RECORDING November 2022 - 65

NOVEMBER 2022
TAXI's Virtual Road Rally 2021
Production Music Libraries: What they are and what they do for you
With Dean Krippaehne: Part 3
Interviewed by Michael Laskow
So how long does it take to see the income from the
moment something is placed? Let's say you've got
something that gets placed in a reality show, one of
your cute little cues that would be for like kittens playing
with each other. You've got some of those, like the
best in the business for those, actually. And it ends up
in a reality show tomorrow-which is November
fourth-how long will it be before any form of payment
shows up on your BMI or ASCAP statement?
In general, it's nine months before you get it from
ASCAP or BMI. Foreign royalties, if it gets placed in
France or somewhere over there, it can be a year and
a half in general to get your royalties. For domestic,
it's generally nine months.
And I'm sure that the music supervisor or video editor
who slugs in your music in France picks up the phone
and calls you up, " Dean, we love that song of yours;
we're gonna put it in our TV show. " They tell you every
time your music is getting used, right? [laughs]
Never. I think I have one or two publishers that...
Well, if somebody gets a sync fee for your... Yeah,
there are times when you'll find out much sooner. If
you get a sync fee up front, you'll find out, because a
lot of my contracts say they have to pay me within
60 days of whenever they get the money, so you'll
find about that sooner. But they are not picking up
the phone and calling me.
I think there are a lot of people who don't know how
this industry works, don't understand the speed of
which it works; they don't understand the freneticism
on the end that the music supervisor is working in a
really frantic mode, the editor is working in a frantic
mode. Musicians are used to wanting to be coddled
and informed, and somebody's gonna help them move
through his or her career. That's the not the reality of
music in the sync licensing world. It's basically your
music gets picked by an editor for a reality show, they
slug it in, they fill out a cue sheet. The publisher doesn't
even know about it generally, you don't know about
it, and then get your statement from ASCAP or BMI
months later and say, " Look at that, I made $13.76
because I had 12 seconds of music in Duck Dynastyor
whatever. " You were the king of Duck Dynasty, if I
remember, right?
Yeah, Duck Dynasty did really well for me. I liked the
Duck show. I don't know exactly how many tracks I
had placed in that show, but the first three seasons I
think I had music in 40 episodes. I don't know how
many I ended up having in total, and for some of
those, I had five or six placements in one episode.
So, it did really well for me. Thanks to TAXI for
making that connection.
Absolutely, man. Can you give us kind of a range...?
When I was having that conversation with (hit Country
songwriter) Jeffrey Steele, he said to me, " So how
much do I get if you get one of my songs in a TV show?
Is it $75k? " And I went, " Noooo. " I mean, Jeffrey Steele
is a huge writer, so he might get a lot more than Dean
would get, or a typical TAXI member or somebody
who's got their music in a library. If you're an up-andcoming
star that's had some sort of a brand, or you are
a big songwriter, you're gonna get, I don't know, for a
song in a big feature film, you might get $10,000,
$20,000, $50,000. If you're Dean Krippaehne, that
same placement might get you $3,000, $5,000, something
like that, for a big film. For a TV show, if you're
getting something in Duck Dynasty, how much of a
sync fee do you get up front?
With Duck Dynasty, I got zero sync fee up front for
all of those. I would say that in general-I'm speaking
in general terms, because there are always
exceptions to this-but in general, with cable shows
you're not usually getting a sync fee. With network
shows, you're often getting a sync fee, and that can
be anywhere-depending how much they want the
song and is it in the foreground or is it
background-that can be anywhere from $500 to
quite a few thousand dollars. And sometimes ads
can pay even more. If you get a placement in a TV
commercial, you can make $10,000 or more if it's a
national spot. And they can renew it every six
months or every year, and you can get that sync fee
again. So, yeah, in general, a lot of the stuff I do gets
no sync fees. And a lot of the income, especially for
cable, comes from the back-end [performance royalties].
But with network stuff, you can get some
decent sync fees, which can add up.
This is a business where a big, hit songwriter can
write one hit song a year and it makes them enough
money for two or three years. And in the [sync side]
of the business, you get your first 10 songs in catalogs,
and then you get 20, and then you get 50 and
then you get 100, and you're really getting about
500 to 1,000 songs [in catalogs] before you can turn
this is into a living. And for me, I didn't do it as fast
as some people. I thought I was doing a lot of cues;
I was doing at my peak maybe 150 cues a year.
And then our mutual friend [and TAXI member]
Matt Vanderbough... we've heard his story. And the
guy's producing 500 cues a year, and I'm going,
" Dude, you have no life. " So, it can be done, and
you can really speed up the process if you want to
make a decent living at this stuff. But you've got to
produce a lot of cues fast, and I just didn't want to
give up the rest of life and do them that fast.
But it's a penny business. A lot of times for your placements,
you're gonna get $1.18 or $6.48, but it's
cumulative, and it does add up, andit keeps growing
over time. And we've maybe got a dozen or more
members that are in the six-figure club, and a lot of
members that are making tens of thousands of dollars
a year doing this. You know, they have a day job, and
they're doing this in their spare time at night and on
weekends. It's not going to happen overnight. It does
take time, but if you stick with it and get it right,
you're gonna create a nice second income.
In my tech company, we developed a plan for
micro-licensing. And our whole theme is would you
rather get $20,000 for a sync for your tune, or
would you rather get a dollar micro-licensed a million
times throughout the world. So, yeah, I'd like to
brag about getting something for $20,000, but actually
I'd rather have a million dollars for something
micro-licensed a million times at a dollar a piece.
How do you choose? There are good production music
libraries and less than good ones. I always say that if
you're meeting them through TAXI, you don't have to
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