Royalty free music

[Josh Swan]

I picked this idea up from Steve's advice on Andrews post "weddings & Music" about the magnatune.com site. I didn't want to highjack his thread, so I figured I'd post one about it. Does anyone know of any other good sites to get royalty free music with lyrics for a good price?

[Stephen J. Williams]

That looks like a great site... I was poking around for just a bit.. All that came up for pricing was 8$.... This seems almost to cheap... maybe i was missing something, but i'll be looking to this site in the future... thanks for posting.

[Brian Boyko]

Magnatune... isn't that cheap.

I think you might be confusing the price for owning the MP3 file for personal enjoyment (about $8, as you said) and the price of using it in a project (around $150, if memory serves.)

[Josh Swan]

I searched it and it was around $5 for use on a single copy wedding video.
Not bad. It's around $100 for web use though (Something like a video blog)

[Mark Von Lanken]

Hi Josh,

I used Triple Scoop Music : Award-winning music for professional photographers and videographers! for some recent projects. They have a huge library with a good variety of styles. Their customer service is excellent.

You can see the clips here.
HD Videos OnlineThe Brides of Oklahoma

[Jason Robinson]

Originally Posted by Josh Swan

I picked this idea up from Steve's advice on Andrews post "weddings & Music" about the magnatune.com site. I didn't want to highjack his thread, so I figured I'd post one about it. Does anyone know of any other good sites to get royalty free music with lyrics for a good price?

While Magnatune is great, and has some great music, they are far from cheap for event videography, that is the primary reason I only used them once. They also are NOT a royalty free provider. Web use is what bumps up their pricing hideously. Essentially, if you want to post each update you edit, don't use them. Use an actual royalty free site like what Mark referenced if you want to keep the prices reasonable.

[Bruce Patterson]

I use Triple Scoop Music : Award-winning music for professional photographers and videographers! for our corporate stuff, which is great but it costs too much for a typical wedding film, IMO.

[Steve House]

Originally Posted by Jason Robinson

While Magnatune is great, and has some great music, they are far from cheap for event videography, that is the primary reason I only used them once. They also are NOT a royalty free provider. Web use is what bumps up their pricing hideously. Essentially, if you want to post each update you edit, don't use them. Use an actual royalty free site like what Mark referenced if you want to keep the prices reasonable.

Royalty free is not cost free, it means you pay a single license fee up-front based on the nature of the production and the number of copies to be made and that's it, no further royalties based on sales or number of performances of the work that the music is used in come due in the future. It can be either buy-out, meaning you pay a single fee for the license and then can use it as many times and in as many different productions as you like, or needle-drop, which means you pay by the number of cues used and/or by length of time each one plays. Magnatunes licenses are a type of needle-drop license AFAIK

Wedding or event video use of 1 song in a product that has a distribution of a single copy runs $5, licensing for a run of 5 copies takes it to a whopping $17, 10 copies only $25. Even a production run of 1000 copies only takes it to $200. The license to use a song in a YouTube posting is free as long as you give attribution. Those are incredibly reasonable prices IMHO. Other companies charge upwards of $100 or more for each time the song plays or 30 second segment of a single playing. - use 5 10-second cuts in your production and your license would run you $500. For example, compare Magnatunes fees to Westar Music's online rate card for cuts from their production library. http://www.westarmusic.com/licensing.html

[Jason Robinson]

From the Magnatune license page for a YouTube video, with emphasis mine:
YouTube and other web video sites (such as Google Video, Revver, etc):
If you'd like to use Magnatune music in a video that will be posted on YouTube, Google Video, Revver, and/or other web video sites, simply buy the album and use the music.
Please note, Magnatune does not provide free copies of our music for this purpose. In order to use our music in your video, you are required to go through the regular purchasing process. You can purchase any album on the Magnatune site for as little as $5.
Please also note, you're required to include attribution of our music. This can be in the form of a visual credit that includes the (1) Song Name, (2) Artist Name and (3) Label Name (Magnatune Records) in the end credits of the video. If your video will not include credits, attribution of the music should go somewhere on the web page where the video will appear.
If your video project supports a business, organization, or commercial venture in any way, please return to the previous page and choose the "Video/CD/DVD" music license.

When you look at that rate, it is $228 for a single song for a company with a budget of $10K (which is probably where most of the pro & semi-pro wedding videographers fit). That is where I cannot pay their costs.

