.

Michael Elsner: If I could say that there's one thing that's the biggest mistake that musicians make when it comes to the licensing world, is they don't understand the business that they're getting into. They don't understand the fact that they are actually getting into a completely different industry. It's just like that guy showing up at the racetrack with a stock Hyundai Sonata from the Hyundai dealership racing against these customized cars with pit crews and all that other stuff. You know that person is going to get annihilated. They just don't know the game that they're showing up to, and they're going to get laughed off the track. It's the same thing.

Michael Walker: Beautiful. I know we could probably spend 300 hours going through everything, but I know you do have a framework that allows artists, that kind of gives them the language, helps them to actually present their music in the right way, and to make a game plan for them to build those relationships with the party owners before they just show up and figuring out how to do that. So I'd love to maybe just zoom out a little bit and look at what are the big steps and what do people that are watching this right now... Let's say that I'm an artist, and I have an EP or I have an album of songs that I feel really proud of. How do they kind of get started along this route of getting it licensed to TV and film?

Michael Elsner: That's great. It's going to start just like when you're finishing a record and you're going to go... Generally speaking, in the professional world when people finish an album, the mix engineer will mix multiple versions of a song. Now, we're all very much aware of, okay, a master and an instrumental. But the reality is that when you're a professional-level musician and you're with a record label and you're really making a record, the mix engineer is going to mix out a lot of different versions of your song. He'll mix out the standard mix with a vocal up, call it a vocal up one dB, vocal up two, maybe a vocal down, just these slight little tweaks, because that's what the mastering engineer is going to... When the mastering engineer sits and sequences everything and masters all the songs together, they're going to try the different ones and see which one ultimately sounds best in the actual flow of the record.

Michael Elsner: Really, in the professional world, when a professional artist is mixing out their albums, they're mixing more than just a full mix and an instrumental mix. If we take that over into the licensing world, it's going to be very similar. You're going to start by always having your full mix. You don't have to do all the craziness of the vocal ups and downs and all that kind of stuff because that brings in a whole mastering issue. You're going to do your full mix, you're going to do your instrumental mix, but you're also going to want to provide your end users with multiple other options. That'd be the first thing I would tell you to do.

Michael Elsner: I would tell you to, at the very least, always have an instrumental mix. You have to. But if you have the ability to sit with your mix engineer, I would have them burn out multiple other versions for you. Simple ones would be even like an acoustic version. If the song started with just acoustic guitar and vocals, then you start adding all the other layers in the recording, strip all those layers off so it's just back to the acoustic vocal. You could do a stripped-down version. You could alternate some levels. If you have some heavy guitars and some, we'll say, EDM keyboards, you could maybe change the levels on that mix, and you go from your rock mix to an EDM mix. A lot of times when you're sitting in the mix process, as a mix engineer is putting stuff together, you start hearing all these other things like, "Oh, that'd be really cool." Maybe even just the bass and the drums are creating a really cool groove. That could be its own mix, a bass and drum mix.

Michael Elsner: When you start really listening to TV... This is the first thing I always encourage everyone to do, is just start listening to TV. When you start really listening to TV, you start hearing all these other musical elements. You'll be watching a TV show, and you might just hear a section where it's just bass and drums. Well, if you have bass and drums on all of your songs, why don't you create a bass and drum mix? Because now you have another opportunity for that placement.

Michael Elsner: Creating stem mixes... Stem mixes are the instrument groups, stereo mixes of instrument groups. You have a drum stem, bass stem, a guitar stem, a vocal stem, a keyboard stem, maybe an orchestra stem. The reason why having these elements is important is because you're always going to be playing along with dialogue and sound design. Sound design is all the other sounds that are being used on a TV show, for example, birds chirping, the sound of the car driving down the street, the sound of the mailbox closing if you're getting the mail, all those things, footsteps on a wood floor and stuff like that. There's all these other sounds that are mixed into the recording to make it sound very real and to draw you in. That's called sound design.

Michael Elsner: When you get further down the chain to the final person in the process, who's called a re-recording mixer, that person mixes all the dialogue from all the actors, all the sound design, just the various effects, sometimes also known as Foley, F-O-L-E-Y, and then, of course, the music. What you'll notice is the music is underneath all that stuff. It needs to make room for all the other stuff, all the footsteps and all that stuff. In certain scenes you might hear something that's just an acoustic guitar and a vocal because there's dialogue over it, and then right when that dialogue ends, it might crossfade into the full version.

