Wait... You only got paid if you sold a jingle and you paid $5 to submit the jingle in the first place?
Yeah. Pay to submit to allegedly get my tune heard. Some real jewy shit. Hit License went under, but Broadjam.com is still up and running. And the grandfather of the pay-to-license sites, Taxi.com, is still in business.
I've never heard of any of those sites. You said you sold one. Did you at least make your money back?
And... No... No, I'm not gonna pay someone to potentially listen to my music. In fact, it works the other way. You pay me if you want to listen to my music. That's how it works.
Yeah, the one sale made up for the money spent on submissions, and I had enough left over to get some pot.
But it challenged me to write to prompts. They gave examples of the type of music they were looking for. So say they wanted music for a movie scene, the ad might say, "They're looking for something similar to this." And there would be links to two or three youtube videos. It might be AC/DC or NIN or Johnny Cash or Tori Amos or Jewel or you know, anybody. And so I would listen to the examples, and try to write something that would encapsulate the feel of the example songs.
Or it might be a jingle for yogurt or kids' clothing or whatever. Music for kids' clothes is different than music for dentures or chicken breader.
Most of the jingles I wrote sucked bad, but some were acceptable. I'm no Barry Manilow.
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