How to License Your Music - Beginner’s Guide to Licensing Songs Online

Do you want to know how to license your music? Whether you dream of learning how to license your music for film and tv, or just need to earn a little income on the side, licensing your music can be incredibly rewarding.

Just a quick note about music licensing, though - it’s not a “get rich quick” scheme or a road to instant fame. but if you keep at it, you will find success.

This guide on how to license your music will cover the following topics:

• An Overview of Music Licensing
• What is Sync Licensing?
• How to Write a Song that Can be Licensed
• How to Record a Song for Licensing
• Mix & Master your song for Licensing
• Creating Alternate Mixes
• Getting Your Songs Ready for Licensing
• Where to License Your Music - Including the Best Sites to License Your Music
• How to upload and tag the song with keywords
• How to license your music for film and TV
• Earn more money from licensing your music by registering with a Performing Rights Organization
• Promote the song through social media and start selling songs!

Interested in learning how start licensing your music this week so you can start earning money from your music? Click here to join a free five-day music licensing crash course.

My Music Licensing Background

Up until a few years ago, I didn’t have a clue how to get my music licensed. I had some vague notion along the lines of:

1. Record songs
2. ?????
3. Profit!

Through a lot of hard work, I figured out how to license my music! Since then, I've earned over $10,000, had placements on TV and Netflix, and just feel damn good about myself. That's why I think music licensing is one of the best side jobs for musicians.

So let’s break out the steps of the process and build you a quick road map to get you started with stock music licensing side hustle, because learning how to license my music is one of the best decisions I've ever made. 

How to License Your Music 101

In this in-depth video tutorial, I'll walk you through all the steps involved in licensing your music. Think of it as an introduction to music licensing, or music licensing 101. It's got lots of great slides and moves at a relaxing pace! 

So if you've got 30 minutes to spend, it's probably the best way to get an introduction to licensing your music!

How Does Stock Music Licensing Work?

Here is a big picture overview of the way music licensing works. You upload a song that you've created (and own) to a music licensing website. You then describe your song and add additional keywords the potential clients can use to find the song.

Then clients from around the world, ranging from TV sound editors to YouTubers to pod casters to video game designers, search the website. They may be looking for something like "energetic EDM upbeat" or "nu-metal mariachi tango." Basically, sync licensing websites work a lot like eBay!

If the client decides to purchase your music, these websites provide them a sync license for your music. Basically, the website receives an upfront fee from the client for the right to use your music in their project. The website takes a commission of this fee, typically between 40-60%, and then you get the remainder.

If you're lucky and track you licensed gets placed on TV, you may also be entitled to backend performance royalties, which can total thousands of dollars!

How to Sell Music Online

Working with music licensing libraries is one of the easiest ways to sell music online. A music library will take care of all the complicated stuff, like contracts, payment, taxes, etc. Plus, it's in their interest to sell your music, since they take a portion of the revenue.

And once you've had some placements in TV or Film, you can use that to help promote your other music!

As I'll describe in more detail below, sync licensing is where you team up with music licensing sites to try to get your music licensed for TV, Radio, Podcasts, video games, YouTube videos, etc.

While these types of sales may be fewer than you would receive from iTunes, I make $10-20 (or more) every time one of my songs is licensed. And you can still put your music on iTunes for sale, if you'd like!

What is Sync Licensing?

The technical term for what we're talking about here is creating sync licensing music. So what is sync licensing? Basically, as the owner of your music, you have the right to choose how it's used. Just like a celebrity has a right to be paid for using their image to endorse a product, music owners have a right to be paid for the use of their music when it is used for something like a YouTube video.

This payment is called a sync fee. And it's separate from other royalties. 

You may have heard of the term "royalties" when talking about music licensing. While this type of music is often called "royalty free," it's often anything but. As noted, the sync fee is already a royalty.

If you want to learn more about this, you dig more into the nuance of selling royalty free music.

How to Write Your Song for Music Licensing

In this section we'll talk about two key considerations for writing music for licensing. First we'll talk about what to write, then I'll teach you about the importance of song structure in stock music.

What types of Stock Music to Write?

When you're writing music for licensing, it's always important to be true to yourself. Don't try to overthink things in an attempt to license your music. Just add these simple rules to what you already do, and you'll be sure to be licensing your music in no time!

While the most popular type of stock music is something called "corporate music", I always say that any genre of music can work for stock music, from Celtic death metal to ragtime. First, the most popular genres are probably over-saturated. Second, in the more obscure genres, you'll like face less competition, increasing your chance for more sales.

But the most important reason to make stock music that you enjoy is because this is supposed to be a fun side hustle. Making music that you don't enjoy is not enjoyable! So don't make this feel like a grind. Make music that you love and you'll love journey of making it!

