Finding The Best Library Production Music
When you’re looking for great music for your video production, you have a few options. First, you can pick your favorite songs off the radio, then pay thousands of dollars to license them, and pay more in royalties every time you post your video somewhere new. Second, you can hire some studio musicians for thousands of dollars, but first you’ll want to look up studio production so you know how to guide them to create the sort of music you want, and then you’ll still be paying for royalties for each new post of the video. Lastly, you can buy library production music for a fraction of what those other sources of music would cost you.
Public domain music is another option, but there are some problems with that. First of all, the selection of public domain music out there is extremely limited, and second, there’s a lot of murky, gray area there. Too often, a song that is presumed public domain because it’s so old winds up being copyright protected, and video makers get hit with surprise lawsuits or have their videos taken down by the video sharing sites.
With all that in mind, here’s how to go about finding great music for your production…
Search for it
Just Google it, and you’ll find hundreds of musicians out there looking to sell their work and get it into a hot viral video. It’s cheap, only costing you a small fee up front, no royalties, no nothing, just free and clear music to use in your video, and then use in another video if you like, for, again, just one small fee up front.
Hear it out
You don’t want to spend money on music that you haven’t heard, even if the price is right. Luckily, these musicians do provide samples so that you can listen to the music before putting any money on it. Listen to all of the samples they have and find the one that works best for you and then just pay for the ones you like best.
Keep Your Options Open
Even if you find exactly the kind of music you’re looking for, you might find something that’s not exactly what you were looking for, but which actually fits even better. Watch a movie by Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino and take note of how they use music. For example, the Layla scene in Goodfellas. Some of the best music moments in film are the ones where “the wrong song” is used in a certain way that really alters the meaning and feel of the scene. So be imaginative and see if you can use music counter-intuitively to great effect.
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