824 – Do music the RIGHT way: Tom talks Royalty Free Music

Episode 824 – Royalty Free Music
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 824. Screw the commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about royalty free music. Music can really help your productions out, but you do not want to get in trouble over it. And I've been there, so we'll talk about that in a minute. Hope you didn't miss episode 823. That was 25 tips on How to Sound Great. See, audio is the only medium where you can learn or be entertained while doing something else. People will put up with poor video but not poor audio. So this gives you the ways to sound great. Make sure you check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com. It's the longest running, most successful, most unique ever in the field of internet and digital marketing. And grab a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree.

[00:01:15] All right, let's get into it. I mean, it's the simple definition of royalty free music is that it doesn't have a copyright. Nobody owns the copyright, so you're free to use it however you want. And like I said, music can really enhance your productions. But there is a downside. And how do I know this? I got a federal copyright violation lawsuit against me back when I had the nightclub. We were closing the shop because the drinking age went from 18 to 21, put me out of business, and we're still running a little bit until, you know, we close the doors and somebody came into the nightclub, heard one song that was copyrighted.

[00:02:04] And filed a federal lawsuit $250,000 per occurrence. Okay, so so this is nothing to play with. Of course, there's a lot of companies that do this with images and music, and their whole job is to settle out of court for 4 or 5, six, 7000, whatever they can milk out of you. That's the there's law firms. That's their business model is to screw you. Now they'll claim, no, we're protecting the copyright owner. Yeah, they're screwing you. So. So there you go. So don't let them give that. Don't give them that chance to do it. All right? That's the thing. So anyway, I settled out of court for 4000 bucks in 1970s money, which I didn't have because we had just lost 400 grand in this nightclub that closed. So. So you don't want to be there now, especially YouTube is really good at catching this. And here's the thing. You will get a strike. They call it if you if they catch you using copyrighted music. And if you get three strikes within 90 days, they kick your channel off the platform. So you definitely don't want to play with YouTube. Now, there's plenty of ways, though, to get copyrighted music or or royalty free music.

[00:03:27] Excuse me. Now I'll go ahead and do a sidebar here ASCAP and BMI. Ascap is American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, and BMI is Broadcast Music, Inc. These are the licensing agencies for almost all big, big time songs that you hear. And there is some kind of method that you can climb through if you're if you've got the guts to do it. See, they don't want to mess with you little people. You know us little people because they don't want a nickel per song when they could, you know, charge a radio station thousands and thousands and thousands of bucks. So they make it really difficult for you to license really popular music. And if you go ahead and use it without permission, you're taking a chance for a federal lawsuit to wipe you out. So just be careful. But you can check ASCAP and BMI if you're dead set on trying to get some popular tune or part of a popular tune. All right. Anyway, let's go to some free and paid sites. Now, even if a site is gives you free, royalty free music. Some of them you got to read the terms of service. Still might require you to give attribution to the artist. In some cases, that's hard to do if you're doing straight audio. Guess you have to say it. If it's on YouTube, you can put it in the show notes or not.

[00:04:54] The show notes for that's for podcasting for for the description. But you have to check it out and always assume music is copyrighted, unless you have an absolute place where you got it and you've copied their terms of service and they tell you what you can do with it. Now, some people say that you could put this music on a video and upload it to YouTube privately, not publicly and not the other thing in the middle there. Private, private, private. Now, would I trust this? And well, why would you do that? Because a supposedly YouTube will tell you and catch it that it's copyrighted before you go public with it. Would I trust this? No, not in a million years. Would I trust this with all the numb nuts that they hire at Google, that just play video games all day and eat the food in the cafeteria? No, I wouldn't trust those assholes with with my business. No. So I wouldn't do that. You could try it just for fun, but don't go public with something, no matter what they say, because it's too risky. Now, my good friend and the guy that started me out in audio, Mike Stewart, the internet audio guy, internetaudioGuy.com has music that he created personally that he will sell and license to you, and he's got collections of it.

[00:06:23] So in fact, the music for the opening and closing of this podcast is from Mike Stewart. And it's I've had over 800 episodes now. Right. Okay. But here's some other places and some caveats. The YouTube audio library very accessible on YouTube and got tons of options, different types of mood and genres of music. Just enormous amounts. Great. Great resource. But here's the thing I got. I researched this, I got probably 19 different opinions. If you can use the music outside of YouTube, if you find a piece, it's best and safest for you to get written permission from the artist of that music before you use it anywhere outside of YouTube. Now, Twitch claims you can use it on their platform, but again, all of this is convoluted and the last thing you want is a copyright lawsuit. All right. Another free option is a free music archive. I think they go by FMA and they've got all kinds of stuff there. And they also have a paid version, I guess, for nicer music. I don't know how they determine that, but there we go. Now, if you're willing to pay, I know there's a place called Music Bakery. Think that's what it's called? There's a place called Premium Beat where you can buy a monthly subscription, I don't know, for like 65 bucks.

[00:07:55] And and that includes five tracks per month. If you're really, really a, you know, a voluminous creator or you can buy one track, I think for like 50 bucks. All right. So another one is Artlist, and they give you a kind of an overriding license for whatever you pick from their site so that you don't have to get a license for each piece of music you pick from them. Some of these get pretty pricey though. So anyway, yeah, learn how to add music to your productions. And Mike Stewart I mean, I remember we did a, I don't know, a webinar years ago and he showed examples of the same production with different music. Oh my God, the music made so much difference. And you know, if you watch any of your, your movies and you kind of take your mind away from what's going on on the screen and listen to the music that they put behind it, it changes the whole mood of things. So it can really be great for you. So, so check that out. Also, check out my mentor program where I can help you with all this stuff and the other million things you need to do to be successful online. So check it out at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.