Music and copyright issues questions
 

Does anyone have any experience with obtaining license to use music on a website? I have a client that wants a popular song for the flash intro on their website and other than contacting the record company directly I have no idea what?s involved. Anyone ever had to deal with this issue before? I am more interested in what it cost more than anything.

lots and lots and lots of money. Unless you are Toyota, dont' expect to license very popular music.

Try going to mp3.com and licenses some smaller needy artists. There's some awesome stuff there and you can probably get licenses for nickels compared to what you'd pay for big songs

Thanks m0rph3us... thats what I was afraind you were going to say. I will go check out mp3.com thought. I had not thought of that. :thumbsup

I know this isn't the most popular thing to say but I would just use the music you want until a cease and decist order comes from the publishing company. They aren't anywhere near as thorough as APIC.

If you wanna go the legal way go to http://www.ascap.com or http://www.bmi.com . Almost all of popular music is represented by one of these two companies so you can find what you need and put in a request at these sites.

If you don't need vocals pick up a copy of Acid Music Creator. You can throw together some good sounding shit for flash sites with that in no time.

You hit the nail on the head :)

If you only use a section of the song, say a 30 sec bit, then you do not have to worry about copyright violations.

Copyright for audio only covers the full version of a recording.

Abby can you show me the law on that? I have heard 3 seconds 8 seconds etc and personally i dont think 30 seconds will fly..

Look at tv comercials.. they pay and they use clips of the song not the whole thing

If this was the case Puff Daddy wouldn't have to pay some old guys big bucks for every song he samples(for every one of his songs).

ya know i always wonder about this. I listen to radio stations, and some of them on their local commercials, the type like Gino's Pizza and Subs or Louie's Transmission Repair, they'll have
famous songs playing under the guy reading the ad copy. I'm talking really famous popular songs. No way in hell have these local radio stations paid to use these songs but they still do it.
I'm amazed they don't get caught.

Yeah, that sounds like he's saying if someone crops one of my photos a bit, I don't own iit anymore. I rather doubt that.

In most cases they let radio stations get away with this because they already pay a blanket fee to the publishers. When you hear the music you know that the voices on top are normally station employees reading the commercial copy.

When an outside company cuts a commercial they sometimes pay the publishers but normally outside companies don't use popular music. They get special music made for the commercial.

Obviously you guys have never read Section 1207 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Post it Abbey

Nope. What's it say?

Does this mean if you have music playing in the background of a video your shooting, it needs to be licensed? Or does it only need to be licensed if you add the music to the video after its shot?

If it can be heard, and you publish the video, then it needs to be licensed.

I believe it's 8 bars max.