51 Marketing Ideas for Film Music Composers

Attention spans are short and very demanding. If you want to make your art into a business, you have to brand yourself and then market your art. No getting away from it.

10 Lessons on “Breaking In”

I often get asked for a checklist of things one can do to break in to the business. Here is my personal “top ten” of lessons learned.

Worst Advice for Beginning Composers

When you are starting out, everyone has an opinion. And here’s mine.

You’re Not Ready

You’ve been told you’re talented. You just graduated music school. You have your plane ticket. You’re gonna be famous. Not so fast, Johnson.

To Be Busy or To Not Be Busy

Being busy creates demand for your work. As humans, we subconsciously see what everyone else is getting and we want that, too. Ultimately, you want to create demand for yourself and your music, and perhaps the simple act of being a busy composer, regardless of what you are busy with… will do that for you. Or will it?

The Burnproof Film Composer

In our industry, it’s go, go, go, go, go, and go some more. How long can you drive on one tank of gas?

What Is Your Biggest Weakness?

It’s hard to talk about what you suck at.

What Is Your Greatest Motivator?

“Motivation” is a strange thing. Be careful how you answer this one: We are certainly aware of the risk involved in even putting this question out there—we are inviting a deluge of the token “writing music is who I am” comments. Honestly, though, if you lost everyone and everything in your life tomorrow, we’d bet money that the least important “treasure” would be all of the shows you’ve worked on.

With that in perspective…. What is your greatest motivator?

Caveats of Convenience—Pt. 2

Part 2 of Deane’s provoking series on “lazy writing”.

Budgets: Putting Your Money Where Your Mock-Up Is

“How much money will I make as a film composer?” That’s the six million dollar question, isn’t it? As much as we can try to come up with a complete answer, the only true answer really is, “Whatever you can!” The bigger question—and the one I want to tackle here—is “How much money do live players eat up during a film score’s production and how do you plan for the bloodshed?” The answer to that questions is… “I wish there was an answer.”

Now that I’ve been no help at all, let’s see if we can figure it out together…

SCOREcast Poll Discussion

In the spirit of this month’s focus on branding and marketing, we wanted to give you all a chance to voice your opinion on what method of marketing you like best. So once you’ve taken our poll in the right side bar, tell us in the comments why you chose your answer. Why is that particular method the easiest for you?

Heather Fenoughty: Personality Branding

The month of June has been one of reflection, for me, on the first half of the year, consolidation, evaluation, and looking forward to what the rest of the year will hold. It’s the calm between storms, if you will. One of the things I’ve been mulling over and considering is business development and branding. After all, my freelance work is a business, and it deserves the same care and attention as any business to grow and become more profitable.

Through this process, I’ve become fascinated with the ‘Myers-Briggs’ test. There are loads of different kinds of personality tests out there, but this is the one I’ve found the most useful and accurate for how I approach life and, more importantly, the business of scoring picture.