And if musical compositions aren't your thing, you can still be successful by recording licensable versions of public domain songs. Just be sure these songs are in the public domain or you could be sued for copyright infringement.

The two most important parts of your Song

There are three things that you have to get right with every stock music song. The most important thing is that you quickly capture, and then maintain, a potential client's attention. Successful stock music for licensing tends to have three traits:

1. Stock music that gets licensed maintains a consistent emotion and tone.
2. Stock music that gets has a clear structure
3. Having a clear ending

The Importance of the Intro

It's been said that these days you only have 7 seconds to get someone's attention. This means that any song you write for licensing needs to have a clear attention-grabbing intro that clearly foreshadows where the song will go.

You can have a slow build in intro, either. 

And I'd recommend that any major instruments make an appearance in the intro, as well. So don't wait until a minute into your song for the drums to drop or the vocals to start. If someone listened to the song that long and were interested, they would probably be surprised and change their minds once they heard how different the song got.

Conversely, if they wanted a song with vocals, they may not wait until the one minute-mark to hear them.

Tease every musical element upfront in the intro, then you can build up over the next minute.

Second, (most) stock music the sells well is tells a story with an intro, body, and conclusion. As we mentioned, in order to be successful with licensing your music, it's essential to grab your listener's attention with a catchy intro. Here are five tips for writing a great song intro.

Maintain a Consistent Vibe

When it comes to maintaining a consistent vibe, it's important not to get too clever. For example, "A Day in the Life" by the Beatles is one of the most brilliant songs ever recorded, but the massive changes in tone make it totally inappropriate for music licensing. 

Why is having a major change in your song bad for music licensing?

Because you want a potential client to know exactly what type of music they're listening to from the moment they hit play! If it’s a dramatic classical piece, it should remain a dramatic classical piece.

If it’s energetic funky hip hop, then don’t mix it up with a weird interlude. This may be one of the hardest lessons to learn about how to license your music, but it will ensure that your songs are marketable to the widest amount of buyers.

But you also have to keep your listener's attention. So you want to make sure that your song is constantly evolving, and that you move from verse to chorus and back faster than you might normally.

End Strongly

Finally, all stock music should end with what's called a "button" ending. That is a tight final hit of a chord (usually of the tonic) that rings out naturally. It should usually be supported with bass, kick drum, crash cymbal and whatever other instruments are part of the song.

Turning back to "A Day in the Life," it ending chord would perhaps be the most perfect stock ending you could imagine. It clearly resolves, but also is interesting.

How to Record Your Song For Music Licensing

The most important thing to keep in mind when trying to license your music is that you can only use "cleared" samples. What does that mean? Well, you have to have permission to use the underlying sounds.

So you can't take a smooth Michael McDonald hit from the 80s, sample a few seconds of it, and then include it in a song for licensing. But if you download samples from reputable sample libraries, you're usually allowed to use the samples in your productions.

Obviously you're going to want your songs to sound as professional as possible. However, recording your music at a professional studio is unlikely to be cost effective. Most of the songs you release for licensing won't earn you very much money.

You have no way to really guess which songs will be successful, so you need to keep your production costs down. That means learning to be a better producer and mixer.

If you're focused on selling your songs, then when you record, the main thing to focus on is avoiding “distracting” sounds and performances. You want to avoid harsh resonances and feedback (unless the song calls for it). In other words, you want a nice clean performance. 

Just put yourself in the shoes of a buyer – they’re probably buying production music to play in the background. You don’t need to worry that you can’t capture pristine sounds like Nigel Goodrich, you just need to be good enough to get a clear, clean recording. That way, viewers focus on the message without getting distracted by the song.

Mixing & Mastering Your Song for Music Licensing

Looking at a song licensing marketplace, you don’t need to have a very good mix or loud mastering to successfully sell lots of stock music. But it doesn’t hurt. If you want to license your own music, just follow these simple steps.

With mixing, focus on getting the levels right, and cleaning up mud and harshness. If you know what you’re doing and you’re good at it, then by all means do your thing. Focus on a clean sound - use these 6 mixing tips from a BBC trained engineer to make sure your music sounds professional.

If you don’t have a clue how to mix, there are a lot of great resources (some free) to teach you how. Check out Youtube or The Recording Revolution. But for now, just commit to getting a little better with each song.

And you’re probably better off using compression and reverb VERY sparingly until you’ve gotten the hang of them.

When it comes to mastering, there is no secret sauce. If you’ve been working with your own track the whole time, then it should basically sound the way you want it to, in which case you should only use mastering to crank up the volume before applying a limiter.

But please don’t ruin your mix by boosting the volume too much. It’s terrible for the song, and the people that buy your stock music really don’t seem to care that much about volume. If your song averages -8 dBFs and peaks at -1dBFs, you're good to go!

Besides, buyers can always crank up the volume further if they want! These final versions will become your master recordings which you'll shop around.

