Sentric is a British music publishing firm that registers your songs and provides “briefs” to which you can submit recordings for the purpose of placement (known as “synchronisation”) on media such as film, tv, and adverts. If your song gets a placement they take twenty percent of the proceeds. It’s not a bad deal, because you can also do what the heck you like with your songs outside of that. In other words you keep all the rights. And there are no upfront costs at all.

I put up a number of my songs a long time ago. Nothing much happened. And then I stopped uploading, and I stopped putting the songs that were already uploaded forward for placement.

Suddenly, out of the blue, and without me doing anything more than leave them there, I got an email yesterday to say that a song (an old and not fantastically recorded song) had just earned me over £120.

I’ve no idea how that happened. This wasn’t a song I had put forward for synchronisation. It had simply been found by someone searching the Sentric library, which must be vast, who then purchased some sort of license to use the song.

I don’t know what my take on this is. Maybe I should put more effort into getting my hands on some of that cash that people obviously seem still to spend on music. Maybe this was a completely random event, that couldn’t possibly be repeated it.

Either way my motivation continues to be very much making music, not making money from music.

But I wanted to mention it, and also recommend Sentric, who seem to be an honest, easy to use publishing company, with no upfront costs as I mentioned. And on top of that, I am finding their customer service via responses to recent questions to be brilliant.

It might be something for some of my songwriting readers.