Well, with the help of one of our voice-overs, Anthony Richardson who will narrate and I can’t leave out Lee Pritchard, who will be putting his expert audio editing and production skills to good use - it’s a team effort

Actually, I nearly forgot, I must thank another voice over artist Lynsey Frost for doing the podcast idents in the style of radio imaging, which you will hear at the start of each podcast.

This does mean though that it may be the middle of next week before a new review is available, just while we rework the old ones and publish those and then I’ll be ready for more.

Anyway, that’s all from me for now, but, I’ll be back soon.

Adam

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For example, I have often heard in the street and on public transport, kids with their crazy mobile ringtones or playing music mp3’s on speaker (guess I am sounding old here) and have often thought, I wonder what copyright law would say about this? Is that not defined as a performance? Is a royalty due? Will PRO’s start happy slapping teenagers with annual PRO licenses? Surely not. That would be madness! Or would it?

It seems that ASCAP want to start charging mobile phone service providers for this usage. Of course, charging mobile phone users would be unacceptable, so they will charge them indirectly through the providers. Hmm… Do you get a discount if you use the silent mode? Also, what about the people that just want their phones to ring and not play mp3’s? Can they buy a cheaper alternative version?

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am all for composers being paid fairly for their music usage, but even if ASCAP did charge the mobile phone service providers, how many independent composers would benefit? Call me cynical, but I suspect that the mainstream artists and industry would be the benefactors.

I mean, when is copyright law going to be re-worked with some common sense? Is this a music tax aimed at supplementing the mainstream industries income at a time when music sales are falling or is it a genuine attempt at collecting income for composers?

It is interesting that we have all become conditioned to expect confusing rules around music use and have come to expect it, but the fact is music use in physical and digital media application is about to explode in the next 10 years. Can we seriously keep implementing performance royalties on everything?

To me, some of these ideas are as crazy as if somebody introduced a compulsory royalty payment for looking at images or art in public… imagine the complications and frustrations… I think it is already happening with music.

What next? Royalties for whistling in the street? Oh, and if playing a CD in your car, please keep your windows closed to avoid copyright infringement.

Read the article that set me off
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/07/02

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Although many people have heard the term podcast, it is still not widely understood how it can be beneficial to businesses. The points in this article should help explain why you may want to consider creating a podcast and how you can make it worthwhile for your listeners and your company.

1. What is a podcast and what can it be used for?

Quite simply a podcast is an audio file that can be downloaded and listened to on a PC, on the web, mp3 player or burnt to CD. They are typically produced as a series, but could also be produced as a one-off for promotions, staff training, newsletters, information articles and more. There is no fixed rule here and a little imagination and originality can help you stand out from the crowd. Podcasts usually last from 5-15 minutes but can be longer.

2. How do you create one?

Creating a professional sounding podcast requires recording equipment, a suitable venue, podcast recording experience and audio editing skills. As this is going to represent your business, it is a good idea to invest in professional services. Location podcast recording can be employed at your offices, clients offices, company trade shows and events. Adding sound effects, music and even background nature sounds can create variety and added interest for the listener.

3. What should your podcast be about?

Your podcast content is dependent on your target market and the information you wish to deliver. Delivering training to staff is completely different to a podcast aimed at clients or potential customers. What is it that your clients need to know? Are there regular changes to your industry? What news would be relevant to them? If you already have a regular newsletter, delivering the information in audio format can provide added value to your audience. This is a large topic on its own and the content of each company’s podcast will vary. However, the key is to provide value that is free to your target market and the content should not be too sales orientated. Another idea is to turn your company articles into audio podcasts using the services of a professional voice over.

4. Who should perform in your podcast?

From experience, I think that the best podcasts are conversational between the interviewer and interviewee. It is best to make a bullet point list of information you want to cover and not to rehearse it too much as this can make the delivery seem a little staged and forced; a literal turn off for listeners. If you really can not face being the voice of your podcast, a good alternative is to hire a professional voice-over, but you will need to provide a good script. A well recorded and edited podcast combined with music and even sound effects can sound very polished and reinforce your company’s brand and reputation.

