Breaking Down My 2021 Licensing Income and TV Placements

2021 was my best year yet for TV placements. It has also carved a path for how I will work in the coming years. In this post I will be breaking down the percentage of my income that came from various types of payments (sync fees, backend royalties, etc.). We will also look at how my TV placements were distributed based on major labels and independent libraries.

Breakdown of Income

As you can see from the chart above, the bulk of my earnings came from RF sites and backend royalties. I expect the backend royalties to increase heavily this year, based on my large amount of placements from last year, and the amount of albums that I've had published recently. I am also expecting the RF income to decrease based on the fact that I rarely upload to those sites anymore, and the fact that the market is trending heavily towards the subscription model (which I don't participate in if I can help it).

Distribution of TV Placements

Here you can see the distribution of my TV placements based on libraries with major sub-publishers vs. indie libraries. I should note that I don't have an official count as to how many tracks are with each type of library. To dissect it would be very hard and time consuming, since albums were published at various times, I have various amounts of tracks with different libraries, etc. The best I can do is keep working with the individual libraries that do best for me.

Exclusive vs. Non-Exclusive

The amount of money I earned over the year was slightly more for my exclusive tracks as opposed to NE. Once again, I expect this to increase heavily in the coming years as the backend royalties trickle in and the RF market changes. To my knowledge, my TV Placements came 100% from exclusive tracks! As we all know, sometimes we don't find out about placements until long after. For this reason I would wager that I maybe had 1-2% of my placements come from non-exclusive tracks. Time will tell, but my efforts have been focused on exclusive tracks for the past 2+ years.

Everyone has a different path. If you know your income breakdown I'd love to see how it compares! Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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