Michael Elsner: And when you really listen, you're like, "Oh, wow, that was amazing how they wrote that piece like that." Well, it's not necessarily how they wrote that piece like that. It's how the editor took these multiple alternate mixes, maybe just that acoustic mix up until that moment, and at that moment, then he crossfaded into the full mix and it sounds like it was intended. It sounds natural. These are the people further down the line utilizing your music in the ways that complement the scene.

Michael Elsner: As far as stems go, why do you deliver stems? Well, because in the music space, we mix in stereo, we have a left and right speaker. But in the TV world, everything is surround sound. It's 5.1. It's 7.1. There's sounds going all around you. That's what the re-recording mixer's job is. His job is to put all that stuff around you. When you go to the movie, that's how you hear all that stuff going sideways and forward and backward and all that stuff.

Michael Elsner: There are times where they want that. They want that freedom to be able to go, "Well, in this space, I want to put the drums up here, I want to put the bass and the guitars over here, and I kind of want to get that vocal back here." Well, if you're only handing them a stereo mix, they can't do that.

Michael Elsner: You're competing with professionals. It's a professional business, and the professionals are delivering music to the end users the way the end users need it and want it. So if you want to play the game with the professionals, you've got to play the game like the professionals do. It would start by having these types of mixes available. Now, if you can't go farther back into your catalog, you only have a full mix and an instrumental mix, that's okay. You can definitely start there, but moving forward, as you continue moving forward in your music career and with your songs, you should always be aware of these other mixes and having them created for you by your mix engineer, or if you're mixing your stuff then you create them, so that you can provide them to the editors and the supervisors and the re-recording mixers who are going to be utilizing your music in the licensing world. I would start there.

Michael Walker: Beautiful. Okay, so basically as a recap, the music engineers that are kind of the final touch on how music gets placed into TV and film, a lot of times they need to adapt the music. It doesn't fit perfectly the way that they would want it to, and so in order to adapt, they need to have, or at least ideally you can provide them with, the stems. The stems are basically groups of each of the instrument types, so like guitars and vocals. That makes it really easy for them to mix it together, to lower the volume on the guitars and whatever and kind of mix it together. That's really important because that gives them the flexibility to be able to adapt it to fit the placement that they're trying to put it on. That's one way that people really can compete with professionals, is by actually being able to provide all those stems.

Michael Elsner: Yeah. And keep in mind that professionals are not some weird group of people just living out in LA who are just writing music for TV. Professionals are people who could be living right down the street from you. A lot of people I know who write music and are very successful writing music for TV don't live in Los Angeles anymore. One of my good friends who's a very, very, very successful composer works on TV shows all the time. He doesn't live in LA anymore. You don't have to live there.

Michael Elsner: Anyone watching this interview right now could be a professional musician who's writing music for TV shows. As far as being professional, all you're doing is you're delivering music the same... You just understand the business. That's the biggest thing. How do you become a professional in this side of the business? By understanding the business. When you start just showing up, like showing up to that party with the platter, you're showing up to the end users. You're presenting your music to the end users in a way that allows them to utilize it best.

Michael Elsner: It's really not difficult. It's just having a slight mindset shift of how you're going to approach everything. You can still continue the music industry pursuit and pursue your artist career and building fans and all that stuff. You can absolutely do that, but you just have to adapt a little bit when you're approaching this industry here. Anyone can be a professional in it. You just have to learn how the business works.

Michael Walker: What's up, guys? Quick intermission from the podcast so I can tell you about an awesome free gift that I have for you. I wanted to share something that's not normally available to the public. It's normally reserved for our $5,000 clients that we work for personally. This is a presentation called Six Steps to Explode Your Fan Base and Make a Profit with Your Music Online.

Michael Walker: Specifically, we're going to walk through how to build a paid traffic and automated funnel that's going to allow you to grow your fan base online. The system is designed to get you to your first $5,000 a month with your music. We've invested over $130,000 in the past year to test out different traffic sources and different offers and really see what's working best right now for musicians, and so I think it's going to be hugely valuable for you. If that's something you're interested in, in the description there should be a little link that you can click on to go get that.

