Royalty Free Background Music Library

I have this bad habit of reading the news each day recently. The trouble is there is a certainty of deaths in afganistan, terrorist horrors, supressed peoples, aid workers attacked helping to relieve the suppressed, oil disasters destroying wildlife and people’s livelyhoods, cost cuts in all services, I could go on, probably I have done so already too much but you get the picture.

So maybe its time for a blues revival? Matching the feeling amoungst the world today. It seems to me you are likely to need some good blues if you are so angry with the world you want to kill people, or you are so supressed you have lost hope and are looking for desparate ways to make yoir mark on the planet, or you are a humble trader fighting poverty either through world recession, natural disasters or human made. Either way, I take my blues hat off to you.

I discovered a new cafe recently. It seemed a great cafe, good coffee, great food, nice people and great music! In fact the music was quite interesting, a mix of The Stranglers, The Cure and Coldplay. Great I thought. Except each time I went back the music was the same!

Ok I loved the music but it would be great to circulate the playlist a little. Maybe the guys changed the music each day and I picked the same day they were playing that playlist, but no.

Anyway, lovely cafe but a change of playlist a bit more regularly I think would make customers more likely come back more regularly.

Customers are more comfortable with regular refreshes of music rather than accepting your atmosphere relies on the exact same music playlist each day, day after day.

Guy.

Looking Cool, new developments and bug fixes abound with WordPress 3.0. The bit I like is the new default theme called Twenty Ten. Look out for my adoption here soon.

Artists & musicians everywhere; how much did you earn from performing royalties last year?

In particular, how much did your performing rights society collect for you from licenses for music played in public areas?

Many if us dont get anything or very little from this channel because its not easy to understand if anyone did play your music in a store, a restaurant or for example a hotel lobby.

Its much easier to track and identify when a track of yours is played if it is connected to a TV advert or a film shown on TV because for one, you know when it is signed for that use (assuming your publisher had told you) and the TV channel is obliged to fill out a sheet to list music usage to help the performing rights society pay you for the use publically of your music.

The problem here is that not always do broadcasters get around to filling out the sheets so sometimes artists themselves have to become detectives and track down the guy who should be doing the sheet (called a cue sheet).

Anyway, thats a problem for another article.

The problem with the way public royalties are paid is that, because they dont know if your music has been played and how much, they have to make some reasonable judgements on typically who’s music would more likely be played.

This approach means the guys in the charts and those others well known artists who are more often than not played on the radio are the guys who get the money. For them it makes perfect sense to be signed up to a performing rights society, they’ve made their name in music and are more than likely to be the one who is actually being played.

Except.. There is an alternative.

You, as an artist are free to with your copyright owned compositions & recordings what you want. You can choose to develop a collection of music and also look through your collection to find music suitable for backgrounds of businesses like hotel lobbys, shops and restaurants that is not connected to any performing rights society royalty collection service.

This music can be used with a more direct route to market via Background-music-library.com. We know exactly who has licensed tge use of which tracks of yours every month so we can pay you directly for that use.

You can create two parallel collections, one for higher priced broadcasting licensing such as TV work and also a collection for background music use, only the higher priced compositions do you use a performing rights society to collect royalties for, the other collection, use us at Background Music Library.

1) Dont use music so no need to pay anything.
2) Pay some local musicians to use their own music compositions & recordings as background music that are not registered with any performing rights societies,
3) Bring to work your own CDs or buy some to play & use and pay your local performing rights society for the use of the music, keep the music fresh by changing it regularly with new music.
4) Purchase music with a royalty free license so no additional performing royalties are due and therefore you dont need to buy a performing rights license.
5) Rent music on a monthly basis from The Background Music Library and get music sourced and supplied specifically for your business use with regular changes to the playlists.
6) Play CDs, listen to the radio without a performing rights license and see how long you can make it until the performing rights society bring the heavies around to threaten you with legal action.

Following on from the recent news that Pump Audio is reducing its commissioning rates to artists to fund expansion (when you have friends like that, who needs enemies?) news has appeared about a new ‘innovative’ background music supplier.

