Become an artist

Welcome!

Do you have what it takes to wow our global audience of filmmakers and video creators? If so, we invite you to join Music Vine and become part of a pioneering and ambitious movement in music licensing.

If you're interested in becoming an artist with Music Vine, the aim of this article is to answer all of your questions. 

1. What is Music Vine?

Music Vine is a high-end music licensing platform with a focus on quality over quantity. We work with a diverse community of talented producers, composers, bands and songwriters, and make their work available for our global userbase of filmmakers and content creators to license for their productions. The license sales generate income for both our artists and Music Vine itself.  

For the talented and astute musician, music licensing is a highly exciting and prosperous venture.   

While having access to a catalogue of great music is one thing, one of the biggest challenges for filmmakers is being able to find the right track. So we have invested a vast amount of time and care into building a platform that streamlines the search and discovery process. Our search tools, algorithms and backend architecture represent some of the most advanced and innovative functionality in the music licensing industry.  

For those unfamiliar with music licensing, it is essentially the granting of permissions to individuals or organisations, enabling them to use music for certain purposes. These granted permissions are sold as licenses, generating ‘passive income’ for the owner(s) of the music.

All Music Vine licenses are ‘sync’ licenses which relate specifically to the usage (or ‘synchronization’) of music within a media production, whether that be video, software or audio content. Another characteristic of our licenses (common to almost all online music licensing companies) is that they are pre-cleared. This means that when an artist joins us, they agree that we can systematically issue licenses on their behalf for the agreed purposes, with no case-by-case consultation needed between us and them. For both customers and musicians, this provides a highly efficient and appealing system.

2. How To Apply

Once you are confident that your music is suitable and eligible for Music Vine, the first step is to complete our Artist Application form. Your enquiry will then be added to our review list and you can usually expect to receive a full response from a member of the Music Vine team after eight weeks.

3. Exclusivity

In a nutshell: Music Vine encourages the submission of exclusive music but also accepts non-exclusive music. At least 50% of your Music Vine portfolio must consist of exclusive material.

Given the goal we have at Music Vine of building a unique library of high-end music, we naturally encourage the submission of exclusive music. However, as musicians ourselves, we appreciate that a degree of flexibility can come in helpful, so we felt it important to give our artists the freedom to supplement their portfolios with non-exclusive music.

4. Rates and Payments

Not a fan of numbers? Don't worry, our rates are straight-forward:

Exclusive	Non-exclusive
60%	35%

When will I get paid? Music Vine's pay-outs are made monthly via Paypal - please remember that you must have a minimum of $50 in your Music Vine account in order for a pay-out to be made.

Discounts - To help engage prospective customers, we will be offering time-limited discounts (usually no more than 20%) . When discounted purchases are made, your earning will be calculated from the discounted total - meaning the impact of the discount will be shared between yourself and Music Vine.

5. Quality Requirements

Music Vine operates a rigorous reviewing process. Each track that successfully passes the initial stage of checks will then be reviewed in depth by 2 members of the team. To ensure consistency in the review process, a grading system is used whereby the piece of music is scored out of 10 in each of the following areas:

• Overall production quality
• Musicianship
• Cohesiveness of arrangement
• Quality of instruments/samples
• Emotiveness
• Commercial relevance / usability

The maximum total score that can be achieved is 60 - representing a piece of music that's exquisitely composed and produced to a world-leading standard. In order for a piece of Music to be considered and accepted for usage on Music Vine, the total score must be at least 50 - still a very high standard.

Because of how labour-intensive the review process is, it may not be possible for members of the Music Vine team to provide detailed feedback for those tracks that aren't accepted.

6. YouTube Content ID

To provide our customers with the most streamlined licensing solution possible, we’ve developed our own Content ID solution called ‘AutoClear’ as a way to automatically clear claims for supported tracks on Music Vine, (whilst still claiming on anyone illegitimately using the music).

An AutoClear icon will be displayed next to all supported tracks, which will be an assurance that any Content ID claims for those tracks will be automatically cleared. This feature really adds to the appeal of the Music Vine platform and gives customers even more reason to use our artist’s music.

If your application is successful and we invite you to join our artist community, we’d strongly advise registering your approved tracks with AutoClear. 

Artists receive 50% of all Content ID earnings through Music Vine.

Unfortunately, we will not be able to consider tracks which are Content ID registered with a 3rd party record label / publisher, unless they can be de-registered before we take them onboard. 

7. Performance Rights Organisations

Although Music Vine accepts PRO registered music (e.g. PRS registered), please be aware that the Music Vine site doesn’t currently support this in a way that prompts customers to complete cue sheets. Your income from Music Vine would be generated solely from a percentage of the licence sales themselves. We will soon be overhauling the site – one of the updates being to fully facilitate PROs-registered tracks and provide the info needed for customers to complete cue sheets so that performance royalties can be collected. We'll be keeping all of our artists updated on our progress with supporting PROs in the coming months.

8. Referral Scheme

Once you've become a Music Vine artist, you can refer new artists and increase your earnings.

As you can probably tell, we're passionate about making our vision for Music Vine a reality and the biggest part of that is getting great artists on board. We want to show our appreciation to those of our artists who help spread the 'Music Vine' word, so we've set-up a referral scheme whereby rewards (in the form of increased % takings from tracks) can be earned by referring new artists.

How it works: For each new artist you successfully refer to us (i.e they submit a track which is accepted), you can then choose any one of your Music Vine tracks and increase your cut for that track by 5%. Say you were to successfully refer numerous artists to us, you'd then be able to apply the 5% addition to the track of your choice each time, within the limits per-track outlined below:

Submission Type	Standard Artist Rate	Maximum Possible Artist Rate (with referral scheme)
Exclusive	60%	75%
Non-exclusive	35%	50%

When you do refer an artist to us, you'll need to ask them to let us know that you referred them when they get in touch with us (so we know it's a referral and can provide you with an update regarding applying the referral reward).