Licensing Music by Gail Mooney
We’ve followed Gail Mooney’s round the world HDSLR project here on PCN and were lucky enough to have her as a speaker at last year’s PhotoCine Expo. She is still out there adding great content to her Journeys of a Hybrid blog about her experiences shooting an HDSLR documentary called Opening Our Eyes.
This latest installment is about licensing music which is something new to photographer filmmakers. I see a lot of professional photographers who often go to court to protect their copyright using unlicensed music for their online videos and movie projects. I think that the current system is broken and that there should be easy ways for small projects to use rights protected imagery and music but it’s pretty hypocritical to just steal it. Anyway,
When you enter into the world of incorporating music into your creative projects and businesses be prepared to spend money and keep proper documentation. I learned a lot in this process and I’ll share with you some tips:
- Be prepared to spend money, especially if you are looking for broad rights
- Even royalty free music in some cases comes with different tiers of licensing rights
- Make sure you keep all licensing agreements as well as any receipts for music – both electronically and printed copies
- Keep track of the music, the title, the publisher, the recording company, the artist, the songwriter as well as how much of the music was used (time) and where in the film
- Don’t forget that most times you will need two licenses for a song
Be sure to read the whole article with fleshed out bullet points on Journeys of a Hybrid.
