Watch: The Music Licensing Platform You Really Need to Know About

Most filmmakers will tell you that, when it comes to picking out music for a project, you're usually going to be on a time crunch. Unfortunately, once you hit this stage, not only do you need to spend time sorting through seemingly endless piles of music on the internet to find the perfect song, you also need to do your homework on what licensing deals you'll need in place and which stock music site will work best for within your means.

This can be really, really annoying. Forget time; at this point in your project when you're so close to the finish line, why would you want to waste the energy? 

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FilmRiot's Ryan Connolly thinks that the solution to all of these woes might just lie in Artlist.io. In this video, he makes a case for how choosing the right music licensing site can save you quite a bit of time in post-production for not just one, but all of your future projects.

Artlist is a music licensing site to which you can subscribe for only $200 a year. While that may sound expensive, you have to keep in mind that a subscription gives you a blanket license to all the songs on the website. That means you can use any song on the site for everything for both personal and commercial use. Perhaps most importantly, there is no weekly, monthly, or yearly cap on the amount of music you can download.  It's unlimited. You can download as many songs as you want for the entire year.

There are some sites that let you download music for personal use on the cheap, but when you consider that each track is about $15-30 and can only be used one time on the one project you're working on, the value of a subscription from Artlist is immediately recognizable. There are no catches here either. Effectively, if you decide to use Artlist, then you've already taken care of two of the most time-consuming aspects of finding music for your film: finding the right service and figuring out the details of licensing the track you want to use.

Credit: Artlist

This takes us to the final and most time-consuming part: actually finding the music you want to put in your film. Well, Artlist has you covered there too. The layout has been newly redesigned and is incredibly intuitive in terms of pinpointing the songs that will fit the mood of your film. As Connolly states in the video above, "usually if you’re looking for music you’re in a time crunch, you want something you can move through quickly and find what you need, and the site’s layout reflects that."

Of course, you can easily do a standard search by keyword, but to get a gauge on some of the more exciting content in the library you can also sort by staff picks, top downloads, and recently added. From there you can further refine your initial search to reflect tempo (low, medium, high) and even duration. After you get the search results based on your parameters, you can go even further and list only the songs that match the mood, video theme, instrument or genre you're looking for.

If you're set on finding the music of your project through mood or genre you can simply scroll through a new carousel on the home page featuring playlists like "road trip" and more that may resemble your project. And speaking of playlists, one of Connolly's favorite new features on Artlist is the ability to create your own, so you can set aside music for future projects or just in case you find a few tracks that you think will work for anything.