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Lemonada

How do songs get licensed for background music?

This is a great question.

We're going to hear from an independent musician seeking advice on skipping out on Spotify.

Royalties for a lot of artists are dismal on streaming services, although there's a lot of debate about why that is because Spotify actually pays out a majority of their income in

royalties. I think the biggest problem is just that there's so much music these days compared to

how it used to be. But nevertheless, is corporate licensing for background music a better option?

And the short version is, is yes, at least on a comparative basis, meaning that if you can get your

music licensed with the

right agency and if a business chooses to use it and then actually uses it frequently,

then you're definitely going to make a lot more money than you would for the same number of

people listening on Spotify or Apple Music or whatever. Of course, those are a lot of conditions

that need to be met, so I don't want to suggest it's easy. And for a lot of independent musicians, you might actually do better in trying to get your music

...