A few weeks back I was hunting for music that I could use on a web based video and had a challenging time. As a photographer who cares about rights to my work being respected, I felt it was important to share that same respect to musicians whose work I wanted to use. Searching and gaining permission to use music for my photo video proved to be a huge challenge and got me to respect the Creative Commons initiative all the more.

While getting permission to use All Rights Reserved creative content is as simple as asking permission it can be frustrating. I’m normally a very patient person, but when I had my video ready to go and I found the music I wanted to use it seemed like an eternity to hear back from the artist. Eventually the artist wrote me back 48 hours later and gave me permission to use any of his work in the future regardless of current licensing designation. I was lucky and found a very cool artist to collaborate with.

Ultimately I burned a lot of time searching for music. It would seem that there is a huge opening for a site to be created matching artists who want to share their work in conjunction with other artists for promotional and non/pseudo-commercial purposes. To me having a directory that matches musicians and photographers to use each others work for mutual promotion seems like a win-win proposition. Until my dream of such a directory becomes a reality below are 5 copyleft resources to search for music and 5 royalty-free stock music resources.

An important note:
Music designated as “No Derivative Works license” cannot be used for photo videos as explained on this Creative Commons page Legal Music for Videos.
So even if you find music you like with this CC license you’ll still need to retain approval from the artist, so build in approval time as you plan your videos release.

“Under CC licenses, synching the music to images amounts to transforming the music, so you can’t legally use a song under a CC No Derivative Works license in your video.“

5 Copyleft Resources For Music

1. CC Mixter
2. Internet Archive
3. Jamendo
4. Proud Music
5. Film Music by Moby
   “‘film music’, is for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short.
   If you want to use it in a commercial film or short then you can apply for an easy license, with any money that’s generated being given to the humane society.”

5 Stock Music Resources (Pay to License)

1. StockMusic.net
2. Shockwave-Sound.com
3. Triple Scoop Music
4. MediaMusicNow.co.uk
5. MagnaTune.com

[tags]stock music, copyleft music, copyleft, royalty-free,  royalty free, music, photo video, photography[/tags]