5. ROI (Return On Investment)

As your podcast grows in popularity, there are a number of ways to monetise them, however, your initial aim should be to include a call to action and monitor the ROI. A quick example would be to include a phone number and discount code, or a special web page where your listener can get a free report. Whatever the call to action is, there should be an effective monitoring system in place.

6. Maximising your podcasts reach

Once you have a great sounding podcast, the next step is marketing it. Implementing a good marketing plan for your podcast is imperative to its success. Just putting it on your website is not going to do the trick. In brief, using mailing lists, RSS, social networking / media tools are vital elements of the mix. Creating an audio-visual version of your podcast (a vodcast) using video software can expose your content to a whole new audience via video sharing sites like YouTube, Viddler, Blip, Vimeo.

There is much more to podcasting for business than covered here, but hopefully, this has given you some ideas and thoughts about creating a company podcast to enhance your brand, retain customers and attract new ones via the web.

About the Author

Lee Pritchard is a professional podcast producer and sound engineer and runs Media Music Now, a web based business that provides royalty free music, on hold messages, voice-overs, audio editing and location podcast recording services. For further information Lee can be contacted through www.mediamusicnow.co.uk

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Time for an upbeat, energetic and funky soundtrack for today’s royalty free music review. The track is ‘Born

To Be Big‘, an electronic, rhythmic and lively theme suitable for television, commercials, comedy or even an informal corporate video or presentation with an element of fun to it.

Personally, I think it has a somewhat retro sound to it, very 70’s funk, groovy, young, hip and carefree, but with a contemporary feel. Retro is back after all. Makes me think of the iTunes / iPod adverts, the psychedelic colours, energetic dancing, just having a good time. It could even be used for a theme tune to a teen sitcom with it’s cool, bright and youthful vibrancy.

In actual fact, this groovy tune with its funky beats and playful sounds could be used for any number of media productions that needs the fun factor adding to it.

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A lot of people may not be aware that there is no standard royalty free music licensing agreement in the music industry. Although similar, they all vary. Yes, I know it is hard to believe… and, it is a fact that can often lead to confusion and misinterpretation. Early license agreements excluded the performance royalty, which has continued to be the case to this day.

Why exclude the Performance Royalty?

For a long time, Performance Royalty Organisations (PRO’s) were doing a good job of collecting royalties for broadcasts on TV and Radio (PRO’s do also collect for performance in public venues and major cinematic release, but just for the purpose of this post, I have kept it to TV and Radio for simplicity). As such, it was beneficial to just include the synchronisation royalty in the license agreement and let the performance royalties be collected by external PRO’s.

This was because Radio and TV broadcasters (only 4 TV channels in the UK during the 80’s) were required to pay an annual license to the local PRO. They were also required to document music usage using cue sheets, which would be used to divide the performance royalties between all registered composers.

The composer / music library received an upfront payment through the royalty free music license and the composer would potentially receive an additional performance royalty from music used on TV and Radio.

This was and still is PRS in the UK. USA has three PRO’s: BMI, ASCAP and SESAC and all other countries have at least one.

A Sign of the Times

Direct licensing the synchronisation royalty and allowing PRO’s to collect the performance royalty was working rather well, however, things would not remain the same. Along came VHS, companies started using royalty free music for training and sales orientated corporate videos. This opened up an opportunity for royalty free music sellers to include a mechanical royalty in their license agreement. With both synchronisation and a defined number of mechanical duplications, the royalty free music model gained a whole new market. But, who pays the performance royalty? I hear you ask. Well, officially the company playing the corporate video in the work place.

Look out for the nineties!

So, the royalty free music model evolved in the 80’s to incorporate new markets. Initially, it catered to TV / radio producers, then corporate video production, and then came the 90’s, which saw a huge increase in Internet use. By the 00’s, there were more potential uses of royalty free music than ever before in history.

