There are two ways your music ends up in front of the people who place it in TV, film, and advertising. You can put your catalogue into a music library and let their team do the pitching, or you can build relationships with supervisors and pitch directly. Most advice treats these as competing philosophies. In practice they’re different tools, and the artists getting placed regularly tend to use both.
If you’re new to how the money and rights work, start with the basics of sync licensing first. This article assumes you know what a sync fee is and want to decide where to send your music.
How library deals work
A music library (sometimes called a production music library or sync agency) takes your tracks into its catalogue, tags them for searchability, and pitches them against briefs from supervisors, editors, and ad agencies. In exchange, the library takes a cut: a 50/50 split on the sync fee is the standard arrangement, and some deals also take a share of backend performance royalties.
The crucial distinction is exclusive versus non-exclusive. A non-exclusive deal means the same track can sit in several libraries and you can keep pitching it yourself. An exclusive deal locks the track to that one library for the term of the contract, sometimes years. Exclusivity isn’t automatically bad; a library that actively works your catalogue and has real relationships in your genre can justify it. A library that just hosts ten thousand tracks and waits for search traffic cannot.
Read the term length, the fee split, and the royalty split before anything else. I’ve seen artists sign multi-year exclusive deals with libraries that never pitched their music once, and those tracks were simply gone, unavailable for every better opportunity that came along during the term.
How direct pitching works
Pitching direct means finding the supervisor working on a specific show, film, or campaign and getting your track in front of them yourself. You keep 100% of the fee, you build a relationship that can lead to repeat placements, and your music gets considered as itself rather than as one result in a keyword search.
The cost is time. Supervisors are busy, their inboxes are brutal, and a cold pitch that ignores what they’re actually working on goes straight to the bin. Pitching a supervisor properly means researching their current projects, sending one or two tracks that genuinely fit, and making the licensing situation effortless: instant clearance, stems ready, metadata complete.
One-stop clearance matters more here than anywhere else. If you control both the master and the publishing, a supervisor can clear your track with a single email. The moment clearing requires chasing a second rights holder, your track becomes the risky option, and there’s always a safer one in the pile.
When each path makes sense
Libraries suit volume. If you write a lot, work across multiple moods and genres, and want your back catalogue earning while you make new things, non-exclusive library deals put your music in front of searches you’d never reach on your own. The individual placements are often smaller (background cues, regional ads, online content), but they stack.
Direct pitching suits identity. If your music has a distinct voice and you want the placements that come with a credit worth having, those tend to be curated by a person, not pulled from a search. That path runs on relationships, and relationships compound slowly: a supervisor who passed on this pitch but liked the track remembers you next season.
The deciding factor for most independent artists is catalogue size. With five finished tracks, libraries can’t do much for you and your time is better spent on a handful of well-researched direct pitches. With fifty tracks, ignoring libraries means leaving the long tail of your catalogue idle.
Run both, but keep clean records
The hybrid approach only works if you know exactly which tracks are committed where. Keep a simple sheet: track title, library, exclusive or not, term end date, and who controls the publishing. The fastest way to torch a supervisor relationship is pitching them a track you can’t actually clear because it’s locked in an exclusive deal you forgot about.
And before any of this, the music itself has to hold up against picture. Placement decisions fail on craft more often than on business, so it’s worth understanding what makes a track sync-ready before deciding how to pitch it. The full sync licensing guide covers the whole pipeline if you want the wider picture.
If you’ve got a catalogue and you’re weighing up which path fits it, that’s worth a conversation.
Non-exclusive deals let you place the same track with multiple libraries and keep pitching it yourself, which is usually the right call early on. Exclusive deals can make sense when the library has a genuine track record of placements in your genre and offers something concrete in return: better briefs, an advance, or active pitching rather than just hosting your catalogue.
A 50/50 split on the sync fee is the most common arrangement, though terms vary. Some libraries also take a share of the publisher’s portion of backend performance royalties. Read the deal carefully: the sync fee split, the royalty split, and the term length are the three numbers that matter most.
Yes, as long as your library deals are non-exclusive. Many working sync artists run both tracks at once: libraries provide passive volume across smaller placements, while direct relationships are built for the bigger, more curated opportunities. The key is keeping clean records of which tracks are committed where, so you never pitch something you can’t actually clear.