Download Music for use in Final Cut Pro
 

As most of you know, any music you download from ITUNES, you have to struggle to import the file into Final Cut.

Is there a site to download/purchase music (preferably movie soundtracks) to use them in Final Cut?

I do wedding videography and I'm always wanting to use different and new music in my movies.

Thank you.

Josh Woll

The reason you "struggle" is because the tunes are protected by copyright laws, and it is illegal to use them in your wedding videos.
This forum does not permit informing readers as to the process of breaking those laws for the purpose of breaking other laws.

If you're not aware that using music from iTunes is a violation of copyright law and your agreement with Apple, you might want to read up on the subject, and read your agreement with Apple.

There are *many* royalty free music sites, but none of them will have movie soundtracks, as soundtracks are protected by copyright laws and may not be used in wedding videos without license. Licenses for a movie soundtrack produced in the last 10 years would start in the $5k range, depending on the film. Most would be in the 50k and up bracket.

Wow! If it's in the USA like Douglas is describing than I've got to do with you guys! I almost can not imagine that it's like that.

Here in The Netherlands we have a of music right organization called the BUMA for collection of royalties. If I use a song for a tv show or corporate movie, I've to pay a certain amount of money to the organization. This is per 30 seconds and not that much of money (couple of tenners per 30 sec.). Basically this system works for any kind of production, like wedding vids. except commercials and big cinema movies, there are other rules for those. I have to provide my information to the organization and the organization is doing check-ups as well. So everybody happy in the end...

So since that, here you are allowed to use any kind of source file for your production, as long as you pay for it. Since there is DRM on iTunes files you can not import them directly into FCP. A workaround: burn the song on a CD and import from that.

And to say again, I can not imagine that it is that much different in the USA.

It's very different in the USA, then.

People cheat and use music without official license all the time, but they put themselves at risk doing so. So it becomes an issue of what kind of risk each person is comfortable with. Some examples:

1-Wedding video. Wedding video guy puts in the latest Celine Dion song in the video he's doing. Bummer is, the bride's sister in L.A. (who receives a copy of the video in the mail) works for the publishing company that administers rights for the song. She feels she has no option but to report the video guy. Video guy gets nasty C&D in the mail from the publishing company's in house counsel. "Take it out, send us a new copy as proof, and MAYBE we won't sue you for licensing fees". Guy takes it out, sends it in, it's over. Can't get blood from a stone, and can't prove damages.

2-Little League baseball highlight video. Your son is on the team, you shoot all the games. Other parents want copies, you decide you'll make a highlight video at the end of the season. You want to recoup your DVD-R costs and maybe pocket a little for yourself. Incidentally, you put in "Eye of the Tiger" in the ending montage.

So you sell these for $15.00 a piece (cost plus a little), and through some equally bizarre and convoluted chain of events as above, somebody from the label or publishing company finds out.

This time, they send you a C&D, and DO sue you because you sold 50 of these DVDs, and have a paper trail to prove it.

--------------------------------------

These stories are kinda baloney because there's a lot of issues at hand, but it's not too far off the mark. I had the good fortune of having a job at a record label for 3 years that was run by an entertainment lawyer, and loved to tell stories and educate his office. His previous position was in-house counsel at CBS, so he definitely knew his business.

FYI, he also runs a call-in radio show in Los Angeles about entertainment law, where every week people call in all day about these issues! http://www.barelylegalradio.com/

Not just the USA but here in Canada and many other places as well. There are clear distinctions between performance rights, reproduction rights, and what are called synchronization rights. A radio or TV station or a DJ can play a recording or a bar owner can put it on the juke box simply by paying a royalty to a rights clearance house such as ASCAP or BMI without much of a beaurocratic problem at all and for not an astronomical amount of money. But when you want to incorporate that same tune into a film or video production that will in turn be reproduced and sold, broadcast, or exhibited in public (and wedding, event, and corporate videos would be included in that), then a whole new can of worms gets opened and you must negotiate with the recording's copyright owners for permission to use the piece and pay whatever royalties they demand. If you can't negotiate them to an agreement at a price you can afford, well, those rights to the recordings of the music are their personal property (even if the "person" in question is a corporation) and you can't use the piece any more than you can use their car without their permission ... full stop. Continuing that analogy, you might be able to hear the music in public on the radio or as part of a theatre audience but that doesn't mean it's become fair game for anyone to use as they wish, any more than seeing your neighbor's car on public display while it's driving down the street means it's become available for public use without the owner's explicit permission.

