Non-exclusive vs. buyout: the five words that decide what your song can do next
Written before the desk opened · June 27
magine two sync briefs landing in the same week. Both pay well. One licenses your song non-exclusively for five years; one buys the recording outright for a campaign. Same money, opposite futures — and the difference lives in five words of licensing language.
Non-exclusive means the song keeps working for you: you can release it, license it again, put it on the record. The only thing you’ve sold is permission-to-use, in parallel with everyone else you’ll ever sell it to. A buyout transfers the thing itself — usually the master, sometimes scoped to a campaign and term, sometimes forever. Buyouts aren’t evil; they’re priced differently because they are a different thing. The rule: a buyout should pay a multiple of a license, never the same number.
The five words to find: “exclusive,” “perpetuity,” “assigns,” “all media,” and “work made for hire” — the last one means the song was legally never yours at all. Any brief carrying it should say so in the headline. That is what the rights line on every card is for — and where the terms say nothing at all about your song, the line reports that silence and dates the capture instead of inventing a reassurance.