Monday, May 05, 2008

The Rights Stuff

My projects are always in need of inspirational yet usable music tracks. Copyrighted CDs are a no-go area and the licensing T&Cs of library music don't seem very flexible either. I spent some time checking out the Creative Commons options. This seems to be a new-ish system of more flexible licensing agreements enabling use under the 'some rights reserved' principle. I spent some time checking-out a couple of resources where much CC music can be found...
Jamendo is a bit of a mess; users upload their material (of wildly varying musical quality) and the one keyword at a time searching makes finding anything worthwhile really quite tedious. However, anything found here can be used for non-profit projects at no cost at all.
Magnatune is a much classier operation. The music is hand-selected and sorted sensibly into meaningful genres. For non-profit use, tracks can be used under CC terms for merely the cost of downloading the tracks (min $5.00 per album). The best thing here is that the tracks are also available for profit-making production work too under numerous types of licensing agreements. This is a very open and scalable solution; a project could start out on a non-profit basis but further licenses are obtainable should the need arise.

No comments: