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Royalty-free music (was: Want to make a...)
I posted about this in another thread, but I think that it really belongs in the tools-of-the-trade discussion, and not lost in the blah-blah-blah blather, so I am going to re-post the information here.
There are lots of places online that will sell royalty-free music libraries for a very reasonable price. A quick search yields http://www.sounddogs.com, but I have used http://www.networkmusic.com on a couple of projects.
The license agreements differ, but they tend to be very cheap if you use the music in conjunction with something choreographed. That is, if you have an act that is linked to the music, the rights are quite reasonable. But, if you want to play the music as people are walking into the theater, that is considered "broadcasting," and the price jumps up substantially. You can also distribute the music on promotional material as long as it is tied to some choreographed media. So if you are looking for background music for a promo-video during the splash or image collage, the music is cheap, but you can't just sell a collection of songs without any additional linked media.
Some of the pricing plans involve "needle drops" - which means that you pay for a selection of music based on the number of times that the selection is played within your project, others allow for unlimited number of instances.
When you purchase the rights to a selection, you will usually get several versions of the music with times ranging between fifteen seconds to a couple of minutes.
There also may be restrictions on how you can manipulate the tracks. Use of the music as sources for re-mixes or as background for lyrics is often denied, so you will probably have to use it "as-is".
If you want to use a particular piece of music, you can always just ask the composer/publisher. They may simply grant permission without any hassle (one shots aren't really worth the effort, so you might get authorization without the paperwork.)
Steven Ragatz
There are lots of places online that will sell royalty-free music libraries for a very reasonable price. A quick search yields http://www.sounddogs.com, but I have used http://www.networkmusic.com on a couple of projects.
The license agreements differ, but they tend to be very cheap if you use the music in conjunction with something choreographed. That is, if you have an act that is linked to the music, the rights are quite reasonable. But, if you want to play the music as people are walking into the theater, that is considered "broadcasting," and the price jumps up substantially. You can also distribute the music on promotional material as long as it is tied to some choreographed media. So if you are looking for background music for a promo-video during the splash or image collage, the music is cheap, but you can't just sell a collection of songs without any additional linked media.
Some of the pricing plans involve "needle drops" - which means that you pay for a selection of music based on the number of times that the selection is played within your project, others allow for unlimited number of instances.
When you purchase the rights to a selection, you will usually get several versions of the music with times ranging between fifteen seconds to a couple of minutes.
There also may be restrictions on how you can manipulate the tracks. Use of the music as sources for re-mixes or as background for lyrics is often denied, so you will probably have to use it "as-is".
If you want to use a particular piece of music, you can always just ask the composer/publisher. They may simply grant permission without any hassle (one shots aren't really worth the effort, so you might get authorization without the paperwork.)
Steven Ragatz
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