Many of you will choose
to have music composed for your films, which is usually the best way to go.
However sometimes you might need an iconic piece of classical music, or a
little bit of authentic diegetic music for which it would be more sensible to source
an existing piece. If you have something in mind you can try to license it but
you'll often find you won't even get a response from the rights holder (or it
takes ages for them to get back to you). So often better to go for something
which is legally free to use without getting permission. Here's a rundown of
the rules...
If a piece was first
published before 1923 and the composer has been dead 70 years then the music
publishing rights (as in the musical notes on the page) move into the public
domain (i.e. become free of copyright).
So this means there is a
lot of classical/folk music and some jazz that is free to use if you can find a
public domain recording. This gets more complex as different countries have
different rules (and basically no recordings are public domain in the US, and
Youtube/Vimeo servers are based there). However there's a curious loophole
whereby government employees are unable to create copyrighted works. This means
that all the military bands/orchestras recordings of public domain pieces are
also in the public domain. Other organisations like schools choose to put their
recordings straight into the public domain. There are some good resources for
this category here-
CLASSICAL PUBLIC DOMAIN
Musopen have also made some high
quality recordings themselves, funded by Kickstarter. You can find those here-
Orchestral / string quartet collection
here–
https://archive.org/details/musopen-lossless-dvd
Chopin piano collection here-
https://app.box.com/v/mo-chopin
And not Musopen, but a
similar Kickstarted piano project here-
https://www.opengoldbergvariations.org/download
CREATIVE COMMONS
There is also something
you may have heard of called Creative Commons licensing. This is where a
creator chooses to allow people to reuse their work under certain conditions.
There are various flavours of license, but generally speaking if you're doing
something non-commercial and you credit them, you can use it. Here’s a few collections-
http://freemusicarchive.org - a big mix of stuff, but more on the experimental side
of things
http://www.mobygratis.com - Producer Moby has made over 150 of his tunes free to
use for non-commercial projects
www.archive.org – this is user uploaded stuff, there is some stuff
incorrectly listed as public domain, so always try to cross-reference with
another source of info. Anything labelled creative commons is more likely to be
fine, but do a bit of research to find out more.
There's also some
creative commons library music here (although only a fraction of it is free)-
There's also a huge
database of creative commons birdsong up here–
And there’s
16,000 sound effects on this BBC site, that you can use for free in
non-commercial projecst-
http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/
N.B. You may be familiar
with YouTube’s content ID checker. This won’t tell you if something is free of
copyright, only whether or not a copyright owner has registered a work with
YouTube. So you’d always need to cross-reference a result from the content ID
checker with another source of information to ensure you could legally screen
at festivals etc.
And if you have any
specific qs on any of this stuff just give me a shout.