The value and importance of music have significantly grown over the past century, as it has become an important part of the entertainment industry. Because of this explosion in the demand for music and musical pieces, careers in music have become very attractive to many aspiring professionals.
What is Production Music Writing?
Production music writing is one such attractive career that offers you flexibility and room for developing and exploiting your creativity. “As a production music writer, you will create and write music that is licensed or sold to a Production Music Library,” says Kevin Wright, Senior Music Writer at APA Style Service. The production music library then places this music in commercials, films, and TV shows. As a production music writer, earnings generated from your creations are split with the production music library that owns the rights to the music.
Education and Training
While most aspiring music production writers have little challenges with writing their music, production and mixing usually pose a significant challenge. You have to consider education and training in music production if you would like to make a career out of music production writing. Music production schools can offer you an opportunity to develop your recording and mixing skills. Developing these skills will help you write, record, and mix quality music that can be easily bought or licensed by production music libraries. You could take up a step-by-step course on music production such as Stock Music.
Advancing your Career
As you begin your career in music production writing, you will generally develop music for general use purposes. However, as you grow, you will become more successful in writing and selling your production music, and will find opportunities to enter into specific or niche markets. You will want to consider writing for a specific production, such as theme songs for TV shows. Advancing your music production to specific use will offer you opportunities to be commissioned as a composer.
Production Music Writing Tips
- Create songs that are 3 minutes long or less; they should not be receptive or too long.
- Create songs that start and end in the same key.
- Create songs that gradually build to create options for music placement. Try to make each section build with a new instrument.
- Strip elements back to allow for different moods of the same song.
- Create your songs to end with a single, resolving chord that embodies the essence of your musical piece.
- “Avoid fading the sounds out at the end of your songs, especially avid long fades,” advises Kelly Nielson, a Narrative Writer at ConfidentWriters.
Unions, Groups, and Associations
As an aspiring and upcoming production music writer, you may find it useful to interact with groups, unions, and associations in the production music industry. Groups as the Production Music Association, Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), and Society of European Stage Authors and Composers (SESAC) offer production music writers opportunities to interact, better develop, and market their music.
Personality and Lifestyle
The production music library that bought rights to your song will receive the credits to your creations. Your work will not be credited to you, and this is something you have to get used to and accept. Your lifestyle will revolve around your studio, so you should expect to be home a lot. This will allow you to write whenever you want or feel like.
Are you ready to become a production music writer? Take action and take up a course in production music writing. Production music writing offers you a career that allows you to tap into your creativity by writing lots of great music that can be placed in a various number of uses, such as ads, commercials, films, and TV shows.