Eosmusic.com claim they are offering an innovative Internet streamed background music service to businesses such as hotels, retail and restaurants. Nice idea. Not only this, they are only signing up artist compositions that are not registered or are to have performing royalties collected via performing rights societies. So, royalty free music. This helps businesses afford music in their business environments without the cost of additional licensing requirements. Its a great idea and differentiates Eos From Musak holdings who they see as their main competitors, however it draws Eos into a new market that is very well established and can compete better than the established corporate world of performance royalty based music licensing. Simply enter ‘Royalty Free Music’ into Google or Yahoo and you will see there are some great music providers out there already well established.

So I do not agree that Eos Music is innovative for this reason and a few others which I will now explain.

EosMusic are not innovative with the Internet streaming model. For example, VoiceSolutions inc. have been using the Internet to stream to dedicated devices for a few years now.

Secondly, the subscription model for selling music to businesses and earning monthly fees for artists is also not new. Ambient Music Garden’s background music service has been offering a subscription model for a while, as has Voice Solutions inc. The model itself is a great way for businesses to rent music, rather than purchase music that they may not use in perpetuity. Additionally, as part of the deal with both Voice Solutions and Ambient Music Garden, a churn of the music collection is offered so that the collections remain fresh and never get dull to listen to as a client or as a staff member of a business.

Lastly, EOS Music is offering artists only 25% share of the music sales. We all thought Pump Audio was being a bit tough on its artists, EOS are really slimming down their potential artist’s income. The problem I worry about is that some artists who don’t understand the value of their music will think, ‘this is 25% of something I wouldn’t get normally’.

What worries me is why EOS think they need to take such a large share? is it that their overheads are so high? paying their managers too much for so little in return? or is it that the music is a ‘loss leader’ and that the devices used are costly to manage and maintain?. Well now, I think we may have caught onto something here. You see, EOS music is really just a new front for a music on hold device manufacturer. Stated from their website meta description:

“Applied Media Technologies Corporation has been an innovator at
utilizing electronic technologies in marketing applications. AMTC is one of the largest providers of telephone
on-hold messaging solutions. AMTC introduced the first compact disc and removable memory card message on hold
systems, as well as the first Web content distribution system for on hold messages.”

Their devices cost $299 plus install ($100) whilst the monthly music service is anywhere between $29.99 and $19.99 (depending on where you look on their site) which massively undercuts Musak holdings who they see as the competition). So it seems to me that AMTC see their new EOS Music venture as a way to shift more boxes whilst attracting businesses with a low monthly fee. Artists, they may think, are a dime a dozen.

The reality is that they are box shifters with a box shifting mentality as opposed to being built by musicians and business people who really understand the innovation that the Internet can provide (i.e. you don’t need a $299 device to do this sort of service anymore!).

Ambient Music Garden for example (although we have to stress that as one of our sponsors we may be accused of being bias, but then I have no doubt that you are intelligent enough to take this into consideration when reading this article) offer a subscription based service with no minimum contract period, a monthly fee and a new mix of a full 8 hours of music (churned to at least 1 hour of music each month).

Their artists earn a full 50% of the total gross earnings, so all costs of sale and distribution are apportioned to Ambient Music Garden themselves. To me that sounds like a fair trade. The partnering of musical artistry with Internet business accument in a fifty fifty split on all earnings, not just a minority share of part of the earnings. Fair Trade Music at its best.

Ambient Music Garden’s music is distributed to the business as mp3 files at 192kb/s which is the same quality as iTunes. The music is licensed for download and burnt to CD, or played on any music player the customer wishes to use. So by using existing equipment (be that an iPod, a PC or a Mac) the costs of playing music in a business is even cheaper.

You see, we may be so bold as to say to AMTC (EOS Music) that the Internet has moved the market on already. They are not innovators but followers of sort. Musak holdings is not your competition. They filed for bankruptcy protection (Chapter 11) in February 2009 so their focus is on financial restructuring, not market share growth right now. Not only that, without providing their artists with a fair share of the music sales and also relying on devices that are costly and unnecessary AMTC (EOS Music) are not providing businesses with value for money.

Those artists who understand the value of their music will look elsewhere to get better returns for their work.

This is a old piece of news but a fundamental case in European law for the
benefit of musicians who are considering entering the royalty free background
music market.

