| |
Archive for the ‘articles’ Category
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
What is Royalty Free Music?
This is a question we’re frequently asked, here’s a simple way to define it: Royalty-free music is music that’s designed to be used in media projects, and can be licensed for a single one-time fee. The term “royalty free” can be confusing, whether used for music or other media such as pictures or video. A better, more accurately descriptive term, would be “license-paid”, however the term ‘royalty free’ has become the generic term associated with the industry.
What Does Royalty Free Music Do?
It offers a simple way to license music, so that it can be used in media projects. When music is used in media situations, such as TV programmes, films, websites, whoever owns the various ‘rights’ to the music must give their permission for their music to be used. Traditionally, the licensing process to do his could be costly and time consuming to arrange, and was usually on a per-use basis. Royalty free music attempts to make this process easier by offering a simple license structure, allowing the media producer permission to use the music repeatedly and in many ways without having to purchase additional licenses.
Reasons to use Royalty Free Music include:
* Licensing is simple and widely available
* Quick and Easy Access to music
* More Cost Effective than traditional licensing
* Peace of mind – you know you’re legally covered
www.royalty-free.tv – supplying royalty free music since 2003 to major broadcasters, movie makers, web designers, media producers.
Tags: Royalty Free Music
Posted in Royalty Free Music, articles | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010
Media Producers of all kinds ask us about this issue a lot, because it’s a subject that can easily lead to confusion. Let’s try to explain what “Performance Rights” are all about, and what you as a Media Producer need to know about them and using royalty free music:
The “Performance Right” is the right of a composer to control how their music is performed in public. Whenever music is played (“Performed”) to the general public, the composer has to give their permission. To facilitate this every country has a national Performance Rights Organisation (PRO), such as the PRS in the UK or ASCAP in USA. These PROs collect license fees from whoever performs music in public, and redistribute the fees among composers. So for example, they will collect an annual license fee from a major TV network, then look at what music has been played (“performed”) on the TV network during the year, then divide the money into many thousands of smaller micro-payments to the relevant composers.
So who pays Performance Rights fees? Well, whoever actually plays the music to the public, pays the PRO license fees. So this would include TV stations, radio stations, theatres, even retail stores and websites in some countries. However, and here’s the confusing part, if you are just the media-maker or producer, you don’t pay any PRO fees. Why not? Because if you have produced let’s say a promotional video for a client, you haven’t actually performed the music in public – all you’ve done is make and produce the video. Whoever actually plays the video in public makes the performance, and they may have to pay a PRO fee.
This is where Royalty Free Music comes in, as it’s designed for media makers and producers, but there are two kinds of ‘royalty free’ and this can be confusing. You may have seen some royalty free music advertised as “PRO-free”, or with “no performance fees to pay ever”, while other royalty free music requires public performances to be notified to your local PRO. The difference here is easily explained. If a composer wants to receive any royalties when their work is on TV or in a movie, and get their fair share of the annual license fees that TV networks and movie theatres have already paid to their local PRO, the composer will belong to a PRO. If a composer never wants to see any of those royalties, or their music is never used on TV etc, he won’t belong to a PRO. It’s usual that professional composers and successful writers will belong to a PRO. If a composer who belongs to a PRO then writes some music for a royalty free music company, the PRO will be often be entitled to charge performance fees on all of that composer’s music no matter who the composer writes for. So although the music is ‘royalty free’ and easy to license for the media-make or programme producer to include in their production, when their work is played to the public such as on TV, then a PRO fee is due.
As a media producer, you probably have a great need for royalty free music, but don’t want to worry about Performance Rights and fees. So the solution is to ask yourself, are you the one who will actually be playing your work to the public? If you produce work for a client, the answer is probably ‘no’, so you have no worries – use any royalty free music you like!
What if your media production isn’t for a client, but for yourself? Again the answer is usually that it’s not a problem, let’s look at a couple of examples to see why…
Example 1 – you’ve made a video, and want to put it on youtube or a similar site. You don’t need to worry about public performance fees at all – Youtube is the one actually making your video public, and they have already paid a performance licence to their local PRO.
Example 2 – you’ve made a video you want to take to a trade fair. The trade fair venue will be responsible for having a PRO license which covers any music being used in their venue. So you don’t have to pay PRO fees, they already have.
So it’s easy to see that in most cases, if you are a media producer then it’s fine to use any of the royalty free music you see advertised online.
We have a list of many of the world’s PROs on our website at http://www.royalty-free.tv/rftv/performance_rights.htm, you can check out your local PRO to confirm what I’ve written here, or get further information.
www.royalty-free.tv: High quality royalty free music, loops, tracks and album downloads.
Tags: performance rights, Royalty Free Music
Posted in Royalty Free Music, articles | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
We’re often asked about copyright, music on hold for telephone systems and royalty free production music, so here’s some useful information on the subject.
