Today I did a quick re-check through the royalty free background music market and found a market confused and fragmented.

For starters the market is all over the place. I feel sorry for you guys looking for the right music and the right deal, it can’t be easy to weed out the right solution for your project. It would be so easy to be tripped up by missing terms or paying more than you need for royalty free music that meets your needs.

There are a couple of guys out there who I think are great. Firstly Michael Bielenberg of RoyaltyFreeMusic.com who flies the flag for a wide range of different music genre needs. Plus old timer Mark Lewis who has been stacking rock bottom blanket royalty free license collections high from when most of us were still at college.

The rest of the players are quite a mixed bunch of guys. Firstly, there is ambiguity over what ‘royalty free’ music means. Whilst some argue it only covers the synchronization license, so additional fees will be payable for distribution (online and offline) others say their work is royalty free for everything except broadcasting.

Help me here, but it seems to me that this isn’t going to help any music supervisor have much confidence when hunting out royalty free music for download or even CD distribution.

As far as I see it, a performing royalty, is a royalty. Yes or No?

So, by marketing music to you as royalty free, I can’t see how some of these guys sleep at night knowing that it is royalty free.. but not quite.
Some guys try to explain this but I think they only make it more confusing trying to argue that ‘Royalty Free Music’ is a term that means you still have to pay some royalties depending on what you are going to use the music for.

Perhaps they should call their music ‘Buy Out’ music which from my experience means that you offer a single one off payment for a sync license which will incur royalty payments to the musician and publisher if the piece is included in some form of broadcast.

The times are changing and I do feel that some of these guys are not only hindering the royalty free music market, but also their own ability to serve music supervisors well.

Let me continue anyway. Some of the sites I found at the top of the Google listings for ‘Royalty Free Music’ included a couple of guys marketing their own work. Impressive as this is, it means that purchasers will only get access to one artist on that site and will not be able to easily compare musicians who have music in the same categories. I am sure these guys do well but I am not sure this helps purchasers particularly. It would not take much for them to open their doors to another few, trusted musician pals as partners.

Apart from these observations I saw a couple of sites with different brand names to domain names, which could be confusing for guys trying to remember where they got a particular track.

I also felt what I was seeing was a snapshot in time. Whilst some of the guys have been there a long time, and will continue to dominate and do well, I felt that there were a number who were sliding down the Google pages. There are some out there that are diluting the quality of their catalogue because of their business model. Now I know that sounds vague but I don’t want to give the game away totally here. But lets just say when you are searching and looking for music, do you really want to listen to some guy’s cheesy copy of Autobahn by Kraftwerk?

One thing that stands out as a contrast across the market more than most things is the pricing structures of these guys. The best guys do tend to have some consistency in the license packages, however pricing can be pretty variable. There is becoming a mean of a standard license for around $30 for a full royalty free track. Although of course, the use for this price will vary site to site, this normally covers use as background music for websites at the very least. To match this I also saw other sites dropping their previously high standard licenses to get nearer these guys without clearing out their bank balances. It must be tough to have to accept your price for a license of say, $250 now needs to match the market price of $30.

It feels the right time for the Royalty Free Music market to get their heads together and make some decisions on a standard set of licenses. Sure each of us could choose to have additional license types where we want to be creative, but if we could all agree some standard licenses, say three to cover the main commercial uses, then purchasing royalty free music would be a whole lot easier for the guys we all want to help, that being you.

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