music licensing for video

[king_arthur]

Has anybody here ever been involved in licensing commercial music tracks for use on a video? Particularly from the "I'm making this video and I want to use this Beatles song" end of things? And particularly in the U.S., though I don't know for sure that the music in question is U.S. music.

I've heard of the Harry Fox Agency but have never actually gone that direction. I have a friend who has put together a video using some commercially available music and she's asked me to record some stuff of my own to substitute in (and actually to even pay me), but I run into this sort of situation every now and then and would like to know what's involved in actually doing it "legally." And/or to know what will be a reasonable amount to ask for if I do wind up doing some original stuff for them.

Hoping somebody here has been through the process before and can clue me in on what to expect. If it turns out that it might just be "fill out a few forms and pay twenty bucks," that might be the direction to go, much as I would love to get paid to crank out some instrumental background music... I do not, at this point, know how many songs (minutes of music) we're talking or how many copies of the DVD they plan to produce.

Thanks,
Charles (KA)

[roymond]

Harry Fox no longer handles synchronization rights (which is what music use in video is called). Most are handled directly by the publishers. For the US you also have to license performance rights, as ASCAP can not manage performance rights for film. You typically get these at the same time from the publisher.

The license fees will be based on the songs involved, the DVD distribution and sales and if you need foreign rights, but sounds like it's all USA. There are places like Magnatune (link to their synch license) who will license indie music on their net-label for synchronization. Major movies pay $50-85,000 for pop songs. Yours won't be anything like that.

[JonPorobil]

A lot of times the publishers won't differentiate between what they would charge a major motion picutre as opposed to what they'll charge a little indie production. I know, for instance, that sonofsupercar used a lot of unlicensed samples in their album We Have Ingition, and they actually looked into the cost of getting the samples cleared. Blue described it to us as "These people wanted $5000 for us to use a four-second clip, so in the end it just wasn't worth it," or something to that effect. Maybe he'll pop in here and talk about it some.

[roymond]

Yes, for commercial publishers, etc. I agree. I think the Magnatune link may be very worth your while, Charles. But $20 may not be the scale.

[king_arthur]

Popping in. This is some sort of documentary-type video about autism, which I haven't even watched yet (hoping to do that this morning). They made it using some commercially available music, but fortunately it was very easy to create a music-free version (I think the editor knew this was going to be a problem!) that I can dub my own music onto.

A little websurfing turned up the fact that, yeah, HFA no longer handles sync licensing, and that two licenses - a "sync license" to use the song and a "master license" to use a specific performance - are required. I found a site called "The Music Bridge" that provides a lot of info about this sort of stuff, but nothing specific enough to answer the basic question - assuming we do go to the effort of creating and recording some new music for this thing, are we doing it just to save twenty bucks or are we saving hundreds... so thanks, guys, for letting me know that we are talking big bucks here.

Also, I was just hoping to be able to connect up with a couple other people who had gone through the process, or enough of the process that they wound up doing their own stuff. Part of the whole reason for posting was just to find out if there were some people here who had gotten into this in the past that I could discuss this with if it got messy

I'll keep the magnatune link on hand if I just can't come up with anything myself that works for them, but that still means they'd have to find some "indie" music that works for what they're doing, and I think they're hoping that I can just come up with something for them as more of a "work for hire."

Charles

[roymond]

I'll keep the magnatune link on hand if I just can't come up with anything myself that works for them, but that still means they'd have to find some "indie" music that works for what they're doing, and I think they're hoping that I can just come up with something for them as more of a "work for hire."

Magnatune is an indie net-label, who happens to handle licensing for their artists. Excellent stuff, great service, awesome morals. They will likely have appropriate music, all of which you can download to try for free.