Public-domain music ressources
- Thread starter muroshi
- Start date
Lots!
Mostly cheesy but some very good. Here's a good place to start looking:
http://vimeo.com/forums/topic:15630
Mostly cheesy but some very good. Here's a good place to start looking:
http://vimeo.com/forums/topic:15630
Steve House
Veteran
Are you really looking for public domain music or did you mean royalty free music? There is very little music written after 1922 that is truly in the public domain, that is, where the words and melody are no longer covered by the copyright of the publisher and composer/lyricist. Recordings of music are covered under separate copyrights and virtually every recording ever made is still under copyright, even if the music itself is in the public domain. Beethoven's 5th Symphony is in the public domain but a recording of it made by the London Philharmonic is not.
This seems to be a great bookmark.
What does royalty free mean? You buy the cd and you can use the tracks?
Classical music and a good student might be the way to go.
silentnoise
Member
there is a lot of creative commons electronic stuff on soundcloud
Steve House
Veteran
...What does royalty free mean? You buy the cd and you can use the tracks?
Classical music and a good student might be the way to go.
Yes, Royalty Free means you pay a single licensing fee and then you can use the music. There are two basic types, "buyout" licenses and "needle-drop" licenses. Smartsounds and Magnatunes are examples of buyout librarys.. you purchase a CD with perhaps 10 tracks on it or you purchase individual tracks online and for a single fee you get a non-exclusive license to use the tracks as much as you want in as many productions as you want. With needle-drop libraries you pay a fixed fee for each individual occurance (each drop of the needle back in the analog audio days) of the cut in your production and each increment of some duration, typically each 30 seconds or portion thereof, that each occurance lasts. Either way you get a license to use the music without payment of further royalties.
Careful about even the classics. The music may be in the public domain but the score the musician is performing from is probably from a current publisher and may be copyright. The only way to be really certain is to rummage through the antique shops and find sheet music and songbooks from the 19th century and even there it can be iffy ... "Happy Birthday" is still under copyright, owned by Time-Warner, and every time you hear it in a TV show or movie or performed in a play or restaurant another royalty drops into their coffers.
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Steve House
Veteran
"Best source" is hard to say. One library with a huge amount of classical is the DeWolfe library. Magnatunes has a lot of early classical, medieval, baroque, plainsong, sacred music, etc. Google for their site.
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http://www.prsformusic.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/ProductionMusic/5701_rc_film.pdf
$50 and maybe even $110 (if you upload it to youtube) for 30sec of a Studentfilm seems quite a rip-off.
$50 and maybe even $110 (if you upload it to youtube) for 30sec of a Studentfilm seems quite a rip-off.