According to Jim Rohn, the Law of Averages says that if you do something often enough a ratio will begin to appear. If you pitch yourself to 10 people and 1 responds, a ratio will begin to appear; you are at 1:10. You'll notice that once it starts, it tends to continue. If you talk to 10 you'll get 1. Talk to 10 more, get 1 and so on.
Pitching, selling, hustling… whatever you want to call it's a must in this day and age. Selling your songs to music supervisors and ad agencies creative/producers is hard work no doubt about that but if you have killer tracks and a killer pitch then it's usually just a matter of time before you land a sync or two.
So what's the secret? In my experience it takes consistent persistence to start conversations with people who can license your music.
You have to kick down, climb over or crawl under every door you believe will support you in getting sync deals.
Keep it Simple and Focused – Ask yourself WHY I am reaching out? And HOW can I get their attention. The reality is that if you put time and energy into each person you will eventually land relationships that keep the briefs flowing.
I used to gather 10 people I wanted to speak with, work out what they are working on, marry up songs that they are licensing and reach out. I would then split test my emails meaning I would gather another 10 people and send a different email and different subject line to see what kind of response I would receive. Then believe it or not I would tweak another email and send that to another 10 people. Out of the 30 people I emailed I would work out the best email moving forward.
I would also make sure that the emails were simple – 3 lines max, with no attachments or blurbs. Less is more when pitching yourself and that's essentially what you're doing – before any music gets sent and before briefs arrive you have to sell yourself. Sure it's difficult to weave your personal journey into a few lines but it is easy to be polite and to the point. Standing out can be as simple as being warming.
The one thing about pitching is managing expectations – if you make grand plans to reach out to 1 person and don't get a response then you get deflated pretty quickly but if you plan to reach out to 100 people from micro, small, medium and large businesses then you will get a decent response.
Just be consistent, don't quit when it gets tough, just keep pitching yourself and make sure you put time aside every week to just reach out to people that can license your catalog.
Click here to check out the best Sync licensing resource on the planet. Learn how to land sync deals and delve into a 2022 music supervisor database like no other!