In the last 20 years or so, thousands of digital and web TV / radio stations have emerged and with the popularity of the web, many potential royalty free music uses now exist, which include: -

• Websites that are media rich with video and music
• Background music in software applications
• Computer games
• On hold systems with mp3 capabilities
• Corporate video
• DVD, CD Roms
• Low budget films
• Student films
• YouTube videos
• Podcasting
• Videocasts
• mp3 ringtones
• Web TV
• Online Radio
• Online advertising

With all these new media uses, the Internet created more opportunities for composers and royalty free music libraries, but at the same time, it helped to start the decline of mainstream music album sales through growing piracy and file sharing.

At one time, PRO’s just had to collect and monitor from a relatively few TV and Radio stations, but with the growth and development of the Internet and the amount of new media uses, they now face an ever growing user base and music use on a global scale. Add to this, copyright infringement of mainstream music is also a big issue that increases the workload of PRO’s.

So, now I have told you all that… this is where the confusion kicks in…

Why So Misunderstood?

Most of the articles and free information on the Internet about royalty free music is brief and tries to explain the subject as simply as possible, missing out many of the potentially confusing aspects. This is usually marketing copy or as I have seen, keyword article fodder that kick out over simplified explanations. Often these are blatantly incorrect.

The fact is, all royalty free music agreements differ when you examine the small print and there is no industry standard agreement. The term itself stuck because it is good for marketing.

It is fair to say all of the agreements include the right to synchronise the music with video, images or voice over. Nowadays, nearly all licenses offer you the option of creating duplications of your product including the music, but there is usually a pre-defined upper limit in the agreement small print. I have seen numbers of 10 to 5000 in recent months. Whatever the number is, you have to pay more if you exceed this limit.

The majority of royalty free music agreements exclude the performance royalty for TV and radio use and are vague about performance aspects for other uses. So, are performance royalties included in royalty free music or not? Unfortunately, this is a massive grey area and is not a simple yes or no answer.

As I mentioned at the beginning, this is not a marketing document, it is an in-depth study of royalty free music licensing and understanding it. By the end, you will have a good understanding of how royalty free music works helping you make informed decisions when licensing music.

Next time, I will explain about why the performance element is such a grey area.

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For today’s royalty free music review, I have decided to make it more hard hitting and action packed.

The genre I immediately thought of was our royalty free hard rock music; a great collection of powerful, energising and adrenaline driven rock tracks.

With a choice of so many great music productions, I eventually decided on a new royalty free music track added just this week. It’s called ‘Beat The Heat‘ and it packs one heck of a punch.

This edgy, heavy metal hard rock theme is perfect for high-octane extreme sports or fast and furious action sequences. The intense rush of adrenaline a person experiences from an extreme sport such as BASE Jumping, skydiving, white water rafting; you can feel the tension in the air. Or an action film or stunt sequence that requires a high impact soundtrack that will have the audience on the edge of their seat.

Whatever your production, TV, Film, YouTube video, presentation, website background music, showreel etc. ‘Beat The Heat’ and other high energy hard rock themes can be licensed online from our high quality royalty free music library.

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Should anyone like to review one of our royalty free music tracks, please contact us for more information.

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Recently it was superseded by a new model that looks a little different and apparently has a number of extra features, more recording capacity and has a slightly higher quality recording with its built in microphones.

Now as much as I rave about my Zoom H4, I am very tempted by the new Zoom H4n.