We all are aware of the old dinosaurs we call record labels, but there is an
older creature lurking in the shadows; the performing rights society. They
have been, yet still act as if they are a monopoly in many cases and in
particular, in Europe.

This case came to court in 2005, whereby, “the main Spanish collecting
society Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (‘SGAE’) sued Ricardo
Andres Utrera Fernendez, the owner of Metropol, a disco bar located in
Badajoz alleging that he had failed to pay SGAE’s license fee..”

(see the full article
about how musicians and music customers can be sure they can use royalty
free background music instead of music that have royalties due here at the
Creative Commons site)

Quite simply, the court rejected the performing rights society’s claims
because the owner of the bar proved in court that the music he was using was
not listed in the societies music and thus not managed by the society. An
important point here is that Fernendez was able to prove that he exclusively
used music licensed to him (via a Creative Commons license) that was not
managed by the performing rights society. Had he mixed both sources of music
he would no doubt have been found guilty & would have needed to pay the fee.

The Creative Commons article continues by stating,

“This case shows that there is more music that can be enjoyed and played
publicly than that which is managed by the collecting societies..

…As CC Spain project lead Ignasi Labastida said: ‘This decision
demonstrates that authors can choose how to manage their rights for their
own benefit and anyone can benefit from that choice, too. I expect that
collecting societies will understand that something has to change to face
this new reality.?’”

Performing rights societies say they are there to support and protect the
artist from missed revenues but even though they are ‘not for profit’ in
reality the only interest they have to heart is their own jobs.

Sure these guys do good for artists, and have done great in the past but my
concern is that they are deliberately reluctant and can become quite
aggressive with anyone that threatens their monopoly and so deliberately
restrict artists from exploiting new business opportunities. The protection
of their monopoly and the restrictions to artists are two very different
things that are often mixed up with their own protectionism.

Who was it that said it is hard to convince a man if it means he
will loose his job?

Just found this site offering background art for music related projects.
Lovely artwork

Go check it out here:

Webweavers
Clipart For Background Music.

Not withstanding the science that surrounds creating a polished production,
and not ignoring the talent that goes into playing an instrument and
composing a piece of music I believe the barriers to entry into professional
music now are lower than ever before.

As long as you can create and have the stamina to continue to develop your
skills and talent, you will be able, with modern technology to create a
potential masterpiece.

Autechture recently said that it would be good for everyone to have the same
tools to hand, giving everyone who is keen to make music the same potential
as each other. I agree.

In addition, I can see that there is a lot of talent out there that whilst
they create great music, wont get their heads above the everyone else’s and
achieve some form of recognition.

Musak Holdings recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The article at
chron.com (now disappeared so replaced with Wikipedia’s page and reference to the chapter 11 event) about Musak Holdings, an infamous supplier of background
music.

“Long-standing debt” ($320 million in assets and a debt of $465 million).
The article states ” a slew of store closures is also at fault, executives
said recently, as the continuing recession causes struggling businesses to
cancel their Muzak accounts.”

Well, I can see a lot of stores are suffering and closing in the current
economic downturn but there are others who are looking at ways to reduce
their costs and are looking at more cost effective ways to provide music to
their stores. Royalty free background music is of course, perfect for this
since it does not have attached to it the additional cost of performing
rights royalties due for every play of a track. Quite simply, the price you
pay up front for the license enables you to use the music with no additional
royalties due. Not only are businesses finding this a way to reduce costs,
but also a way to get a music publisher on board who can gather the right
music to fit the business need.

The Internet, of course, enables businesses as well as consumers to look for
new suppliers who can provide better products and services and this will
continue with the background music market this year with background music
becoming available from royalty free libraries who are primed for providing
businesses better deals with even better and targeted music.

Unfortunately, like most large corporates, they only see the change when it
hits the numbers at board level. Im sure the guys talking to the customers
on a day by day basis have heard the same story for a while, but for that to
penetrate the well furnished board room hang outs is another matter.

Today’s business music market looks very different to it was when Musak
Holdings started out. Whilst most of the innovation that has taken place in
the music industry has been high profile there has, and will continue to be
much innovation in the following few years.
Just watch.