Michael Walker: The other thing I wanted to mention is if you want to do us a huge favor, one thing that really makes a big difference early on when you're creating a new podcast is if people click subscribe, then it basically lets the algorithm know that this is something that's new and noteworthy and that people actually want to hear, and so that'll help us reach a lot more people. If you're getting value from this and you get value from the free trainings, then if you want to do us a favor, I'd really appreciate you clicking the subscribe button. All right, let's get back to the podcast.

Michael Walker: I love how complimentary it is to everything else that you're trying to do. If you are trying to build your artist career and you're trying to build a fan base and tour, you're creating music anyways, and so it doesn't take very much effort to talk to your producer or your mixing engineer and say, "Hey, would it be possible to get just the stems bounced out on these songs?" Literally, what took five, 10 seconds gives you this huge amount of adaptability.

Michael Walker: Another question for you is, for someone who hasn't built a lot of relationships yet with music supervisors and they're kind of like, "Hmm, those parties sound pretty cool. They sound like some pretty cool parties. I want to go check them out, but I don't want to be that weird guy who just shows up," how do they start, so they can Google and they can find these people? How do they start thinking about reaching out to people, and how do you do it in a way that isn't weird and that helps you build a relationship with them?

Michael Elsner: Sure. When I started, I administered my catalog fully on my own. What that means is I would send CDs. This is back when I was sending out CDs still. I would send CDs every time I finished a new batch of songs, maybe 10 songs at a time. I would put them on a CD. It was actually nine songs. I did nine songs, and the reason why is because at the time when I was still sending out CDs when I was starting, you could fit 19 songs on a CD. You couldn't fit 20, but you could fit 19. I would always send the master and the instrumental, so that gave me 18. You can't divide 19 by two evenly, so I would go to 18 and divide it by two. You had nine songs. I had nine masters, nine instrumentals. That's how I approached it initially.

Michael Elsner: I would send those CDs out to supervisors, and then I'd be out somewhere, maybe getting some dinner with a friend, and I'd get a phone call that they want to license one of my songs. I'd have to quickly pack up my stuff and get in my car and leave dinner early, and go back home into my house or my studio, or wherever my computer was at the time, and get them the files that they needed sent out, and then print out the PDF that they would send me and sign that, and then scan it and send it back. There is a lot that goes into administering your catalog, and a lot of it is...

Michael Elsner: The licensing world works very quickly. If someone needs to license a song, a lot of times you'll see in a brief that you usually have, most of the time, 24 hours, 36 hours maybe at the most, but this is for a custom type of piece. When it comes to just licensing a track, that is generally taken care of very quickly, usually within less than a day.

Michael Elsner: So you have to really ask yourself, are you going to be able to do that? Are you going to be able to be checking your email often? Are you going to be able to respond to stuff quickly? If you're working a nine-to-five job and you get a call at 11:00 in the morning someone wants to license your song, but they need all the stems and all that stuff by 4:30, are you going to be able to leave your job, go home, get all that stuff packaged up, sign the deal, and send it back in time? These are questions that you really have to ask yourself. For me, I chose about nine years ago now, nine, 10 years ago now, that I was done doing that. It was just too much. It got to be too much to administer my catalog every day. So what I did is I started having someone else take over.

Michael Elsner: Before we get into that, just a little backstory is, like I said earlier, my whole goal was I always wanted to have a publishing deal. I felt like that meant a lot. When you have a whole team of people marketing your music and pitching your music, that was a big indicator for success. For me, that was a bit of a barometer that I wanted to reach in my career for success. I think if at some point you've wanted to have a publisher and getting a publisher was a goal of yours, just raise your hand. Just admit it. I think most musicians want to have a publisher.

Michael Elsner: In the licensing world, a publisher isn't called a publisher. It's called a library. They're the exact same thing, but it just has to do with the history of the TV and the sync world. They're called libraries. It's interesting now. I'll say something about a library to musicians, and they're like, "I don't want to give up any of my publishing. I don't want to sign any of my publishing over." But then in the next sentence, they'll talk about how they want a publishing deal. It starts again kind of going back to just understanding the business. In the licensing world, a library is a publisher, and actually you have a lot more freedom with being signed to a library than you do in the traditional world being signed to a publisher.

