NoFilmSchool » soundtrack

Five Reasons to Give Away Your Film's Soundtrack for Free

Ryan Gielen — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:32:07 +0000

On Feb 1, 2008 Mark Cuban posted to his blog about a far-fetched, impossible-to-execute marketing concept that he desperately wanted film studios to adopt, in order to leverage the value of free giveaways to combat the crumbling theatrical marketplace. Digital was exploding, distribution was becoming a fractured nightmare, and studios were scrambling to adapt.

The idea was staggeringly simple: give away the film’s soundtrack for free. (more…)

Rightclearing Makes Music Licensing for Filmmakers Fast and Easy

E.M. Taboada — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 20:43:44 +0000

Whether it’s for your short film, feature film, or funny YouTube video, finding and properly licensing music can be a pain. You can either try licensing that classic track, which can be exorbitantly expensive, or if you have a musician willing to license their music, you may have to go through the rigamarole of drawing up legal documents and agreeable terms. Enter rightclearing.com. It’s a new service launched by restorm.com that aims to make it easier for musicians to monetize their music — and easier for content creators to find and license that music. Just how easy? Find out in the following video: (more…)

1,000 free songs from SXSW

Ryan Koo — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:00:57 +0000

As the SXSW music/interactive/film superfest kicks off in Austin this weekend, I was reminded of a comment made by this week’s interviewee Barry Jenkins. His film Medicine for Melancholy originally premiered at SXSW ’08, and later kicked off Independent Film Week (where I saw it). During the Q&A, Barry was asked where he’d found all the wonderful independent music in the film. His answer (I’m paraphrasing here): “I keep a playlist of songs in iTunes by unsigned bands that I think might work in a film.”

In this vein, SXSW offers a great opportunity even for those filmmakers who aren’t attending the conference. Bands playing at the festival typically release a free MP3 in advance of the show for promotional purposes; every year for the past five years, these MP3s have been collected and released as an unofficial torrent. This is a great opportunity to listen to a lot of music, from bands signed and unsigned. Of course, there’s no guarantee that an unsigned band will agree to let you use their music in your film, but the chances are certainly better in the situation where you can ask them directly, rather than deal with a label.

It’s my understanding that, because all of these songs have been publicly released gratis, this torrent is legal. I may be wrong, but either way no one’s going to get mad at your for downloading this compilation of over 1,000 free and current MP3s. If you need a bittorrent client, for the PC try uTorrent and for the Mac try Transmission.

Start that iTunes playlist in preparation for your next project, or just enjoy the tunes!

Link: SXSW Torrents