11/9/2020 Meta 1 8 1 – Music Tag Editor
Tag your Music with Metadata. You’ve made all this great music; you burned a ton of Cd’s and are headed off to a conference. You hand the CD to several music supervisors and industry professionals. You feel good, heck, you feel great! You are hopeful about all your new connections.
An In Depth Guide To Meta-Tagging Your Tracks For Stock Music Libraries
Posted by Aaron Davison on Friday, September 21, 2012 Under: September 2012
Today's post is a guest post by stock music expert, Aaron Saloman. Aaron and I recently created an in depth course together all about how to make money with stock music libraries called 'How To Make Money With Stock Music Libraries' (fitting title!)If you purchase our course this weekend only, you'll save 20% off the regular price and Aaron will also 'meta-tag' the track of your choice and provide a comprehensive report including a description, possible genres and keywords. Purchase our course here: http://www.howtolicenseyourmusic.com/stockmusicpromo.php Here's Aaron Saloman providing an in depth description of how to properly 'meta-tag' your tracks and maximize your results with stock music libraries:
'Hello again!
AaronSaloman here. In case you’re new to Aaron Davison’s newsletter & blog, werecently collaborated on a course called “How to Make Money with Stock Music Libraries”. This was the first in a series of special niche-focused courses AaronD. is doing on various aspects of music licensing. We also did a freesupplementary interview with a bunch of additional info, which you can checkout here: http://www.howtolicenseyourmusic.com/aaronsaloman.php
AaronD. wrote a previous blog ( http://www.howtolicenseyourmusic.com/blog/how-to-properly-metatag-your-tracks-so-they-get-found-and-licensed)about one of the most important things you can do to maximize your chances ofmaking money from stock/production music libraries – detailed meta-tagging ofyour tracks. I’m going to share a bit more info on this topic, because theimportance of good metadata for your tracks really can’t be overstated.
Meta-taggingis the process of categorizing, writing descriptions, and entering searchkeywords for your tracks, so they can be found amongst the tens of thousands ofother compositions in the library. You could have a great song, recorded andmixed to the highest standards, but if customers search the library and yoursong never comes up in the results, it won’t sell.
Whatto do?
Oneapproach (a misguided one, if you ask me) is to include as many genres,descriptive keywords, product, band, and place names as possible in themetadata, in the hopes that your tracks will show up in every search on thesite. This is a losing approach though, because clients will quickly becomefrustrated if the songs that come up in a search don’t accurately match thedescriptions. Too many composers doing this has led music libraries to developvery strict rules and guidelines for metadata, and sometimes even ban composerswho try to take advantage of the search system. This doesn’t help anyone, andwon’t lead to any extra sales in the long run. So the best approach is to behonest and accurate with your metadata, but as detailed as possible withinthose restrictions. If you’re not sure if your song fits in a particular genreor inspires a particular mood, ask someone! Run it by a friend, spouse, etc. Ifyou’re not sure what a particular subgenre means, Google it! You’ll bebroadening your musical knowledge at the same time as ensuring more sales byhaving your songs properly categorized.
Hereare some of the categories of metadata that you’ll often find onstock/production music sites, and a few thoughts on how to approach each one.You won’t find every category on every site – each one is different – but theseare some general guidelines:
Title
Self-explanatory. Write the title of yourtrack - no extra info, composer names, or anything else. The only other info Iwill put in the title field is edit length, so the client can see it at aglance, or alternate mix info. Examples:
BigGuitar Song
BigGuitar Song (30 second edit)
BigGuitar Song (no lead guitar)
Description
This is usually one of the first things aclient sees when searching tracks, so it’s important. There are two broadapproaches you can take for a good description: either describe the music indetail, or describe the mood/setting/images the music evokes. If you havespace, it’s probably a good bet to provide a little of both. Here’s an example:
Anin-your-face guitar noisefest with screeching leads, pounding drums, anddistorted bass. Chaotic and furious, but fun. Perfect for a chase scene,extreme sports, or an underground punk club.
On the other end of the spectrum, here is abad description:
Loudpunk
(Yes, I really see a lot of tracks withdescriptions like that.)
Genre
This is pretty straightforward. Most siteshave dropdown menus with a list of pre-selected categories, and will let youchoose between one and three. Sometimes each genre choice will branch out toselectable sub-genres as well. Here is an example of how you might categorize atrack, given three genre boxes, each with a selectable sub-genre:
1.Rock – Hard rock/Metal
2.Rock – Alternative/Punk
3.Dramatic Music – Action/Chase
If you’re not too familiar with aparticular genre of music, be cautious. Certain genres, particularly metal andelectronic music, are notorious for having hundreds of precise subcategories.In this case, keep it general, or spend 5 minutes on Wikipedia finding outexactly what these sub-genres mean. You don’t want someone searching forindustrial electronic music to find your track miscategorized because youthought “industrial” meant “for business use”.
