Royalty-Free Music

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Permalink Reply by Benny Lewis on January 18, 2009 at 4:04am

Yeah royalty-free became an issue for me when my favourite video was taken off youtube for using a popular Brazilian song, so I've learned my lesson. I love those links Kim!! I'll be checking them out.

One alternative is to create your OWN music. I am way off being a musician but software nowadays makes it possible to throw a few beats together. Sony Acid (Windows) does the trick for me and I'm slowly learning how to make something half decent - I'm sure there are Mac equivalents. You can combine the two methods and remix some classical or easy going royalty free music with some beats so that it fits the mood in your video. It takes a lot less time than you think!

When I made my Burning Man video (see it in the videos section on TBEX) I asked David Miller over at Matador to help out and he took a segment of the music I recorded live during the event (just some guys casually playing the Didgeridoo at my camp), reversed a segment for the intro, added some beats and it worked out really well! In retrospect we decided we should have done more since I had to loop it a lot in the middle, but it was a great more personal alternative to royalty free music.

I've also got some musician friends who said they'd love to collaborate some time and give me one of their own songs - if you don't mind putting up a mention in the credits you can help eachother out. :)

Permalink Reply by Shannon Hurst Lane on January 22, 2009 at 6:29am

A great resource I use is http://music.podshow.com. Register for an account and start searching. I've found some fantastic tracks and new artists this way. I did a podcast on Yellowstone a few years back and found that a local tour guide was also a composer of the park's most popular CD, Yellowstone. I emailed him for permission to use his music and he was fine with it, so long as I credited him at the end.

I really believe in using new artist or independent labels.

Permalink Reply by SammyK on January 23, 2009 at 9:36pm

Yikes! I am a pretty bad offender of using copyrighted music in my videos... I just have a passion for music and have so many songs that inspire me to shoot a shot a certain way or to act out a certain scene... but true, royalty-free or with permission is the best policy.

There's a pretty good site with music released under the Creative Commons license. It's called ccMixter. The site's a little cumbersome to navigate, but I've used a few songs in our videos.

Also, my friend from back in Kentucky, Justin Durban (who's becoming some big-shot super-star composer-guy in Hollywood right now) has released a whole lot of his music for free on his website. If you can't find the MP3 of a song you'd like, just contact him. He'll probably just send it to you.

Permalink Reply by Gary Arndt on January 24, 2009 at 12:55am

I did a search on the name of my blog and found a DJ who created a song called "Everything Everywhere". I contacted him and asked if I could use it for my podcast. He said yes, and that was that.

Permalink Reply by Kim Mance, Founder of TBEX on January 24, 2009 at 5:03pm

Cool that you found a song with the same name, clever!

I love the idea you and some of the others have had on using independent artists. I think we'll start checking more options like that out.

Permalink Reply by CoreyTaratuta on March 22, 2009 at 8:20am

Thanks for the tips. I've been using music from http://music.podshow.com. I find their search a little tedious, but I've found some great music.

Now to start listening through these other suggestions.

Permalink Reply by Neil Johnston on March 28, 2009 at 6:47pm

There are a ton of good Creative Commons Attribution License 3 tunes available at http://www.jamendo.com/en/ You can refine the search for both commercial and non-commercial use which is a huge help.
After you search on a tag, click the advanced search and then select commercial usage. Admittedly there's enough death-by-synthesizer stuff there to drive you bonkers, but there are some gems too.

Permalink Reply by Something Creative Bali on May 15, 2010 at 5:28am

we use jamendo.com- some amazing CC songs on there.

Permalink Reply by Emme Rogers on November 24, 2011 at 12:07pm

This is a great topic thread.  Thanks for starting this.

 

We recently discovered the 'Royalty-Free' music our editor was using actually had fees of $100 / year / video associated with it.  You can imagine that in the long-term, with regular video posting this could get quite costly.  

 

What we learnt? Be careful and read the fine print on the sites where you are obtaining Royalty-Free Music from.