Licensing Music for Youtube Home Videos, Now It’s Easy!
on Jul 02 in Music Marketing, Music Production by Andy Chimicles
A company called FriendlyMusic has begun offering a service that allows customers to legally license music to be used on personal Youtube videos.
Until now, licensing a track involves a lot of legwork – tracking down labels and rights-holders, negotiating rates, etc. Obviously nobody submitting a home video of their dog’s new trick would be willing to go through this. And the way it’s structured, it wouldn’t be worth a rights-holder’s time to license his track if it would only reach 50 viewers.
In my opinion this service or one like it could be a major revenue stream for artists in the future. People aren’t buying as much music for their personal collections, much of this music is being streamed for free anyway. At the same time, people are creating more and more content for their social media sites – their Youtubes, their Facespaces, whathaveyou. If someone can offer a cheap and easy way to legally add other media into your own media, that opens up a gigantic, and growing, customer base. It can even be a tentative solution to the “problem” of the mashup culture. Let the people mash up as many tracks as they want as long as they pay the minimal licensing fee for any track involved. If they start making actual money off of their work, other arrangements can be made.
Currently Friendly Music has about 35,000 songs in its library, none from any major labels. I wouldn’t doubt if the majors either utilize Rumblefish or create their own version of the company within the next year or two. Maybe Apple will offer a new “buy license” option in iTunes. This could be one of the gamechangers the industry has been looking for to start bringing in the profits again.
Links
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