Michael Elsner: To answer your question about how to go about this, I'm a big advocate now of working with a library for a number of reasons. When I signed my catalog over to a library, I started having a lot more success with my placements. To give you an example of that, I moved to Nashville a number of years ago. When I moved to Nashville, I had over 750 placements. I now have around... I have over 2,300, so I've tripled that in a fairly short amount of time having a library, which basically means having a whole team promote my songs constantly.

Michael Elsner: Right now as you and I are talking, right now there could very well be a license happening that I'm unaware of. I'll get paid for it and all that stuff, which will be great, but I don't have to sit here and stop my conversation with you and get on the phone and be like, "Hey, Michael, I'll be back. I've got to go print something out quickly, and then I got to go find my stems and I've got to send it all off, and this and that." That's why I'm a big advocate of working with libraries.

Michael Elsner: I know a lot of musicians want to deal with supervisors. The reality is, again, if you don't know the business, which a lot of musicians just don't understand the business, a supervisor is not going to want to work with you. I know that Chris SD says the same thing. It's definitely true. Supervisors don't want to be teaching amateur musicians how to license their music. They want to work with people who are either administrators or libraries, people who do this every day.

Michael Elsner: It starts by understanding that a library in the licensing world is a publisher. You get more freedom working with a library because you are only bound to that library by the songs that you write for them. For example, let's say I write 10 songs, and I want to have one library represent three of them, another library represent three of them, and another library represent four of them. I could do that.

Michael Elsner: In the traditional music industry path, if I write 10 songs and I'm signed with a publisher, that publisher owns all 10 songs. In fact, generally speaking, that publisher will own everything that I write during the term of my contract. If I write 100 songs during the two years that I'm under my deal with that particular publisher, they would own all of those songs. In the licensing world, that's not the case. I own everything that I write until I sign those songs over to the library, and I can sign those songs over to any libraries I choose.

Michael Elsner: In my business, I have three outlets. I call them buckets. I have a company called SonicTremor, and we do trailers specifically. That's all we do. We don't do any pop songs. We don't do commercials. We just do trailers. Then I have just me, and this is the stuff that I do mostly for commercials, just my regular bucket. Then I have the other part of me which is not a company. These two are my own, Michael Elsner. And this is all the songs that I write with any songwriters and anything that doesn't fit into the commercial category or the trailer category.

Michael Elsner: Now, commercials are their own thing. Commercials are generally always going to be over 140 beats per minute. They're always going to be upbeat. They're going to be shorter pieces. Then trailers are more epic and bigger, and they're just written differently. They're written in three sections. You know when you're writing a trailer. You know when you're writing a commercial. Everything that doesn't fit into those fits into this bucket.

Michael Elsner: Now, I have one library that represents this company, which is a partnership that I have with my writing partner. I have another company, another library, that represents every piece of music that I write that I feel is worthy of being a commercial. I send it to them, and they have a lot of success with those for me. Then every other track that I write, over the years I had multiple libraries working with them. But now I have them all funneled under another company name, and that's all administered by a third library.

Michael Elsner: So I have three different libraries, or three different publishers. When I'm writing a song, I can very quickly determine which bucket this is going into. If it's a pop song and I have a songwriter in here writing with me, it's sitting in this bucket. If I'm just writing by myself and it's an upbeat, fast, driving track, it's going to be a commercial. It's going to sit in this bucket. I know where the outlet is. If it's a big, epic symphonic piece that's obviously good for trailers, that's going to sit in this bucket. There's a lot of freedom there to be able to work those catalogs to those specific clients accordingly.

Michael Elsner: At the same point, all of those particular libraries were specifically chosen because of the clients that they have and in the industries that they work with. For example, the company that represents, for example, SonicTremor is a company called 5 Alarm Music. They're owned by ole. ole is, I think, the biggest independent publisher in the world. I have people who will be like, "Hey, Michael, I'm sending my pop tracks to 5 Alarm." I go, "Okay. I didn't tell you to do that." I wouldn't send my pop tracks to them because they have a big catalog already full of that stuff.

Michael Elsner: They're a great company, by the way. They've been very successful for us. But they've been very successful for us in the trailer world, because in the trailer world we fill a niche in that library. There are elements where you have to be pretty specific on how you're placing your music, but the wonderful thing about this is that you can find multiple libraries that can represent multiple styles of music that you write, and represent them successfully. You can have a tremendous amount of success by doing this.

Michael Elsner: I equate it to something like the stock market. In the traditional music industry, if you're signed with a publisher, that's like putting all of your money into Apple. You can only be with one company at a time. And if that company doesn't promote your music or they don't do well for you, then you're kind of screwed.

