So the challenge last time was to contact someone at BMI to find out what they have in regards to a Film and TV department and what that department can do for me in helping get my music on tv shows and into films.  Update:  I sent an email early yesterday morning to the one and only contact I have at BMI and am waiting for a response. We'll see if they're blowing me off.  All right, one item checked off

Another challenge was to draft an email that I can send to Music Supervisors, asking them to add me to their email list when searching for music for their projects.  Update: I have an email drafted.  Now comes the hard part (for me anyway): sending the emails out.  I think it's a pretty good email, but I don't know for sure, you know?  Is it professional enough and will it do what it's intended to do?  What I plan on doing is sending the emails, then following up with phone calls a few days or a week later.

The last challenge was to research local ad agencies about using my music in their projects.  I procrastinated on this, but I did a quick Google search this morning on agencies in my own town only.  I came up with four and put their contact information in a spreadsheet.  I think that's a good amount to start with and perhaps get some feedback from them.  To be honest, I don't know if this will bear any fruit or not, but it's something I thought of for Making Money with your Music so I'll let you know if it's worthwhile.

Since Wednesday (two days ago), I've boughten the Film & Television Music Guide by Ritch Esra and Stephen Trumbull at www.musicregistry.com for $100.  I spent some time last night perusing it and I'm impressed. I think it's worth the money.  Tons of contacts for Music Supervisors, Publishers, Recording Studios, etc.  I should be set to go.  I also spent some time this morning crafting an email that I can send to people looking for music, such as music supervisors, music placement companies and movie trailer companies.  I need to spend some more time on it, but here's the thing.  All this stuff takes time.  I have very little time.  If I can make this work on the little time I have to work on it, then anyone can do it. 

That means I have to be very careful to carve out some time in my life, and then spend that time working on the very few and essential things that will have the greatest impact in achieving my goals.  For example,

I've outlined my guide, Making Money with your Music kind of like building a house.  First you have to lay the foundation.  This means getting everything ready, which includes copyrighting your songs, making music library cd's, registering with a performance rights organization and setting up your business with a website, email and phone. 

That sounds like a lot, and it does take a little bit of work, but it's not really that bad if taken step by step.  I plan to go into more detail on each of these subjects in the future, but for now I just want to document what I've been doing the past few days and what my next steps are. 

Success!  Sort of.  After a few more hours of searching and programming, I have resorting to using Tunepaks on Reverbnation as the media player to use on my music licensing page.  This wasn't the ideal situation because I wanted to embed the players right on the page, but with Tunepaks you can't do that for some reason. So, I have a list of songs, and if you want to listen and download, you have to click a link which will open the music player in a new window.  Not ideal like I said, but I'm sick of not getting this done and it will work for now and it will work fairly well.

The nice thing about the Tunepaks is that the songs can be downloaded right from there.  There is also a "lyrics" link.  I put short song descriptions and the lyrics to the songs there.  At least for the songs I uploaded today specifically for this.  For some reason, however, and I'm not sure why, the lyrics link doesn't seem to be working today from the Tunepak itself.  But if you follow the link to my Arist Page, the lyrics can be opened from there.  Maybe I should contact Reverbnation and find out if there is a bug or something. 

To view the page, go to http://www.brotherhowe.com/musiclicensing

Well, I'm trying to update my website to create a "professional" presence for music licensing.  The idea is to have a page on your site where you can send someone to listen to your music and decide if it's right for their tv show, movie, video game or whatever. It's a lot quicker than mailing someone a cd, which you can do also. 

So my big thing today, which is taking hours and hours is figuring out how to embed a music player on my website.  I want to have three music players, one for each style of music (country punk, punk and slow & moody).  However, the internet is giving me fits, so I think this is going to take a little longer than I planned on. 

I'll keep pressing on though, and get this thing figured out.