Two Good Solutions for Music Licensing
As we all know, licensing music for your piece can be incredibly expensive (not to mention a huge pain…try getting a record label to respond in a timely manner…), which leaves many of us with only one option: to turn to royalty-free music for our work.
But sometimes there is a no royalty-free substitute for that perfect song. Well-written, professional pieces of music are works of art in their own right, and when the right song is paired with the visuals you have created, it brings your entire piece to the next level.
This is especially important for those of you who make a living as wedding videographers. Often times a single song is so important to the emotion of the piece, but wedding photographers don’t have the budget to acquire rights to this music. To make matters worse, labels have begun to crack down on Wedding videographers who break copyright law and use music for which they don’t have the rights. This has of course been happening since people started making wedding videos, but with the rise of YouTube, and the possibility of your wedding video being seen by anyone (or going viral!), labels have been tougher about pursuing those who skirt around copyright laws.
However, there are two services out there that can help you with this challenge.
The first is SongFreedom – a subscription (or pay per track) library of popular music with songs from artists such as Jason Mraz, Amos Lee, and Train. We recently used music that we licensed from them for our Behind the Scenes video for the MotoArt piece that we just released. Their prices are incredibly reasonable, allowing you to purchase on track at a time for $24.99 or buying different levels of subscription that give you access to multiple songs. Currently, their licensing packages don’t support Indie Films or Commercial endeavors – but the founders over at SongFreedom will help you fulfill that request separately if you email them directly.
The second is "With Etiquette" – a collective of musicians (ranging from pop, to folk, to electronica and everything in between) that have banded together to affordably license their music to the public. You won’t find any main stream artists on this site – but the music you will find is genuine and powerful. What’s really cool is that they have developed a "Wizard" for helping you find music that is good for your piece. You narrow down the selection by choosing from a variety of criteria such as tempo, genre, and length, and the application chooses selections of songs that would best fit your piece. Licenses are available in a variety of tiers for everything from Wedding videos to Film Festivals, to Small Business. Larger licenses are available (commercial work), but must be custom priced.
I encourage you to hop over to both of these sites (Song Freedom, With Etiquette) and check out their services and their music libraries – it may prove to be a useful solution for those of you looking to license music for your projects. It certainly has helped us here on the blog!
Those are great tips! I hadn’t heard of them, With Etiquette seems amazing!
Sound Freedom or Stumble Upon? Logo looks so similar
I’d like to point out the existence of Jamendo Pro, another alternative which offers a similar service. You can get there licenses for any format, including feature films and commecial work.
My band is on this plateform for years and our music was already used in dozen of documentaries and ads. And as incredible as it sounds for an indy band of our size, we make money !
Using both SongFreedom and mobygratis.com for my endeavors and I have this wonderful blog to thank for that. Permanent bookmark, hehe.
Those are great websites with really helpful content. Thanks a lot for pointing them out Vincent!
But I think that it should be noted that non US users need to be really careful when licensing & using music from a licensing company that is not based in their country of operation. If you license from a US company that license may have no value where you live.
In Germany for example, you pay twice. You pay for the “film synchronization right” that you negotiate with the rights holder. Additionally the rights holder association / collecting society GEMA will make you pay according to your usage and their fee catalogue. Even if an artist is not member of a collecting society GEMA makes you pay unless YOU prove by a contract that the artist is not in that society and that you licensed the song directly.
While Germany is an extreme example legislation and fines vary widely from country to country.
In case you don’t comply with those local laws it can get very very expensive and your license bought with one of the website will at best cover the film synchronization right.
Christian
Mets Reply:
August 28th, 2012 at 1:33 pm
Thanks for the information, I live in Holland and we have to deal with Buma Stemra. Im going to find out if what you say is also the case in Holland.
Marc Reply:
June 4th, 2013 at 7:30 am
@Christian Tillmanns, maybe you’re interested in Soundtaxi.net a German based company for royalty free music.
They’ve got a really huge archive of fantastic sounding music from almost every genre,
plus you’ll get a license document to each song you buy.
Maybe you wanna give it a try!
cheers, Marc
Excellent info. I’ve skipped using music because it seemed like such a pain, but I’m going to give it a look now. Good stuff.
A good alternative source for songs that can be licenced commercially is http://www.jamendo.com Mind you, not all songs are great or have commercial quality, but sometimes you can find the needle in the hay that you have been looking for. 🙂
I want to buy a license from song freedom, but i don’t know if it can be used in a non-commercial short film.
Can it?
Vincent Laforet Reply:
August 29th, 2012 at 3:45 am
Kindly check with them on legal matters 😉
@Mets, I live in Holland too. Unless my client really requires it, I avoid having to deal with copyright societies like the plague. Licensing can easily run up to 100s of euros, per 30 secs!
Online use is not TV and if they would make it a simple process, I’ll bet they could sell a lot more. Instead, I frequently use musicloops.com or, if given a little more budget, Audio Network. But finding the right type of score still is very time-consuming, so you have to outweigh cost vs benefit…
People need to stop being so damn cheap and pay for the right to use songs. If video creators really cared about anybody other than themselves, the world would be a better place. Stop taking advantage of musicians and pay for the rights to use the music!
Vincent Laforet Reply:
October 9th, 2012 at 11:23 pm
Musicians and their labels need to make things a lot easier for us. When was the last time you reached out to a record label only to wait days or weeks for a response? If you’re on a big budget commercial it’s easy. Smaller productions have a much harder time even getting the time of day… A better system needs to exist for both sides in my opinion.
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