Michael Elsner: It's kind of like a stock. If that stock goes down, you lose all your money. But in the licensing world, we have the opportunity to go, "I want to work with this company with these songs, so I'm going to put some money into Netflix. I want to work with this company for these songs; I'm going to put some money into Starbucks. And I want to work with this company for these songs; I'm going to put some money into Apple." As they start doing well for you, you're like, "This is great. This is great."

Michael Elsner: But maybe one company starts to not do so well for a while. Who knows? Things change. Well, we always want to make sure that we understand our contracts. We want to always make sure that we do not sign any in perpetuity contracts, and that every contract that we have has a reversion clause. That just means that the rights can revert to you at a certain point.

Michael Elsner: Maybe we have a two-year deal with this company. In that case, if this company is not doing well anymore, like Apple is not doing well anymore stock-wise or something, and we go, "Well, I want to cash out. I want to take my money out of Apple, and I want to put my money into something else," that's what we can do in the licensing world. We can go, "Okay, this company is not doing so well anymore."

Michael Elsner: Maybe they had a big turnover and they got a whole bunch of new employees, and you don't know anyone there anymore. You can take your money out, you can take your songs out, your songs are your business assets, they're money basically, take your songs out, and you go, "Okay, what's another company that would be really good at representing this particular style of music? Oh, that company over there. So now I'm going to put these songs with them."

Michael Elsner: We have a lot of freedom in the licensing side of the industry to be able to work our catalog and have this team work these songs, have this team work these songs, and have this team work these songs. That gives us a lot of opportunity to make consistent income and get placements. If someone starts dropping the ball and they're not doing well anymore, just like a stock, you can pull your assets out and place them elsewhere. That's not true in the traditional music industry path. When you sign a deal with a publisher, they own those songs in perpetuity.

Michael Walker: I love this stuff. This is blowing my mind right now. So to recap what you're saying, sometimes it's valuable to not put all of your eggs in one basket, not investing just in Apple, but actually kind of spreading it out based on their expertise.

Michael Walker: To take things back to the party analogy, maybe you decide, "Do I really want to be the one who's going to all of these parties and going and mixing and mingling with all these people myself, or do I want to get a publisher, who essentially is someone that goes to the parties for you?" They have a team of people who are going to all these different parties and connecting with the different people within those houses, and that gives you more freedom to not necessarily have to be the one on the front lines doing that and building those relationships, when those relationships have maybe already been built to a certain extent.

Michael Elsner: Yeah, we can get ridiculous with the analogies, but a great analogy for the licensing industry is real estate. I think that the two industries are exact clones of each other. The only difference is in real estate, you're selling real property, a house. In licensing, you are granting permission to use, because you're not selling anything, you're granting permission to use or rent a piece of intellectual property. A song is intellectual property.

Michael Elsner: Just going on this path for a second, if you sell your home for sale by owner, you're going to stick a sign out on your front lawn, but you're not going to have access to all the channels that realtors will. You know what I mean? Realtors have their friends and their network. They get a new house coming on the market and be like, "Hey, Bob, I got a new four-bedroom, three-bathroom house coming on the market in this part of town," and blah, blah, blah. They can start getting that stuff out to all their channels, and you can sell your house quickly. Of course, they also have their finger on the pulse of the industry, and they know the real value of that house depending on the location and stuff like that.

Michael Elsner: That's like working with a library. You're working with a team of professionals who know the value of things. They've got their finger on the pulse of the industry every day. They have their marketing channels and their people that they work with all the time.

Michael Elsner: But I feel like when you're a musician and you're just going to go, "I'm going to try and do this on my own and get it out to all these music supervisors," okay, that's like selling your house for sale by owner. It might take you a long time. You could definitely sell your house, but are you going to get the optimal value for it? How much time are you going to spend trying to get it out there and promote it that you could actually be doing... You could actually be spending that time on something that's actually more valuable to you, which is actually building your catalog.

Michael Elsner: That's actually the first part of my process, is to continuously build your catalog, because your catalog, your music, your songs, they are the business assets. They're the assets that you're creating that are going to generate money for you. So for every hour that you spend sitting behind a computer trying to get your music out to supervisors, those are hours that you're losing creating new assets that could be generating income for you.

