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Many musicians believe the only way to succeed in music is to rack of streams. This is natural, as this is the way that music is mostly consumed these days. People are no longer buying CDs, they’re listening on Spotify or Youtube or even TikTok. This has led to artists focusing all their efforts on getting streams as their main source of exposure and revenue.
- Paying for playlist placements
- Spending dollars on facebook ads to get pennies back in streaming revenue
- Spending most of your time creating content to get pre-saves
Syncs are better than streams.
There are so many reasons to focus more of your effort on getting syncs instead of streams. You make money instead of spending it, you gain access to a huge audience and frequently end up with mailbox money down the road.
Access to borrowed audiences
Similar to opening up live or getting a co-sign from a bigger artist, you can gain access to much larger audiences through sync. You’re fighting to get a placement into a playlist with 25,000 listeners while a sync placement could put your music in front of an engaged audience of millions. Leading to, you guessed it, more streams.
You get paid for free exposure
With streaming, almost every avenue to get your numbers up involves you paying for it. Sync opportunities on every level pay you upfront for the use of your song and then you get backend royalties every time it airs. While allowing you to piggyback on the million dollar marketing campaign used to promote the show. Think of getting placed in an Apple ad, you help them by making their brand look cool and you benefit from millions of global ears hearing your music (and I’ll say it again, they pay YOU for it!)
As a supervisor I know that you can’t just force your way into sync, but in a lot of ways, you can’t with streaming either. Paying for streams doesn’t even make the money back and doesn’t gain any actual fans. 80/20 your efforts on music promotion and what do you find? Put 20% of your effort towards sync and 80% of the money and streams will come from it. The real goal obviously isn’t streams, it’s fans. So instead of focusing on “number goes up” remember there are other opportunities out there that value your music and will end up bringing you more streams in the long run.