BPM
If you recorded your session to a click,write in the session tempo here. Make sure it’s exact; people use this info totime the music to visual edits. If your tempo changes, it wasn’t recorded to aclick, or it’s an ambient piece, indicate that where possible. Acceptableexamples:
120bpm
variable- approx. 120 bpm
ambient/free-time
n/a
Primary& Secondary Keywords
Best Meta Tags To Use
Along with a good description, this isprobably the most crucial part of meta-tagging to generate sales of your stockmusic. Some sites only allow you one box for keywords, and some have separateboxes for primary (directly descriptive & relevant) and secondary (moreimpressionistic or evocative) keywords.
When I started selling production music, Iwould type 5, 10, or maybe even 15 directly relevant keywords. I didn’t want tooverdo it, and some of the sites had really scary-sounding rules about usingtoo many vaguely related keywords. But I found with only a few keywords, thetracks didn’t sell that much. So after a couple years of sluggish sales, Idecided to put in the hard work of going through every one of my tracks again(over 30 + edits at that point) on every single site (4 or 5 at the time),re-writing the descriptions, and expanding the keywords. First, I researchedthe other composers who were selling the most. Some sites will publicly displayhow many times a track has sold – use this to find out who is selling well& what they’re doing. I would listen to their tracks, and read theirdescriptions/keywords. After doing this for a bit, you start to get a sense ofthe track quality/description/keyword ratio that seems to work. With that as mybasis, I used a thesaurus and went through all my tracks, adding as manyrelevant keywords as I could. The important word here is “relevant” – I didn’twant to annoy either the music libraries or their clients, so I was careful toonly choose keywords that a reasonable person would use to describe the tracks.
This was a ton of work. I still sometimescatch a track on a site that I missed in one of my update sweeps, and I fix thedescription and keywords when I find one. To this end, it’s helpful to have amaster document where you keep all your track descriptions and keywords, so youcan copy and paste them on different sites. I can safely say that afterdevoting that much attention & time to my descriptions & keywords, mysales doubled or sometimes even tripled on individual sites. Here is an exampleof primary and secondary keywords for a hypothetical noisy punk song:
Primary:loud, fast, guitar, bass, drums, energetic, speed, crazy, chaotic
Secondary:electric guitars, distorted, distortion, evil, mischief, mischievous, angry,anger, chase, pursuit, monster, truck, car, race, police, cops, cop, crime,criminal, racing, speeding, careening, racetrack, race track, extreme, sports,snowboarding, hockey, football, skiing, ski jump, Olympics, skateboard,skateboarding, punk, metal, hard rock, heavy, punks, tattoo, tattoos, piercing,alternative, alt, boots, leather, club, bar, noise, noisy, live, bombastic,cacophony, chaos, fight, big, huge, energy, explode, explosion, driving, fun,anthemic, release, tension
That’s just a small selection – somelibraries will allow you hundreds of keywords, others only a few. For the onesthat allow more, break out the thesaurus! Go through each word, and write downother common words that mean the same thing. Use your judgment, though: while“boisterous” may show up in a thesaurus alongside “upbeat” and “fast”, it’sunlikely anyone will ever search for “boisterous punk rock”. But hey, who knows. . .
Notice how I sometimes wrote multipleiterations of the same word: ex. “distortion” and “distorted”, since it’sprobably equally likely people might search for either one. Again, use yourjudgment and keep it relevant.
And finally . . .
Meta Tag Editor Windows
PRO/ Writer & Publisher
Don’t forget this! To ensure your songisn’t accidentally credited to another composer with the same name, it’s a goodidea to log into your PRO account and get your IPI number as well. This 9-digitnumber is a unique identifier that has been designed not to overlapinternationally. Here’s how I would fill out these fields:
PRO:SOCAN
Writer:Jane Smith (SOCAN – IPI: 123456789)
Publisher:Jane Smith (SOCAN – IPI: 123456789)
If Jane had her own publishing company, shewould write that info in the “publisher” field, along with the company’s uniqueIPI. However, since Jane “self-publishes”, she just writes the exact same infoin both fields.
I hope all that info is helpful! Differentmusic libraries allow for different levels of meta-tagging: some haveadditional categories such as “sounds like”, “instruments”, “time period”, andso on. Some only allow 3 or 4 checkboxes of information (less work for you)! Italways depends on the library, but the items I’ve discussed here should giveyou a general idea of the amount of work involved in meta-tagging, along withsome strategies for maximizing its effectiveness.
Thanks for all the great feedback on thecourse! And if you haven’t yet, don’t forget to check out our course “How toMake Money With Stock Music Libraries”! We're offering a 20% discount if you purchase the course this weekend and I'm also including one free 'Meta-Tag' Report. Send me the track of your choice and I'll provide an in depth meta-tagging document that you can use as a sample for how to meta-tag your tracks.
Check out our course here:http://www.howtolicenseyourmusic.com/stockmusicpromo.php Meta Editor WindowsAaron Saloman
In : September 2012
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