Like royalty-free images, royalty-free music can be found by the in amazing varieties and quantities on the Web. Just do a Google search, and you’ll see.
Not really sure how I ended up using Premiumbeat.com for the $29.95 worth of music I used in my “Royalty-Free Buenos Aires,” but I was just experimenting, and I was left wondering. . .With all the royalty-free music sits and services, certainly some have got to be better than others. So. . .
If you are ahead of me on this royalty-free music learning curve — which wouldn’t be hard — are there royalty-free music services and basic concepts that you might share with me, and my thousands of faithful readers?
“Most songs are copyright protected, and cannot be used unless they are licensed,” Ralph Clevenger emphasized when we talked the other day. Actually, he emphasized this point a number of times, noting that this very obvious point is not so very obvious to many photographers putting images to sound.
I wasn’t to me, which is why for my “Milonga de Sal y Pimienta” video, which I posted here in May, I totally — major oops — stole music from Gotan Project to achieve my artist goal. I just wasn’t thinking, inspired by the music itself to make my video. Heck, the music is the best part of the piece!
It’s no excuse, but I think my music-using ignorance is somewhat understandable. After all, millions of YouTube videos feature illegally-used music, and, right or wrong, this has given me a sense that using music any which way is AOK. Well, it’s not. Just like it’s not OK for people to use our images without permission.
To get myself on the right side of the intellectual property of music, yesterday I threw this little baby together, appropriately called, “Royalty-Free Buenos Aires.”
“The way I approach multimedia is to think about each project as a storyteller and then to think about what tools I will need to best tell the story,” says Mary Lynn Price, who since retiring from practicing trial law in 2003 has dedicated herself to video journalism, with specific interest in natural history stories that support conservation efforts. Just as Ralph Clevenger told me, Price explained to me than nothing matters more than thinking about story when putting together “music videos” — her name for multimedia projects that tell stories without narration or even graphics, but just smart use of images and music.
Price proves her music-video storytelling prowess in “C-17 Flight to McMurdo Antarctica.” In less than two minutes, she takes us from baggage security scanning and flight boarding to landing on “The Ice,” having shown us tons of interesting close-ups during this famous, windowless flight.
“Famous” is, um, definitely too strong a word for this particular flight that takes scientists and support staff to the McMurdo Station. But I’m an Antarctic exploration junkie so I’ve sure heard about it plenty, although I could never really imagine what it would be like — until I got taken for a ride with Price’s great documentary vision.
What does it mean that I’m an Antarctic (and Arctic) exploration junkie? It means that I’ve read Alfred Lansing’s“Endurance”three times, twice read “Shackleton’s Forgotten Men” (by the brilliant Lennard Bickel) and at least once just about all of the other classic books about frostbite and suffering in pursuit of knowledge at the southernmost (and northernmost) tip of the world.