At the time I bought my H4, a few people I knew commented on how impressed they were with the recordings it captured and were tempted to buy one. Well, if you are up for a solid state digital recorder that won’t break the bank, I imagine that it will be discounted in some places to make room for the new model. This could be the time to snap up a bargain… or even splash out on the new one… I am very tempted

My 2007 Review of the Zoom H4 Handy 4 Track Digital Audio Recorder

The Zoom H4n and other digital recorders can be purchased from Amazon

If you buy one, please let us know what you think by leaving a comment

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Perhaps a travel programme showing idyllic beaches, crystal blue waters, relaxing with a cocktail by the pool or even one of these homes abroad television shows depicting a fresh start in a new home with new and exciting opportunities on the horizon. Or possibly, an American teen drama TV series, much in the same vain as ‘the OC’ or ‘Dawson’s Creek’.

Whatever the production, Rearview is light, contemporary and an inspirational acoustic guitar track with a sense of hope and longing.

Listen to a low quality preview

If you would like to comment, bookmark or retweet this, please feel free to do so. And if you would like to review a track yourself from our royalty free music library,  please contact us for more information.

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Think of music royalty income as a pie that can be divided into several portions. There can be few or many people claiming ownership / income from the same pot of money. The mainstream music industry has many people who demand a share and therefore licensing music can be complex. Mainstream music is also very expensive to license and there are typically many parties controlling different aspects of the musical copyright. For example, there is copyright in composition, recording, musical score, arrangement and lyrics.

From the perspective of a media creator looking to license a piece of music, there are 3 main licensing aspects to consider. These are Synchronisation, Mechanical and Performance, illustrated in the graphic below.

There are a number of interpretations of what mechanical / performance use is, and this has become more open to interpretation as internet use has increased. Adding to this complication is the fact that many countries have differing copyright legislation.

The Establishment

Please keep in mind music licensing policies were developed from about the 1930’s onwards based around copyright legislation of the day. At the time, the major labels income was the focus and instant global distribution and home recording studios were inconceivable. Since then, things have really changed, but music licensing and copyright principles are largely the same with numerous quick fix patches to accommodate new media types and usages. The reason I mention this is because it has become the foundation for all music licensing available today.

Even though royalty free music licensing is a separate section of the music industry, the historic development currently defines how all music licenses work in relation to localised copyright law. There are a few exceptions, for example, Creative Commons is a fairly new movement that approaches music licensing with a modern perspective. To quote their website “We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof. “

Squeezing new business models into the shoes of old ones can cause problems for the very people copyright law is trying to protect. More about this later in this series.

Bringing it together

Based on the three main copyright areas: synchronisation, mechanical and performance, the mainstream industry uses publishers, and royalty collecting societies to collect income through licensing. This means there are lots of commercially interested parties expecting a slice of the pie.

With the monetary expectations of all involved and the popularity of mainstream music, this can be drawn out and prohibitively expensive for the licensee.

Today, with non-mainstream independent music, there is typically one copyright owner, the composer / producer.

Some years ago, somebody realised that non-mainstream music could bypass the usual channels making music licensing quicker, simpler and cheaper. This unknown entrepreneur coined the phrase ‘royalty free music‘.

The overall principle of royalty free music is to buy-out some or all of the rights in a one-time payment, which is relatively easy to achieve when there is no involvement from the mainstream music industry.

As this represented a quicker lower cost alternative to music licensing, it became very popular and the term ‘Royalty Free Music’ has become an industry recognised term.

This is not the end of the story though… the term ‘Royalty Free Music’ is often misunderstood and misinterpreted.

To be continued…

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I look forward to your comments and if you know anything about the origins of royalty free music, I would be interested in hearing from you

Also, please feel free to bookmark, retweet and ShareThis post below.

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Its fast moving pace and sense of forward movement make it suitable for commercial use, representing a confident and strong image, the kind any company large or small would want to portray.

This electronic royalty free corporate track could be used for music on hold, video production, slideshow, showreel, and even sport related events. Get Up and Go also has a workout version, ideal for fitness classes and aerobic exercises. You may even feel the urge to workout yourself after listening to it

Get Up and Go lo-fi preview

Your comments on this track are welcome and feel free to bookmark, retweet or ShareThis review.

Also, please contact us if you would like to review a track in our royalty free music library.

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