I've been building production music catalogs since 1996. What I describe here isn't the story of someone naive to the music business… it's the story of someone who kept making the same structural mistake while getting better at everything else.

Thirty years in. The same five misconceptions. Over and over. Music licensing is opaque from the outside, and there's no shortage of confident-sounding voices willing to fill that gap with things that are partially true, mostly simplified, or just wrong. Here's what actually costs composers time, money, and momentum.

A false rumor. A disgruntled musician. Twenty years of saying nothing. Here's what I learned about reputation, defamation, and the only revenge actually worth having.

My dad built the studio desk I work at every day. He passed away this past week. This is about what he built, and what he left behind.

The music being good is the entry requirement, not the achievement. I've talked with composers ten albums deep who couldn't understand why their career wasn't moving. The answer was rarely about the music. It was about everything that comes after it.

I grew up about a mile from Les Paul's childhood home. We went to the same public school system. I didn't really understand what all of that would mean to me until I'd already given my life to this.

There's a version of sync licensing advice that gets passed around a lot. It's well-intentioned, generally accurate, and built almost entirely around studying the placements of artists who will never be in your situation. Sia. M83. The Black Keys. The Cinematic Orchestra. These are instructive examples if you're trying to understand why a piece of music works in a scene. They're not particularly useful if you're trying to build a production music catalog as a long-term business.

The NYT Magazine just ran a major piece on production music and sync licensing. Here's the perspective they couldn't get from the outside—from someone who sold a catalog to Extreme Music.

A tribute to Jean Kacanek and Stephanie Edwards — a piano teacher who held me when the world knocked me down, and a gifted educator who lit a fire that's never gone out.