Make your own song

This is cool. I meet a music license quote/calculator widget which is free and can be placed in your blog. There are basically two types:

a. License quote generator
b. License calculator.

In the world of music publishing, there is a term “license” which means that before anyone can use the song, they must pay for license. This is the business aspect of music which every songwriter needs to know. In fact, buying a CD means that, I pay for the CD price in exchange of the use for the song personally (like using it only in your home or car stereo). The cash you paid in purchasing those CD or downloading a song online constitutes a “license”. The terms and conditions is that: you can only use the song for non-commercial purposes.

What about if you are planning to use a song from certain songwriter X as part of your film project which you are planning to release? This needs another type of music licensing. Of course the licensing cost is not the same as simply buying a CD and ripping off that song for your other commercial purposes.

This where music license tool is very helpful. It can be used to calculate the licensing fees automatically by setting the terms and conditions of the song usage. See example below.

Lets illustrate how much does it cost to license a song “X” if:

a. I will use it for my film/movie project and the song is a theme song.
b. I would like the movie to be viewable also in the web, aside from cinemas/theatres.
c. The song will be featured also in the out of context trailers.
d. My budget for my film project is less than $40 million.
e. The movie will be released worldwide.

Using the calculator, it gives around $16,186.46 one time fee which I will give to the music publisher in exchange for the film synchronization license.

The only short coming of this calculator is that it does not give whether it will be an “exclusive” or “non-exclusive” form of license. These two affects so much the licensing cost and I have no idea why they have not incorporated this feature. And I think, the tool assumes a “non-exclusive” license since it is the most common form. “Exclusive license” means that if I grant this form of license to customer “X”, I cannot grant a license to another customer except term of usage for customer “X” expires.

It makes sense that non-exclusive licensing cost should be higher because you cannot get income other potential customers during that certain of time as stated in the license. Lets have another example, say I am a recording producer planning to release a major album and would like one song from a certain music publisher to be performed by my artist. Below are the terms of usage for the license:

a. Song title: X
b. License type: “Composition and Sound recordings”
c. License terms: “Life of Copyright”
d. Number of copies: 100,000
e. Commercial- media production
f. Song use: Composition only.
g. Song use duration: Entire Song
h. Territory: The universe (all galaxies)

Using the calculator it gives around : $13,950.00 licensing cost. Also another shortcoming of the tool is that it does not have a feature whether the song is already popular or not. This tool assumes the lowest price and that the song is not a popular one at all.

If you are a music publisher you can try this tool using the shortcut above.

How to Link to This Site:

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<a href=”http://www.make-your-own-song.com/”>Make your own song:Free Music Lessons and Songwriting Courses</a>

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Make your own song:Free Music Lessons and Songwriting Courses

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 2:52 am and is filed under Music Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.