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:
It provides an overview of the process-
Going back to the opening scenario. Let's say I had been using Blur's "To The End" as a dummy track on the closing credits of my short film. Now, I don't know about you, but I don't forsee myself having the time or budget to license that song any time soon. With rightclearing.com, I can simply drop the song into the search function, and through some analysis the service will draw up a number of similar songs - in terms of genre, mood and instrumentation. I could then sort the songs by license terms (i.e whether the song has been licensed for advertisements vs film projects, commercial or personal use) as well as my budget. I would then pick the songs that fit my project, pay the license fee and sign a licensing contract immediately sent to me by e-mail.
At least that's how it should work. From playing around with it over the past couple of days I've found some pretty interesting stuff -- as well as some of the limitations. As a relatively recent launch, it seems it will be as useful as the size of the song collection one can browse and the number of musicians who license their music through it (12,000+ songs may seem like a lot, but it will be a much better service once it has several hundred thousand songs from which to choose).
By eliminating the lawyers and negotiation factor it seems like it does make the process a lot easier - I can find and license the appropriate music in the course of an afternoon. Of course, as with anything involving contracts - it's best to read it carefully before signing, and if you don't understand what you're signing, get a lawyer!
If you're interested in how it works from the musician side (since I'm sure we have many multi-hyphenates out there) check this video out.
Have you had any luck with other music licensing services? Does this look like a good idea? Let us know!
[via BoingBoing]
