Actually it’s been a little more than 10 years — it was 2014 when I first discovered the term music licensing. I was 36, father of two little girls and I was looking for job opportunities, well almost constantly.
From the beginning I had been playing in bands on bass, guitar and piano. I had many experiences, ups and downs. In terms of bands, that time was the quietest ever. My own main band was on hold, the band with which I was performing the most at the time broke up almost overnight. I was only playing bass in the band Santa Diver (still to this day).
As a composer, things weren’t that dark — actually, if I think about it, it wasn’t a bad year. I composed music for a film about the famous Hungarian pharmacist Gedeon Righter, wrote acoustic pieces for a theater production, and there were some tv ads as well like this one.
A year earlier, I was lucky enough to receive my highest royalty check until that day, from an ad whose broadcasting rights were sold to several European countries. From that money, I was finally able to upgrade my home studio, so I started looking for new ways to use it. Slowly I began to discover what music licensing actually means — the world of exclusive and non-exclusive music libraries, and other sites where you could submit music for a fee.
It seemed like a reasonable path to take, so I took a deep breath and started putting together a small catalog of instrumentals. I had several unfinished pieces, many unaccepted versions of different works, and a lot of theater music I had recorded earlier that was no longer on the theater's repertoar. I took the whole summer of 2014 for this.
I chose some non-exclusive libraries as a starting point, and most of them accepted the music I sent. I don’t want to go into too much detail, I made some bad decisions of course but this is how learning works. Maybe I'll make a separate blog post about these wrong decisions I made in the first couple of years. But the point is: I didn’t make any money from it in the first year or so.
After nothing happened in the first year, I thought this wasn’t going to lead anywhere, so I started thinking about new projects. I was very frustrated — finally, I had the tools to record music, but I didn’t know what I wanted to create. So I began to experiment freely, and a darker, experimental electronic album started to take shape, which I called Darko (later ended up in the Crowander catalog). I reached out to a few labels that might be interested, one of them being HUSH Records, whose founder I contacted, Chad Crouch. Chad kindly and honestly wrote back that the Darko material wouldn’t be relevant for the label, but they were launching a new music library called Needledrop, and many tracks on my SoundCloud page would fit there. I was very excited about this and, of course, happily sent them my music. They included it in their catalog. Soon after, I realized that Chad was running a very successful project under the name Podington Bear, specifically created for music licensing. Needledrop became the first library from which I started to see some revenue. Another library was Pump Audio, which has since closed. I don’t know much about them, but they accepted my music and periodically sent reports showing which of my tracks had been licensed. There was even a time when small payments came from there regularly.
In 2016, Chad contacted me again about a music platform called Free Music Archive, which had partnered with Needledrop to represent their catalog. He asked if I wanted my music included there as well. I didn’t know much about Creative Commons licenses, but honestly, I thought that if Chad was putting his music there, then of course I would too. Basically people could download my music for free and use it for non commercial purposes. Thanks to FMA, people from all over the world discovered my music, film students, content creators, all kinds of people. In those days, almost every week someone would contact me. Later, interest gradually decreased, but I also received serious requests, not just for licensing, but for commissioned composition work. At this time, I had the opportunity to compose music for a documentary called Three Days of Glory and for a short animated film as well .
Meanwhile, I joined Kiscsillag one of the most well-known bands in the Hungarian indie scene, as a guitarist and keyboardist. During the first years, up until the outbreak of COVID, we played an incredible number of concerts. This shifted my focus, but at that time I also wrote most of my rock music, which later ended up in Crowander albums like From the Garage and Uplifting Funband.
So by 2018, things related to music licensing had calmed down again, and the next turning point came when, at the age of 40, I released my first solo album as a singer-songwriter under my own name. It was a huge effort to create, and once it was out, I began thinking about licensing again. I wanted to bring some order to my projects; I didn’t like being both a singer-songwriter under my own name and a licensing composer at the same time. A childhood memory of a small crow figurine from my grandparents became the inspiration, appearing on every album cover. The first idea wasn’t even a name, but the concept of organizing all my music into albums, each featuring the crow on the cover. That’s how the project name Crowander came about.
It was a massive effort to reorganize all the music, create the covers, and also remix and remaster all previous compositions. 2019 became the big restart for licensing, now under the name Crowander. I spent a lot of time thinking about where to submit the music, but eventually I only approached one or two libraries, which didn’t lead very far. Subscription-based models appeared, and I saw that high-quality music could now be licensed relatively cheaply. I thought about joining one of these libraries, but I wasn’t accepted into the high-quality ones, and I hesitated with the lower-quality ones, not wanting to risk making another mistake. So I mostly uploaded the albums to FMA, one by one, week by week, and at the same time, I launched my website. The effect was stronger than expected. People from all over the world, from New Zealand to the United States, started contacting me almost daily. There were some particularly exciting usages, such as a Mini commercial, Mubi or, more recently, the film Baby Girl, where, unfortunately, my music, Carres is barely audible, just briefly in the background :)
I increasingly began to treat Crowander as one of my main projects, constantly releasing new albums. This approach works for me — I need a concept that attracts my creativity. That’s how, for example, the Peaceful album came about in 2022. When the Russian invasion broke out, the news shocked me deeply and affected me. I thought I would try to create the most peaceful musical album possible, titled Peaceful. I wanted to mention this separately because just a few weeks ago, an independent Ukrainian filmmaker contacted me to use two tracks from this album in a documentary about a war refugee pianist. It was very moving, and I felt that these compositions had truly found their best place.
It is now autumn 2025 as I write these lines, and it has been almost a year since I released a new Crowander album. I felt I needed a little break, and honestly, the lack of inquiries after my last releases also played a part. Since this is a side project for me, I never pressured myself too much and I don’t closely follow the market, but it’s clear that with the rise of AI, this industry is already changing significantly. I can only hope that individuality will remain valuable. I’ve never written these albums on a production line; each one is born from genuine inspiration. That’s why some are not really suited for licensing. I didn’t worry about this, knowing that only a few would find relevance in, for example, the Mad Trash Disco album or Cleaner, but for me, this approach works. Thankfully, a few years ago I met Nickolas Griffin (One Man Book) and Dominic Giam (Ketsa) through FMA, who happily included me among the founding Independent Music Licensing Collective (IMLC) composers and later expanded their work to track my music used on YouTube with a solution similar to Content ID. Needless to say, over the years, thousands of people have used my music for free via FMA, so at least we can generate a little profit from it.
In 2025, I decided not to channel all my ideas into Crowander for now, but to collaborate with other musicians and perform my compositions in front of an audience. Several new formations have been created, and more and more people are hiring me as a producer. Nevertheless, I want to return to Crowander eventually. I have accumulated a lot of theater and other music, from which I plan to release compilation albums. I also have a few new album ideas, and finally I was able to set up the Crowander Music Library, from where you can easily search and find music by tags and genres.
Keep in touch,
David