But, for the most part, music comes with a price tag as well. Setting aside the willingness of the current generation to steal music “because they can”, music is also desired and needed for other purposes as well. With the popularity of online video services such as YouTube for both entertainment and commercial promotion, there are lots of people who have never before created a video presentation doing just that…incorporating production music. Companies have been doing this sort of thing for many years, so they may be more well-versed in the legal requirements of music usage than most, but even they sometimes struggle to figure out what they can use, where they can find it, etc.

Years ago, recognizing the power of music, broadcast networks employed entire orchestras to provide music for radio and TV shows. Just imagine the expense of employing, say, 40 live musicians full-time such a purpose. And yet, there weren’t many good options available at the time. Technology has, of course, changed that…to the place where live musicians are only rarely employed by others these days. Most of those that make their living in music either employ themselves and try to manage their careers as bar bands playing cover versions of successful songs by others, or as recording artists who create their own music, and have albums and concert tours as part of their product mix.
 
Royalty Free Production Music

Royalty free music seems to have appeared in the 1970s-80s. One of the first professional libraries was Network Music, who would place a number of LPs in professional recording studios and would either charge a needledrop fee of $50-300 per use of a specific track from the album (depending on whether the commercial advertisement was local, regional or national…and how long it would run) or a blanket license of several thousand dollars per year to use any of their material.

This system worked fairly well for a number of years, except that as more and more folks got into the broadcast commercial and video production fields, competition over price margins made it hard to lay out as much money for production music. It was at this point that the buyout music library made its entry into the market. These individual albums (and CDs were just entering the market as “an option” as well for those that owned players) were generally available for between $80 and $200 per volume. They functioned in a similar way to the original “blanket license”, except that you only paid one time to purchase them, rather than annually.

Production music is commonly used by literally every type of business as music-on-hold for telephone systems. Music-on-hold can be called into action throughout the day as phone calls are channeled to the appropriate people in any other business that relies on phone support. Royalty free music is a type of music in which there are no on-going fees or royalties to be paid to the seller of the music or the artists that created it, and, is thus copyright free music. This does not mean that there are no copyright restrictions…rather that individuals pay to satisfy all copyright demands up-front, as part of the purcahse agreement.

Royalty Free Music is by far the easiest and most cost effective means of incorporating copywritten music into any audio/visual project or presentation. It is widely used by webmasters, multimedia developers, corporate and audio/video professionals in many diverse applications.

Royalty free music is more necessary now than ever before. In the past, everyone from educators to independent filmmakers, low-budget commercial producers to power point presenters could get away with using music they hadn’t bought. Royalty free music is a flexible alternative to purchasing the rights to use music from larger mainstream music companies such as BMI and ASCAP because it involves just a one-time fee for unlimited lifetime use of the music purchased, allowing you to build sizable collections of music that you can use in not only current projects but many in the future. But how do you find the right music for components of your business that require very specific or non-traditional accompaniment? Royalty free music is getting better these days as musicians are more open to the idea of composing music for this use. The market for this kind of music will grow very soon as more applications are invented that will require this licensing format.

Royalty-Free Production Music (aka “Buyout Music”)

Buyout music is synonymous with royalty free music, and simply describes a type of music that offers an up-front price for use with no on-going monthly payments; professionals “buy out” the royalty payments all at once for the music selections they want instead of paying each time they use it or on a monthly basis. More of these professionals are choosing to employ royalty free music to use as production music in their many projects to cut costs without compromising the quality they deserve and expect. Buyout music isn’t copyright-free, but by paying a small fee, you gain a royalty-free license to use the music in your production. There’s a lot of buyout music out there, most of it available in bulk: you buy a CD, or set of CDs, and all of the music on it is yours to use.

Buyout music is production music that can be licensed for a one-time, flat fee. This royalty-free production music can be synchronized with any type of production, including broadcast, corporate/internal, or film. Buyout music is an essential tool for multimedia developers and can serve as an affordable solution without compromising on quality. Buyout music is a huge category for the video producer. A quick Google search for the phrase “buyout music” will yield over a million relevant web pages!

Read the other articles on this site for more info about commercial music licensing.

Since it has to cover a wider-range of usage than songs composed for other purposes, royalty-free music is generally less complex and less engaging than popular music. And yet, the music is rarely “the star of the show”, as it’s often used underneath a professional narration and location audio. Thus, some producers play on this strength and create separate tracks called “underscores”, which have the lead instruments stripped out of the tracks.

Evolution in the Field of Royalty-Free Production Music

In the 1980s-1990s, synths gave way to samples, as technology allowed more instruments to be “sampled” digitally and recreated on desktop audio workstations. Instead of “faux” instruments such as drums, bass and piano, it became more and more difficult to distinguish live instruments from their sample counterparts. It’s gotten so good now that artists are recording albums featuring single digitally-sampled instruments…even very complex instruments such as pianos.

