Sync Music: Get Your License Once And Use It For Ever
Before we get into talking about Sync Music let me give you some good information about how music licensing works.
When a composer/author write a song they create what’s called an intellectual property and it’s going to be their property for all their life and beyond. When you buy a CD or download a song from the internet you only buy the rights for domestic and not for commercial usage. When you want to use a track commercially – typically as background music for your production – you will need to pay two kinds of license if you don’t want to end up in troubles. Copyright infringement is considered a serious offense and the fines are quite costly.
A Mechanical or Sync license is required every time you copy a song. What that means is that if you wish to reproduce a CD featuring somebody’s tune or you sync that song to a Commercial or Radio/TV Show you will need a license. The price of such a license varies depending on the territory, the kind of usage – is it going to be the title song, underscore, jingle – and the length.
We call Performance license when you need to perform the song both live or via one of the mass media. Also with performance royalties the costs vary depending from the territory and length of the song.
Often a production house will pay a large sum to a composer to tailor write music for their project. This is an expensive way of getting the right music for the project but it takes away the headaches of having to search for the right music for the project. Today however there is a huge amount of Buyout Music with huge catalog to choose from and many big production houses all over are relaying on them to find the music they like.
Using Royalty Free Music is definitely the easiest way to get the music you want for the job. Their general policy is that you pay a once off fee and after that you have a lifetime non transferable license. You still need to submit the cue sheets for broadcast to the Broadcast Society because the composer/author are still entitled to their performance royalties, but the mechanical license are taken care of.
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