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Originally Posted by rogermexico
It depends on a lot of things. How much of the publishing rights you own yourself as the artist. How much of the songwriting credit you own. And then how you're splitting things with your representation.
Basically, if you are out there hustling on your own, you have vanishingly small odds of ever landing a placement on your own. If you want any chance of it happening you probably need to have a publishing company out there shopping your stuff, so you're going to be sharing any royalties with them.
I had a few placements in the early 2000s. We had a song in the end credits of a show on the short lived MTV Canada. We were talked into giving them this for free in a way to "get our name out there." It did not work. We'd get a mechanical royalty for the TV play but it was not much. We also had a tune played in a low-budget European vampire web melodrama. (I don't even know what it was called.) Same thing - no actual publishing deal just the mechanical royalty. I think the biggest quarterly SOCAN cheque I ever got at that time was about fifty bucks.
We later signed on with a small Vancouver based indie label who had a person dedicated to selling publishing rights. I can't remember which percentage of the rights we signed away to them, but anyway the deal was they would take a cut for each placement they earned us. They earned us zero placements. They did get a placement on Grey's Anatomy for another artist on the label and I remember it being worth $30K. Which is awesome but I doubt that artist every had a similar placement again. So as a one time windfall it wasn't bad but it certainly wasn't quit your day job money.
All of this was pre social media so I have no idea what the landscape is like now but I imagine the basic structure is the same. Basically, if you are the Black Keys with a large publishing apparatus out there working really hard to place you all over, then yes, you will make a lot of money. If you are 99% of artists though, any money you are making is coming from the door at gigs. (And that isn't much either but that's a whole other topic. Maybe I'll start a podcast: How to lose money as an independent Canadian artist.)
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this is amazing insight . thanks
sounds like royalty free creators or just making your own theme music is the way to go about it if you don't want to deal with negotiating for rights and giving a cut for usage
also i would tune in to that podcast