SoundCloud 101

SoundCloud is a versatile platform for composers and sound content creators of all kinds. Oliver Sadie goes inside to bring you the low-down.

Collaborating with Technology

For this month’s column regarding collaborations, I was thinking about all of this great technology these days, the Internet, and how people have – now more than ever – the ability to collaborate at many levels and from any location in the world. Songwriting, Arranging, and Scoring can now have many different authors if you so desire. We have the ability to leverage the talents of session players, arrangers, musicians, producers, et cetera to help create great sounding music. At first you might not embrace this, especially if you don’t want to split credits, publishing, and royalties. So lets assume for this article we are beyond that and you need or want to collaborate, either…

Selling Music Online: The Stock Audio Market

How many of you buy photos or have even heard of the website, iStockphoto.com? Well…the stock audio market is pretty much the same – license music tracks for a one off small fee. It is “royalty free”, meaning (obviously) you won’t receive any back-end royalties from it. Due to this, you would think that you would be rewarded by this with a greater one off payment – but you would be wrong :) The “Royalty Free/Stock Audio” market can be a small stream of income for you, and it can be enough to pay your bills in those months where an income is scarce (quite a deal for a professional composer OR composer on his…

Houston Haynes: Personal Scheduling In an Online, Mobile World – Chime In!

Like so many jobs in the entertainment biz, this career demands an ever-increasing level of technical savoir faire. And yet so many composers have blind spots when it comes to leveraging technology to keep their work schedule on track. We’re often housed in a facility full of computers, with a cell phone strapped to our belt and a bagged laptop under the desk. Yet we’re still surprised when a session runs long and we miss a meeting, an email goes unanswered or we lose a time window to return an important call at a respectable hour. Sometimes assistants can help avoid such pratfalls. But just like most composers can’t afford a full-time orchestrator, copyist or…