Personally I have mixed feelings about mandatory licensing systems such as you describe. On the one hand, it ought to be able for a small producer to make, say, a wedding video for a client containing the couple's favourite songs without having to pay an arm and a leg for the rights to make those 3 or 4 copies of the video. On the other hand, I'm loathe for the government or the courts to have the audacity to tell private individuals what they can or cannot or must do with the fruits of their labor and that they must allow others to use them under X, Y, or Z circumstances. If I create a song recording or a video or a film, I should have the absolute authority to determine who can use it for what purpose and at what price and no government regulatory body has the right to make any ruling to limit that authority. The government's role is to help me enforce my rights. <<rant mode off>>

I worked for 10 years in music copyright at a major UK broadcaster. I'm not that familiar with how things work on the other side of the pond but similar to the BUMA agreement, through the MCPS in the UK you can buy an LAPL (Limited Availability Product Licence) for very short run projects like weddings and charity films etc. which allows you to acquire sync rights to any commercial tracks.

There are certain provisos including that you can't use more than one track by any particular artist and you have to display clear copyright messages etc. but it can be done for not too hefty a sum. You also need a similar licence from PPL for the use of the recording (MCPS only covers the publishing side) which is a little more expensive but still, it is quite possible to budget for and makes such a huge difference to the final film of course.

It seems silly that we can acquire these rights in the UK to use material from American artists and yet in America it's made so difficult.

Colin

Anyway, the way you use iTunes purchased music is to burn it to disc as an audio disc. Next, rip you disc to your hard drive and choose the aiff you want to use. It will need rendering in FCP since it's 44.1khz not the required 48khz audio. To convert it before hand just open it in QT PRO (you have it since you have FCP) and export it again as 48khz aiff.

This is how it's done, but, being a professional videographer, you already know about the perils you face using copyrighted music without permission in your own work for hire...so I won't bother you with the details.

I have never managed to get any permissions from the MCPS. They don't even reply to my applications. I had given up on them but maybe I was unlucky. How did you find them?

Mike,

A lot of people say that! And sometimes it takes a while for them to understand what you're after but I haven't had too many problems with them.

Their website is: http://www.mcps.co.uk/

There really isn't much information on the LAPLs on the site - typing it into the search box will only give you a very brief summary. I think it is a relatively new thing and that there was talk they were planning to merge the whole process with PPL so that it was all on one form with one payment.

Strangely, Production Library Music is not part of the LAPL agreement and must be licensed via the normal rate card but you can get your commercial music (publishing) clearances for non-commercial products this way. But remember you also need to clear for the record label via a similar agreement with PPL. The PPL version is rather more restrictive as I think you can only make 4 copies (as opposed to 500 with MCPS) without it getting more costly. Fine for most weddings though and if they want more you just have to spell out the additional costs to the clients.

So call MCPS and just ask for details of a Limited Availability Product Licence - hopefully you should get through to someone who knows about it.

Good luck out there!

Colin

Why not find some independent artists producing their own music and make arrangements to use their work?

There are plenty of stock music sites that you can buy royalty free music from. This is a great, inexpensive way to get 'variety' that you seek.

Another type of license we have is 'Creative Commons' and there is much music released under that structure.

http://creativecommons.org/about/lic...t-the-licenses

The stuff you want is out there, just takes a little time to look for it.

-gb-

A library that has a good selection with very reasonable licensing terms in www.magnatunes.com

this guy has a good site of inexpensive classical music, including all the wedding favorites:

http://royalty-free-classical-music.org/

for the price, you really should buy the cut rather than use the itunes workaround. it's not fair to rip off the artists for commercial use.

however, i use the itunes workaround for my own home movies, and all you have to do is import into iMovie, put the file into the timeline, add a black slug of video which matches the length of the audio you're converting, and output straight to an AIFF file, which you can then drop into the FCP browser for import. once you've figured it out, it's pretty easy really. dave's suggested method works fine, too, but this method is fully digital and waste-free....