Having on-hold music on telephone systems requires the user to be licensed with:
1. A “Mechanical” license, which allows you to physically store the music recording on your on-hold system. The royalty-free music license issued with tracks you buy from www.royalty-free.tv includes this. When you buy one of our music tracks you can chose between a “standard license” which covers you for a single location, or you can up-grade to a “full license” which covers you to use the track from multiple locations. For example if you have offices situated in different parts of the country, or in different countries around the world, you should opt for the “full” version.. This license does not need to be renewed each year, it is a once-only purchase, so you can continue to use the track for as long as you wish.
Additionally, you may also need:
2. A “Performing Rights” license. Playing music on-hold has been deemed as a public performance in some countries, but not all, and so may require a performing license too. You can check and obtain a license if necessary by asking your local Performing Rights Organisation, eg PRS in the UK. For a full list of these organisations, and links to their websites, please visit http://www.royalty-free.tv/rftv/performance_rights.htm
In terms of choice, www.royalty-free.tv has over 6,500 great production music tracks from 22 award-winning composers around the world, and we are constantly adding new ones. You can search through the individual tracks, or browse over 100 different album downloads to find exactly the music for your onhold telephone systems that you need. Our customers are always happy to be able to contact us and receive a prompt reply, whether to answer queries or offer suggestions. After all, we are composers ourselves!
Tags: music copyright, music on hold, on-hold, performance rights, Royalty Free Music
Posted in Royalty Free Music, articles | No Comments »
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
Choosing the best audio quality for the sound and music in your flash movie is a compromise. Large file sizes give great audio quality with slow loading times, but compressing a file too much to get it smaller and load quickly, and the audio quality can easily get worse.
It’s good to start with the best audio quality you can, which is why all the royalty free flash music loops we supply at www.royalty-free.tv are in WAV format, the same high quality as audio CDs. Once you import the WAV loop into your movie, you’ll need to compress the file to make it a smaller file size, so that it loads faster. Using Flash, click the Sound icon in the library, then on the pop-up menu that appears select Properties to open the Sound Properties dialogue box. Here you can experiment with different audio settings, generally MP3 is a good format to choose, and the lower the number you choose for the bit rate the smaller the file size will be – but the audio quality will also be lower. A good compromise is generally 128 bit, which gives audio quality not too far from CD quality, but with a file size of almost 90% smaller than a WAV, which means the loading speed shouldn’t be a problem.
We have hundreds of Flash Music loops available, in loads of music styles from writers all over the world. It’s now really easy to add great music to your Flash movie, with a high audio quality, without making the loading speeds suffer.
Tags: audio quality, flash music, flash music loops, Royalty Free Music
Posted in Royalty Free Music, articles | No Comments »
Saturday, October 31st, 2009
Flash is widely used on the internet to show movies or play audio, but adding long music music pieces to a Flash movie can make it too large to load quickly when it’s online. The solution is to use Flash music loops instead - a loop is an audio file that’s usually only a few seconds long, carefully prepared so that when it plays to the end it can instantly restart from the beginning again, without you being able to hear the join. Because it’s much shorter than a full-length song, it’s much faster to load and doesn’t slow down the loading times for the end user. Here’s how to easily add a music loop to your Flash movie.
Flash will recognise .aif .wav and .mp3 music file formats. For seamless audio loops it’s important to use a music file that has already been prepared to loop seamlessly, such as the Flash Music .wav loop files we supply on www.royalty-free.tv. Don’t try to use an mp3 file to loop seamlessly, this doesn’t work since mp3 files will not loop without an audible ‘click’ at the end/start looping point – very annoying!
To import your chosen sound file, from the main menu within Flash choose file>import>import to library. In the dialogue box that appears, choose the file you want to import and click it. If you’re on a Mac choose Import, on Windows choose Open. This will import your chosen audio music file into the Library of your project. The next step is to add this audio to the timeline of your movie. First, you need to create a new layer in the timeline, click the Insert New Layer icon to do this. It’s a good idea to name this new layer “sound” by double-clicking the layer name and typing in the new name. Then click on your chosen sound file in the Library and drag/drop it onto your new ’sound’ layer, and you’ll see it appear in the first frame. You can preview your movie by selecting Control>Test Movie.
Since your imported flash music loop wav file is designed to loop seamlessly to create a continuous soundtrack, you will need to enable this “loop” option option. Click on the music file you want to loop, then look at the Properties Inspector. You’ll see a menu option “sync”, to the right you can set the loop options to “loop”. That’s it - now you have a continuous music background, using only a small music file!
Tags: Flash loops, flash music, flash music loops
Posted in Royalty Free Music, articles | 6 Comments »
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
One of the great things about using Flash on your website is the way it seamlessly integrates music and sound easily with your images. No longer do you have to trigger lame-sounding midi files, instead it’s easy to incorporate high quality music right into your flash movie. You may be worried that adding music may slow up your movie, and leave users waiting impatiently for your website to load? No problem – simply use short clips of music instead of longer themes, and use the ‘loop’ function within Flash.