Michael Elsner: I'm just a big advocate for working with a team of professionals who know what they're doing, who have their marketing channels and their strategies and all that stuff in place, and letting them work your catalog. They are going to take a percentage of it, just like a realtor is going to take a percentage of your home sale, but that allows you to continuously keep getting back to doing what you're good at, writing music and adding to your catalog.

Michael Elsner: The goal with licensing is not to land one big placement or two big placements. Those are called bragging rights, but you're going to blow through that money in no time. The goal with licensing should be to build a career out of it, and the way to build a career out of it is by consistent placements.

Michael Walker: Awesome. Yeah, it's really fascinating. This actually feels like it ripples into a lot of different industries, just because it's all about building a team and about leveraging your core area of expertise and having people that have established relationships. I could go off the deep end here, so I have to-

Michael Elsner: No, I love it. I love it.

Michael Walker: ... pull it back. But even the way our brains work and the way that electrical signals, the dendrites stick out, how there's branches that branch out, building a network of relationships and building a team is something that's a valuable life skill to do. It sounds like with publishers, really that's about plugging into an existing network of expertise. So yes, interesting.

Michael Walker: Michael, again, I know we could really dive deep into this. When I'm talking with someone like you who's a master at whatever field that they're in, I get the sense of the level of depth. The level of understanding is so deep. You probably aren't even aware of the... A lot of it just makes sense to you. It's like, "Oh yeah, this is just how it is." It just oozes out of everything you're saying. I appreciate you taking the time to come here and share some of those nuggets of what you've learned. What would be a good place for people to learn more in terms of what you offer and in terms of your free training resources?

Michael Elsner: Yeah, I created a website called mastermusiclicensing.com. On there, you can go there and you can download a free book that I have. It's a PDF. You can read it in about 45 minutes. It outlines my exact four-step process that I have. We talked really only about the first two steps, and we really only spent actually any time on step two of the process.

Michael Elsner: I have a four-step process that I've used over the years. It's just been very successful for me. I've been teaching this to a lot of my friends. I've been teaching it to my friends since 2005, but I've been teaching it publicly for the last two years. It's awesome to see others who take the information and take action on it succeed, because it does work. The process does work, because the process is all about showing up to that party with that big plate of the hot wings and the spare ribs and the fruits and vegetables. You're showing up and people are going to be like, "This is awesome. Let him in." It's all about bringing value to our end users.

Michael Elsner: It's all about understanding our end users. The end users in the licensing world aren't just music supervisors. There are people past music supervisors. You have music editors. You're also dealing with directors and producers and whatnot, so you have to keep that in mind. Re-recording mixers, they're the end of the chain. There are a number of people further down the line who are going to be utilizing your music, and it's about delivering your music to them in a way that they can utilize it.

Michael Elsner: It doesn't change the process of creating the music, writing the music and stuff. That process starts literally from the time you're mixing. I literally start there. From the time we mix, our process is going to be a little different than the process of when you mix a song and you send it out to the CD duplicator and get your CDs packaged up and sent out to fans. It's a completely different process.

Michael Elsner: You can learn about that four-step process or you can download the book. Then I have blogs and videos and stuff like that. You can go to the blog page, and pages and pages and pages of blogs and videos that I discuss a lot of that stuff. And I do have an online course that I release a couple of times a year. As we're speaking right now, I'm actually finishing up a sync ready challenge program that I'm super excited about. It's about getting your songs sync ready, and ready to be sent out to supervisors and libraries and all the end users. I call them end users, editors and whatnot.

Michael Elsner: But yeah, that's what I have, and I love sharing this. I've been doing this for so long, licensing. I definitely enjoy writing music and getting it out there, but I really, really, really love getting the updates from people who've gone through my program and sharing with me the placements they've gotten, even video clips. I had a guy I know recently send me a video clip of his first placement on a TV show. I just think that's the coolest thing, so I love that.

Michael Walker: Michael, you're awesome. Dude, thank you so much for taking the time to share what you've been working on for the past 20-some years. We really appreciate it.

Michael Elsner: Cool. Thanks. We'll see you soon.

Michael Walker: Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our guest today.

Michael Walker: If you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit subscribe, then that'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends or on your social media, tag us. That really helps us out. Third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take their music careers to the next level. The time to be a modern musician is now, and I'll look forward to seeing you on our next episode.