I do my share of wedding videos and run my own royalty free music site (a TV composer by trade) but I wouldn't choose royalty-free music for my wedding videos - not a great salesman am I?

I'm not saying there isn't a great deal of decent royalty-free music out there now, as some seem to think, just that there's a lot of value in having recognisable music in your production, particularly those such as wedding videos, and I don't mind paying a little extra for that as it really enhances the film and is personal to the couple too.

However, if I lived in the US, with the situation as it stands (i.e. expensive and time-consuming clearance issues) I might well think again.

I do wish the North American recording industry would get their act together and set up some sort of reasonable clearance process such as they have in other countries. For the small producer it really should be no more difficult nor more expensive to clear a song for use in a limited distribution program such as a wedding video or corporate training program than it is for the local small-town radio station to play the latest hit tunes on the air. But I'm really opposed to government stepping in and mandating it - I'm a cantakerous libertarian enough to believe that sort of thing just isn't part of the legitimate role of government or within the scope of authority of the State.

It still seems to be a bit odd that I can use all the of the USA repertoire in my productions over here in the Netherlands and you guys can not.

For example; here in the Netherlands we have MTV as well, with the infamous MTV Cribs on it's playlists. If you listen closely you can find out that it's fitting the whole billboard top 100 in 30 minutes or less. I really can not imagine that it's profitable for Viacom/MTV to pay thousands of dollars for that, and I can not imagine that there trying to cross the border according the law.

I was just wondering if broadcast applications like MTV fall under the rules for performance licensing such as when a radio station plays the song or the rules for synchronization and mechanical licensing such as when the music is used in a film or video soundtrack. I suspect it's the former

Well then, I didn't know this posting would have received the response it did. Thank you all for the information you posted, it will definitely be helpfull.

For broadcast, or public performance/playing of music, it works similar to what Vincent described, but for dropping music into a production, you have to license the material directly from the rights holders.

The group here for performance/broadcast is ASCAP:
http://www.ascap.com/index.html

The thing is that licensing music for a "couple of tenners per 30 sec." is entirely different than what Josh mentioned, which sounded like paying 99 cents on iTunes and dropping into a video production that you charge a client $1k-$4k to produce.

Radio stations, TV stations (like MTV), night clubs, etc., all pay a standardized licensing fee to ASCAP which grants them licenses to play music from ASCAP members.
I think ASCAP does have licenses for internet and other "new media".
Not sure what they have for wedding videos.
Bet it costs more than 99 cents a song though. ;)

[EDIT:
OK .... to license music for production use, you have to engage the artists (or "their people") directly. From the ASCAP "About ASCAP Licensing" page:

[/EDIT]

It does.
It's scary how little folks actually know/have looked into what's legal and what's not. Example of Nick's post above, Nick is a professional in the game, but cites ASCAP for licensing commentary.
ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC have no authority to issue, negotiate, or advise regarding sync licenses. They are air to air and mechanical to air (meaning say...CD player in a bar) agents only. They have nothing to do with video/film/visual arts production.

There is a very lengthy and explanatory article on this subject here on DVInfo.net; it's well worth the read. I wrote it nearly 3 years back, but nothing has changed in the licensing aspect of the industry excepting a small, narrow deal with Zoom.

The licensing deals that AFTRA and other organizations offer to small producers of video works is limited to extremely small replication runs such as what weddings are. Corporate may or may not fall into this category depending on where in the world you live. Broadcast works may not ever fall into this category regardless of where you live.
It's actually a very simple subject, if one takes a few hours to read it out and attempt to grasp it. Most folks will spend more time reading industry gossip each day than it would take to have a firm grip on copyright law.

For example, ripping iTunes for use in ANY project is illegal, because the encryption process for iTunes is also copyrighted, and it's a violation of that copyright to bypass it. That may or may not be meaningful to this discussion, but given the direction of this discussion, it's heading over to the Taking Care of Business forum.

I didn't quite read everything, but I use www.freeplaymusic.com and pay the royalty licesnse to use the music. You can also buy them as a CD set. I also know a couple on pianists and violinists that have given me their song for an extremely low fee. Start to get to know some local musicians epecially ones that may play in churches, schools, or professionally (wedding and other events).

As far as licensing goes I think America is completly out of wack with its legalities on these issues (sorry had to say it)