At www.royalty-free.tv we have 100’s of high quality royalty free music loops that play around and around totally seamlessy, all available for you to use, and designed for using as looped Flash music. It’s simple to choose whatever music style you need for each movie scene (we have hundreds to choose from), then simply download the WAV file (it’s in the perfect format for Flash) and drag the music file into Flash and set it to ‘loop’ – job done.
Flash leaves loads of room to be creative with music, and it’s easy to make Flash movies that use sound and music in effective and powerful ways. We’re constantly adding new music loops to our collection, so why not take a look.
Tags: Flash, flash music, flash music loops, Royalty Free Music
Posted in Royalty Free Music, articles | No Comments »
Monday, September 21st, 2009
It’s been interesting to follow the debate about copyright law. Some would seem to say that copyright laws should serve the public and not the “Rulers and the Divine Profits”, and that anything else is totaliterian and draconian. If music is so important as to require free file-sharing for the good of the public, what about food? Should that not also be freely available to all who are hungry? Or housing – doesn’t everyone have a right to shelter? Yes they do, and as a society our taxes go to help those “in extremis”. But you can’t give food and housing free to the whole general public as a right – it’s simple logistics to understand that the builders of the houses, the manufacturers of the materials, the farmers who grow the crops should be paid, so they can grow more. Composers should be paid, so they can write more.
If you try to skew the arguments with claims about “giant corporations” bleeding the country dry, that removes the identity of the composer, the musician, the initiator of the music. This is where it all starts. These are the forgotten people who make it happen. They should be paid, and valued.
Those who take issue with the control and distribution of this created music, who object to the profits of the record companies, should instead of piracy find a new distribution system that connects the composer to the public. They can’t just help themselves to whatever they want. Some bands and artists make their music available to be downloaded for free – great. That’s their choice, and it can be a useful way to promote a band. At www.royalty-free.tv we connect the composers of production music direct to the media producers and TV programme makers. We are composers ourselves, and the internet allows us to control the license terms and distribution of our tracks and those of others. Great. Let’s empower composers, not ignore them and tell the public to help itself to whatever.
Buy bread. Buy houses. Buy music.
Tags: music copyright, music law, music piracy, Royalty Free Music
Posted in articles | 3 Comments »
Friday, September 11th, 2009
We often get asked if it’s OK to use our Royalty Free Music on Youtube and other video websites – well the simple answer is “Yes, you can”! At www.royalty-free.tv we offer a ’standard’ license, which allows you to use our music tracks on internet video websites such as Youtube, Myspace, Facebook etc. We have 1000’s of music tracks available in pretty much every style you can think of! Simply find the track or tracks in the style you you want by genre (rock, pop, horror etc) or by instrument, mood or tempo, at our search page http://www.royalty-free.tv/rftv/frameset.htm, then follow our simple checkout procedure. You can then download the track in WAV or MP3 format, and use it in your video before uploading to Youtube, Facebook etc.
You can even make your videos available for sale, simply by upgrading our “Standard” license to a “Full License” for a few dollars more. Select and upgrade the music you’ve used in your video by visiting http://www.royalty-free.tv/rftv/frameset.htm and clicking “advanced search” in the left menu. In the search box in the page that appears, type in the track title (for example slicks), click “go” and you’ll see the music track in the search results that appear. Click “add to cart” and then select “upgrade” in the license page pop-up that appears. Simply checkout as before, download the track(s) again if you need them – and you’re cleared to sell the music as part of your Video!
You can read full details of our licences at http://www.royalty-free.tv/rftv/royalty_free_music_license.htm
www.royalty-free.tv specialises in providing music for video producers – a quick and easy solution to music licensing.
Tags: licensing, myspace, Royalty Free Music, youtube
Posted in Royalty Free Music, articles | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
Yes, you can. All the music on www.Royalty-Free.tv is designed for use on websites, as well as for films and television.
If you are using it as part of a Flash presentation, for example as a website designer using a track to stream behind a client’s website, our Standard license provides the Mechanical licence you need to use the track on a single website.
If you are incorporating our royalty free music into a video, then our Standard license provides a Mechanical license allowing that Internet Video to be used without restriction, on multiple websites, but it must be streamed, and the track must not be downloadable. This means that you can post your Internet Video on video-sharing sites, such as YouTube.
You should also check with your local Performance Rights collection agency, to see whether your website needs additional licensing to “broadcast” music. The situation regarding Performance Rights for online music use is different in each country, and is currently undergoing considerable change. A list of these Performing Rights Organisations and links to them is available on our site – Performing Rights Organisations.
Our License details are available to read online in full on our Music License Page.
Our music is used by media producers of every kind, from website designers to TV and Movie makers – we have made it easy to search for exactly the music you need.
We hope you enjoy using our site and our music!
Tags: license, performance rights, Royalty Free Music, using royalty free music on website
Posted in articles | 32 Comments »
|
|
