Charlie.... Indeed.... there's one thing you absolutely must keep in mind when you submit to any music library or commercial end user. The song you send in is going to be used exactly like you send it in the final video production. They're not going to have another group of musicians record it again, and they're not going to take the time to send it back to you saying they really love the song and could you please fix the vocals or the out of tune guitar..... nope, they're going to deep six it and pick another song that does sound professional in every way.

Taxi generally returns 90% of the music submitted for one reason or another. Rainy Day on my music page was one such return. The review said the music was professional, the lyrics nailed the requested scene in the movie. The screener even asked.... "you wrote this for this listing, didn't you?" (yes I did) .... the style is ballad rock and they wanted more of an indy-rock groove. It was a 3 day turnaround. Close deadline and I spent a lot of time on it to get in before the deadline. The screener even said in the review that I "nailed it". I appealed it but the head of screening at taxi agreed that the song was "spot on" but the wrong style and they didn't want to send songs, no matter how well it fit the lyrical aspect of the listing, if the producer didn't want anything outside of his requested musical style risking their relationship with that producer.... so it was a return.

I had about a 90% return rate, which is average, from what I hear. The forwards all ended up in digital oblivion. I did get one really nice A-list library out of it..... but that library never placed the songs and didn't communicate well. Other taxi folks told me the library was a good one. I guess that's their opinion.

I quit using Taxi for a variety of reasons and started using other libraries I found on my own. My placements in TV and film have come from the ones I have found on my own.

But yeah, back to the topic.... the music you send has to be top bar stuff. If you don't have the time to punch out the mistakes or pitch correct the vocal track, don't send it. Taxi will return it. If you are dealing with a publisher or a library, the president or the screener there will not have a very high opinion of your work and will tend to set your stuff on the side to be reviewed only if they can't find what they need (if at all) in the other songs presented. In other words, you get a bad reputation quickly for sending in less than usable music, and that's hard to recover from.

A number of the libraries I use now, had a screener listen to 2 examples of the music I write, record, and produce. Some of them took me several attempts to get the quality up enough to be accepted. There's a lot of really talented people out here writing music for film and TV. With the advent of home studios and really good gear becoming affordable, the quality bar has been raised to stratospheric levels in this area. That alone is making it harder and harder to get placements. Factor the sheer number of songs being submitted for consideration on each listing, and you begin to see that this is hard work.

I still use a few lower cost alternatives than TAXI. No membership and just pay $6 per submission. The more you submit to them, the more listings they send to you to choose from. Another is only $5/mo and I can unsubscribe any time I want.... or submit as many songs as I want. I get emails for new listings on a daily basis. I pick the ones I think are a good fit. Just got an exclusive publishing offer for some of my tunes from that one.

Look around and see if you can land a few other libraries on your own before the TAXI subscription comes up for renewal again.

Last edited by Guitarhacker; 12/19/17 03:09 AM.
You can find my music at:
www.herbhartley.com
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