That said, if you want to get better at mastering at help ensure that your songs grab your clients' attention, check out this free mastering cheat sheet.

Earn More Money Licensing Your Music with Alternate Mixes

Alternate mixes are one of the easiest ways to increase your music licensing income. In addition to selling the full mix of your song, many clients are looking to license shorter or simpler versions of your music. 

What are alternate mixes, also known as "edits"?

Just put yourself in the shoes of someone looking to license music: either they're planning on adding a voice over, or they want to use it for just a short period of time. If you don't have a mix of your song available, they're unlikely to buy it!

Buyers of stock music are often working under tight deadlines and may not have time to perform much editing to your music. The easier you can make their jobs, the more likely you are to license your music.

If found that these alternate mixes are the ones most likely to be licensed:

• No vocal mix
• No lead instrument mix
• No drums mix
• Just drum and bass mix
• 30 second mix
• 60 second mix
• Loop
• Ending hit

So be sure to create each of these versions of your song - and master them! If you want to estimate how much you can earn from music licensing, check out this free music licensing earnings calculator.

Should You Register Your Copyright Your Music?

In the United States, you automatically own the copyright to your music the minute it's affixed to a medium, whether that's writing it out or recording it. But in order to really protect yourself when you license music, you need to register your copyright with U.S. Copyright Office. This will create an official government record of your ownership, which you'll need to prevail in court. You need to register your actual sound recordings as well as compositions.

It's pretty easy to register your copyright, and doesn't cost that much money. But if you're creating 50 songs a year, it can get up there. Of course, law suits also cost a lot of money since you'll need to hire an attorney who is an expert in copyright law.

While certain libraries and buyers will only purchase a license if it's copyrighted. And some libraries will want to be the ones that register the copyright after they buy the song from you.

And then, many music licensing libraries and buyers do not care. Given the expense in time and money, and the low likelihood that some one will steal your copyright (and the high cost of you suing them if they do), you may not see any benefit to registering the copyright all of your tracks. Many smaller producers do not go to the trouble of securing copyrighted music, even though they are unofficially the copyright holder.

Now that said, every country has different copyright laws, so be sure to see what works in your country. 

Getting Your Songs Ready for Music Licensing

Before you go ahead and upload your songs, you want to do a little quality control! Each library may have requirements about the final format of your files (.Wav vs .Mp3; 48khz vs 44khz, etc). You'll save yourself a ton of time if you make sure that your songs comply with whatever formatting requirements each stock music library requires.

You'll also want to take this opportunity to make sure that your file names are correct. Make sure the name of each song represents which alternate mix it is, too. This will make it much easier to keep track of things.

Most importantly, before you upload your songs to a music licensing website (here are the 4 best music licensing websites currently accepting sumissions), be sure to trim any dead space at the beginning or end of the song that may have cropped up! Most music libraries will reject songs with too much dead space, so a little work now can save you a big headache later!

Where to License Your Music - Including the Best Sites to License Your Music

After years of experience, here is my list of the three best sites to license your music for beginners. Now, you could try to upload to every site out there, but in my experience, most sites never result in any sales, so you are just wasting your time using the "pray and spray" technique.

So stop wasting your time researching where to license your music, and start spending that extra time on effort on making more music and licensing it!

In my experience, the three best sites to license your music are:

1. Pond 5
2. AudioJungle
3. AudioSparx

(Note that this is a referral link, meaning I get a commission if you purchase anything from the Pond 5 - but I don’t not get a referral for recommending that you sign up as an artist. It's just my honest belief it's the best site for folks new to licensing).

If you want to see the differences between Pond 5 vs. AudioJungle, check out this roundup post. For most folks wondering where to license their music, I think it's best just to start with Pond 5 for 6 months and then grow from there.

The good news is that these sites generally have different licenses for different size audiences, so a small business owner looking to make a video pays a different rate than a big business. The bad news is that you have no control over the use of music, so your song could end up promoting a product you object to.

If you've got a record label, they might have other contacts.

Update March 2022: I've been hearing the AudioJungle is becoming harder and harder for new musicians to work with. It might not be worth your time if you're just starting out.

Upload the Song and Tag it with Keywords (Metadata) That Sell

I recommend signing up for an account with Pond 5 for the reasons described in this post. You can’t go wrong with them, and you can always join other sites later.

This free mini course will turbo charge turbo charge your music licensing success!

From there, you’ll want to upload your first song(s) and give it a nice descriptive title. Many music licensing sites will place a high emphasis on the song title for ranking search results. So to have better success licensing your music, be sure to include a keyword or two in your title. 

I've had a lot of success with a format like this: "Grim Reaper (Energetic Death Metal)."  

