The music business is real. So is the business of selling the dream of it. I've taken to calling the second one the Music Dreams Industrial Complex… and it would very much like you to not notice the difference between the two.

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.