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I signed up with Pump Audio in 2006, thinking it might be cool to have some of my tracks licensed. Especially if they ended up on a nature documentary. My stuff was accepted and nothing happened at all.
Then Getty Images bought Pump Audio, and I figured nothing would improve. Getty's MO with their image business is to sign up as many photogs as possible and then promote a few big names, shafting the small ones in the process. I assumed the same would happen to me at Pump Audio and I planned on pulling my music.
Except I forgot to pull my music and got a surprisingly cryptic email from Getty Images last June, which looked like an invoice that said I owed them some $800. It turned out that was my 50% for licensed music and that they have some bizarrely antiquated system that doesn't involve using words to explain wtf is going on.
That was a pleasant surprise, and I got another one around Christmas time, this time for $2k. I'm liking making money off intellectual property, for work that is complete. I'm down with having a product that can be resold or replicate easily – it certainly beats getting paid by the hour. (I'm also way past the whole sellout argument – blowing money on heating a home in the US changes your perspective on that quite a bit. The chances of me shooting myself in the face for getting popular and raking in money is zero.)
This past week I realized it was payment time and was looking forward to the 25th, when Getty tells you if & how much you've made in the past 6 months. Could be nothing, but could be something – hopefully the latter. The email I got from them yesterday had a subject that started off with 'Reminder: a very important message…" and I figured they had improved from cryptic invoice-like messages to proper emails. But no – it was Getty doing what I expected them to do when they bought Pump Audio. In their words:
Dear Pump Audio Artist,
We would like to thank you for your music and congratulate you on being part of one of the fastest growing music licensing companies in the world. Since the acquisition of Pump Audio by Getty Images, we continue to hear praises from a wide expansion of our clients on the depth and quality of our catalog and that is a testament to you.
As we plan for the future growth of our offering to the global music licensing client base, we have determined that to fully support the 400+ person Getty Images sales staff and invest in marketing and technology needs that we must make adjustments to the current revenue split system. By making these changes, we intend to accelerate the pace of our growth and achieve our goal of becoming the largest music licensor in the world.
The new model will be as following:
1) Licensing fees will now be 35% to the artist, 65% to Pump Audio/Getty Images
2) This change will take place as of July 1, 2009. Any royalties payable through June 30, 2009 will not be affected by this change
3) Performance royalty splits will remain at 50% of the publisher’s share
4) Those that don’t accept the new split will have their music removed from the system no later than December 31, 2009.
5) The rights you granted to us in the original contract do not change
So… you run your business like sh!t and 400 employees – which seems like a LOT for a company that licenses images & music – and you want to make more money off me to pay for your poor decisionmaking? I suppose they're just being inspired by the American auto industry.
I've thought about just leaving the music there and whatever I earn, I earn. But I've already been looking for alternatives because I could not simply upload more music – they required that I 1) create an artist account at Pump Audio (that should already exist) and 2) send more music on a friggin' cd that would have to go through the approval process.
It's obvious that Getty bought Pump purely with money in mind as there has been zero thought on how to integrate their systems and make getting more music to license easier. So I say to Getty, Fah Q. I was too lazy to fill out the form to pull my music, and I'm sure I'll be too lazy to fill out the form to agree to your new bullshit. I'm going to research alternatives and post about them once I have a few.
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I love Pump Audio. That’s not a popular thing to say, I know, but they get me a ton of placements which result in a ton of performance royalties, and the income keeps growing. I think, like any library, it’s a numbers game: I have about 200 cues with them, and have been with them for a good 5-6 years now. While the collective sync fees have been good, where you really see the money come in is in performance royalties, especially for the basic cable placements on MTV, History, Discovery, etc. – channels that play their programs to death.
The cut in sync fees to composer-gets-35% kinda sucks, sure – but the sync fee money was never that great to begin with. I can’t tell you how many $8 fees I got from cues placed on History and other similar channels… but those cheapo placements have accrued a ton of performance income. And the other upside of Pump is that you get the full writer’s share AND 50% of the publisher’s share! I don’t know of any other retitling non-exclusive libs that do that… most keep 100% of the publisher’s share. So would you rather have 50% of that $8 placement (instead of 35%) but lose 50% of the publisher’s share every time that show airs? That’s always been my thinking.
I have music spread out over 4 different non-exclusive libs, and 2 exclusive libs, and out of the 6 in total, the only library to generate a single penny of income for me has been Pump. So it always strikes me as funny when people criticize Pump for cutting sync fees.
I think there has been a lot of cutting-off-of-noses-to-spite-face where Pump is concerned, and I gotta say, I’m glad I stuck with ‘em.
I’m glad Pump is working out for you. My numbers have declined, but I also have not added any new music to them since my initial batch. Without any online submission method, I won’t be adding any music to them anytime soon.