[Steve House]

From the Magnatunes site: "This license is for any video, powerpoint, slide or film project which will not be shown in theaters, but may be sold. If your project has very limited distribution (ie, a wedding video) a "single units" license will probably be less expensive. " The $228 is not when the company is worth $10k, it's when the production budget (including salaries) for that one video is greater than $1000 but less than $10,000. The actual production budget of most wedding and event videos would be well under $1000 per video I'd expect. I also think you're looking at the wrong type of production - I would interpret this to apply to videos such as "How to Frame a Painting", "10 Easy Exercises To Lose That Belly Flab", or "The Beauty of Ballroom Dance" that you're going to offer for sale to the general public or to show for profit on a website. That's not the same thing as a wedding or corporate video done for a single client - if you deliver 1 copy to the B&G the license for 1 song is $5, if you deliver 3 copies the license totals $13, or if you deliver 5 copies the license is a total of $17. For an event videographer covering "Boise Busker Fest 2009" taking orders and selling copies of the video, the license to use 1 song on a run of 100 copies of the show would only run $200 or $2 per copy. A blanket license allowing you to use an unlimited number of song cuts from their entire catalog in 100 copies of a single video is only $600. How often are you going to deliver more than 100 copies of the video of an event you've covered?

Just what, exactly, are you wanting to post on YouTube, etc, as a wedding videographer that would be covered by the bolded line in your posting?

[Jason Robinson]

I can assure you that I have already had many phone calls and email conversations with Teresa Malango from the licensing department at Magnatune. According to their decision relayed to me a video posted online as well as burned to a limited production run DVD falls under the "Project type: CDROM / Video / DVD" license, which for a single project budget under $10K but above $1K (which is most individual wedding videos) has a license cost of $228.

Using the "Single units: wedding video, small quantity for-profit" does NOT allow posting of the video with the Magnatune song to a web site, which is the major distinction. This means clips or highlights that will be posted to a web site will cost $228 MINIMUM, unless you consider the song a "theme song" which means the per song license cost starts at $343.

[Steve House]

I'll take your word for it ... but consider this. Posting the video on your website essentially makes it into an advertisement for your videography business. And that being the case, isn't it fair to pay the going rate for commercial applications of the music, just as if you were incorporating it into a website commerical you're shooting for an auto dealership or shoe store client of yours? How many of the wedding videos you shoot for clients do you actually publish excerpts from to the web anyway - all of them, 1 in 10, 1 in 50? Use the song in a clip you choose to use in your promotional material and it costs $228. But use the same song in a normal wedding video you shoot for a client, delivering say 5 copies of the DVD to your client without posting any clips in which the music is heard and it only costs you $17. Seems fair to me. Of all the videos you've done it seems like you'd only post clips of the few best of the best and if none of the Magnatunes music is in those specific clips, you don't need to worry about it, even if you do use the music elsewhere in the complete video.

Are you saying your personal out-of-pocket cost for the typical wedding you do runs over $1000? The "production budget" the licensing tiers refer to, as I read the site, is not the retail price you are charging your client, it's your out-of-pocket operating cost in producing the video, its wholesale cost. You may charge your client $2500 but I'll bet your out-of-pocket direct production cost is at most a few hundred bucks.- expendables (tape, batteries), amortized equipment cost, transportation and expenses, salary for paid assistants and subcontractor 2nd camera if any, legal and licensing fees, etc would be pretty much it. Since you're the producer, you really don't get a "salary" for shooting and editing that's part of the production budget, instead you get to keep the profits from the sale of the completed work. That profit wouldn't be included in the production cost. Have you discussed that distinction with them in your conversations?

[Jason Robinson]

The specific video I licensed the song for actually had a total project price of $1700 to the client, with $550 going off the top to my photographer for his part of the bundled service. A remaining $512 went to camera rentals. That left me with $638, minus the ~$60 in tapes, lightscribe DVDs, mileage reimbursement, and a few odds and ends. I then had ~120hrs in post production (wasted a lot of time trying to eliminate some wind & AC unit hum from the audio).

Slim margin indeed. That was one of my last productions priced at "hobbiest" levels. If I were to do the same production again, the videography alone would be ~$1700 and I finally would not have camera rental expenses, and I could potentially worry about throwing >$200 towards a single song music license, though not for the song I was using (kind of a generic modern piano solo theme). I would rather spend $60 on a buy out song than pay their rates.
I am going to be taking a real close look at the music available on Mark's link because those prices, while a bit high per song for my tastes, provide much more value to me in that I don't want to have to re-cut a scene with a different music track, just to include the visuals in my samples page.

[Jason Robinson]

Originally Posted by Steve House

That profit wouldn't be included in the production cost. Have you discussed that distinction with them in your conversations?

I have actually, since that was the bulk of my concern. To Magnatune, there is no difference. The client's bill total was what they considered, and only what they considered.

The Magnatune "budget" is determined as (quoted to me by their representative) the "Budget of the entire production (including salaries and all expenses)", meaning the entire amount of the bill to the client since all monies over expenses are my income.

[Mark Von Lanken]

Wow, after reading all of those terms and conditions...Triple Scoop Music sounds better all the time...no pun intended. It certainly makes it much easier.