For small production houses, production music libraries in the form of an in-house CD library or an online library of downloadable tracks are the preferred choice.

From what we’ve seen, the Creative Commons has its greatest impact in the world of “mashups”… where various elements are creatively combined for artistic or entertainment purposes. A perfect example would be a YouTube video featuring certain kinds of existing footage (or possibly footage introduced for the first time in this work) and merged with a preexisting song and sound effects found elsewhere. Creative Commons attempts to define “fair use” for such an effort, which is usually not based around the idea of profit.

Creative Commons was officially launched in 2001 by a group of intellectual property experts, lawyers and web publishers. Creative Commons licenses cover art, music, and writing… but it is not designed for software. CC is an organization founded to help authors and creators who are interested in sharing their work avoid the very restrictive rules of copyright, and their subsequent chilling effect on users. The licenses available through CC allow authors and creators to attach a recognizable legal document to their work, especially but not exclusively web work, that allows users to make broad categories of use of that work without further permission. Creative Commons intends to provide tools that solve both problems: a set of free public licenses strong enough to withstand a court’s scrutiny and simple enough for non-lawyers to use, but yet sophisticated enough to be identified by various Web applications.

Creative Commons helps copyright holders release their works via terms that are more generous than default copyrights. It also helps creators understand the terms under which their work may be used… and assign rights under those terms. CC is a not-for-profit organization that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. Through its free copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to enable a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. Creative Commons seems poorly understood to date, but people do appear to be starting to dip their toes in the water at this point.

Creative Commons is perhaps the most impressive embodiment of the ideas and potential behind RDF and related technologies. The vocabulary is anchored in authority developed by a team of lawyers — and lawyers, of course, are the profession most associated with nailing down semantics. Creative Commons has created a solution, a legal licensing toolkit, in much the same manner that open-source software licenses gave developers tools to share their code. CC is helping to instigate cultural change: empowering rights holders with the knowledge and tools to decide under what terms they wish third parties to use their creations, while permitting users easy and user-friendly means to use content lawfully without the necessity of requesting permission. The release of the CC licences has inspired a global revolution, supported by a sub-culture with its own identity, ideology, activities and membership and the spawning of other model licences developed with a similar philosophy, such as Science Commons, Patent Commons and Creative Archive.

Creative Commons provides a valuable resource for the modern “cut and paste” culture that has been neglected by traditional copyright law. The need for content management tools that are both easy to use and free, and material that can be legally utilized by private individuals for creative purposes without the need to obtain additional permissions, will only increase as user-generated content grows in importance and popularity.

Creative Commons licenses only apply to copyrightable works. There may be many other legal issues that arise in relation to copyrighted materials that Creative Commons licenses do not cover and that database providers need to consider. CC requires support to help enable a participatory culture – a culture in which everyone can actively engage in the creativity that surrounds us all. Creative Commons intends to be a rising tide that lifts all boats.

Creative Commons doesn’t set out to create a social movement but rather to give artists choice and a stable of great ready-made licenses. They’ve succeeded in that. Creative Commons representatives have stated that the trademark restrictions are not part of the license. In a graphical Web browser, the text for the trademark restrictions are visually distinct from the license text.

Even with a somewhat slow start, Creative Commons has demonstrable value and some clear applications to the field of production music.

Because indie musicians control their own creations (freeing those creations from the traditional publishing agreements), commercial enterprises of various types have begun to look at how this music can be incorporated in various ways. These days, you’re as likely as not to hear the intro for a tune from a local singer-songwriter playing as “bumper music” on the Martha Stewart show as you are a song from a major pop artist. Why? Because the rights to that song can be acquired much more cheaply….and money is a factor for everyone, isn’t it? It certainly is in a competitive field like media production!

This is why we’ve observed more and more unknown artists like Dirty Vegas and Hem seeing their music utilized by major advertising entities such as Volkswagen, Liberty Mutual, Apple Computers, etc. It’s much cheaper for Apple to approach someone an indie artist than it is for them to use a song by U2…which they still might do, of course, if they are promoting a U2-branded iPod. Otherwise, however, they’re more likely to dip into the indie world.

An Emerging Market

There are even companies that do nothing but plug these songs to exactly these kinds of producers, and for some indie musicians, it’s become a nice secondary (or “first-ondary”) source of income. Pump Audio is one example, but there are many others, including single individuals who are well-connected in both the worlds of music and production.

So, commercial music, in the form of production music libraries…(whether needledrop or royalty-free music/buyout music) now has some competition…even among those who are choosing to obey the law. These days, producers of various types of media are directly connecting with recording artists through their web sites, seeking to license their music for various purposes. Many artists are including music licensing rates on their sites.

Rates for such uses are usually affected by a variety of factors including:

• for-profit vs not-for-profit
• length of use
• what region or size of audience will be affected
• access to a single song, entire album, the artist’s body of work