Be sure to write a strong description & use 50 evocative keywords. These keywords are called metadata, and it's really important to get it right. This step is honestly just as important as creating licensable music, because no one will find your song without a good description, title, and keywords.

For the description of the song, you want to craft a short narrative to let the reader know about the emotion of the song, what it sounds like, how long it lasts, and how it might be used.

For the keyword metadata, you’ll want to use a solid mix of terms that describe the tone of the song, who it sounds like, what its technical details are, any unusual instruments used, and how it might be used, but not in a narrative way.

Can You Use Social Media Promotion to License More Songs?

You'd think that it would be natural that online music licensing could be boosted with online promotions on digital platforms, though I'm not convinced.  I don’t have evidence that using social media directly boosts sales, but in my own experience I have seen a strong correlation between when I started adding social media to my toolset and when my sales reached a new peak. 

And a lot of stock music musicians more successful than me use it, so it must be helpful (if nothing else, it boosts the odds that your song will rank in external search engines).

I would recommend using three platforms to start.

Twitter, Soundcloud, and on your own webpage (not technically social media, I know).

With Twitter and Soundcloud, you need to focus on building a following just as much as you need to focus on promoting your song. By building a following, you increase the odds someone will click on one of your links or share it. 

By tracking how many clicks my links receive, I know that this website drives a fair number of visitors to my stock music on Pond 5 (though I can’t track whether they buy my music online). However, a website is still give you a static base of operations from which to promote and highlight your songs, and is something that people are more likely to encounter through a Google search.

How to license your music for film and TV

While the majority of buyers on stock music sites don't represent film or tv companies, I have still gotten a couple of placements a year as background music. My music has been included in an award-wining indie horror short, TV shows, and a Netflix documentary. Music licensing may be the easiest way into the music industry.

Getting these songs licensed for film and TV took no additional work on my part. Clients simply purchased my music through Pond 5, and then used them in their productions.

Music licensing for film can be really rewarding personally and professionally, but it's not something you should pursue until you've started to master the basics of music licensing and are getting consistent sales. That's because there are so few opportunities for music licensing for film that if you mess up at the beginning, you may not get a second chance. 

However, as you become a more experienced producer, you'll gain additional opportunities for licensing your music for film and TV. Once your songs of a higher quality, you can start submitting them to exclusive libraries, which have a higher percentage of TV and film clients. When you give the exclusive rights to a piece of music to a library, they often become the copyright owner of your sound recordings in exchange for a fee.

Or you can even start to develop relationships directly with a music supervisor on TV and film and try directly pitching songs to them! Don't crowd their inbox, but if you've got the perfect song and their contact information, don't hesitate!

If you have a legit record company distributing your music, they might also have music industry contacts that they'll pitch the music to.

Earning More Money from Your Licensing Through Public Performance Royalties

If you're lucky enough to get a song placed on TV, then you are also going to be entitled to earn public performance royalties! Essentially any place, like radio stations, must secure public performance licenses. These backend royalties are collected by your Performing Rights Organization (also called music rights organizations).

In American the two main performing rights organizations are ASCAP and BMI. I use BMI and would recommend it!

These performance royalties can be one of the biggest possible perks of song licensing, because if your song gets licensed for the right show, you could be earning serious bank. 

In order to get paid for these performances, you need to be sure that you register each song with your PRO. Then, when your song is broadcast as part of a TV show, the production company files a "cue sheet" with your PRO. Every TV station pays a license fee to the PRO, and depending on how frequently your song is played, you earn a pro-rated share of those fees. 

Sometimes it's only a few dollars per broadcast, but it can really add up. Backend royalties have boosted my music licensing earnings by thousands of dollars through broadcasting music I licensed through Pond 5.

And the best news is that every time that TV show is rebroadcast or streamed, you get paid. It's one of the ways the music licensing can really create passive income for you!

As you start to improve the quality of your music, you may start licensing your music through music publishers. They will often be responsible for selling the synchronization license, public performance license and master use license, and unfortunately they'll usually take a 50% for all of it. But they also help you get your music placed in opportunities that would otherwise be impossible.

Closing thoughts on how to license your music

So there you have it. Each of these previous steps is very difficult to perfect, but incredibly easy to start.

So you should start on this sooner rather than later. You are not aiming for your first song to be perfect. You’re aiming for your first song to be good enough. And for each song to be a little better than that. 

A little better written.

A little better recorded.

A little better produced.

A little better described.

And a little better promoted.

If you really want to learn how to license your music, check out this free course! Even if you're not making sound recordings of original music, you can still get into licensing.

If you commit to constant improvement instead of immediate perfection, you will absolutely be selling songs online. And the sooner you start writing, the sooner you start selling songs. And once you start earning income from your licensing your music every month, you'll see why music licensing is one of the best side jobs for musicians!

If you're looking for other music side hustles, check out this list of the 9 best music side jobs.