Licensing royalty free music is very common today. In fact it is one of the best licensing schemes for both low budget and big budget projects that utilizes music. If you are not familiar with how royalty music works, it has the following characteristics:
1.) The licensee needs only to pay once to use the music and then the licensee can use it in perpetuity limited by the rights granted by the license.
This is applicable in “per track” and “per catalog basis”. In “per catalog basis”, the licensee can pay a blanket license fee that gives the rights to use whatever songs in the catalog.
2.) The licensee will only be working and agreeing with one supplier and that is the royalty free music provider. In the traditional music licensing methods, any interested licensees will be researching the name of the music publisher and the owner of the master recording so that the licensee can ask for a license to use. This takes a lot of time especially if the music publisher and master recording information are not provided in most audio files.
Even if the information is freely provided such as included in the CD inlay albums; the licensee will still need to ask for a license from these two persons (the music publisher and the master recording rights owner). In this case, the licensing can be very costly and time consuming. With the royalty free music licensing, the licensee needs to deal with only one provider.
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Most ordinary music consumers looking forward to use copyright music in their project does not know how to license a music. Or most beginning music publishers does not know how to offer their music for licensing either. The result is confusion, lots of mistakes, inefficiency in the business and lots of time wasted in the process. Based on my experience as an indie music publisher and how do I issue license to my customers, this tutorial will hopefully end the confusion. First, you should accept the following facts with regards to music licensing- Strict documentation is a must. This includes the following:
a.) Are you keeping your copyright certificates?
b.) Do you maintain an online or offline music catalog that list your official titles for publication and licensing?
c.) Are you keeping tracks what are those titles that are not yet copyrighted? Or what are those titles that are not yet registered with your public performance society?
d.) Most indie publishers own the copyright of the sound recording. So are you keeping tracks of the master version? Do you have a list that you can monitor whether those tracks have studio or acoustic versions? Are those master sound recordings copyrighted?
e.) Are you keeping a copy of your issued license? Or a list of your customers with contact information?
f.) Do you list the complete song credits of every song? Who are the writers, performers, etc?
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Someone licensed your music and will be asking for your master recording. So how will you prepare and deliver your master recordings to your client? This tutorial will talk about delivery of your finished product to all of your music licensing customers.
There are actually two aspects you should be focusing on the delivery. These are the:
a.) Audio Format.
b.) Method of delivery
Lets start with the tradional method. This is delivery using CD. The following should be the specifications of your audio format and the delivery:
a.) If you are delivering less than 15 songs to your customer. Then send use the CD audio wav format of your masters. These should be in 16bit/44.1Khz resolution. This is also the end/complete format of most audio mastering houses.
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