Last week we talked about music Performance Royalties, and how you, as a media creator, might have to deal with it. In short, if an artist is from a big music label, they can command specific contracts that grant them the right to royalties. However, most artists get residual royalties through something called a PRO, or Performance Rights Organization. This has little impact on you, or your creations, as they only take revenues generated by the organizations who benefit from the audience hearing the music. In most cases, it only requires you to fill out a cue sheet to the PRO.
You might see the term PRO, or Performance Rights Organization when shopping for music on Bard, Pond5, or any number of music licensing sites. What is this and how does it affect how I buy a song for my video production? The “Performance Rights Organization” label added to certain artists might sound like a bit of legal wrangling that most video editors and creators don't want to deal with, especially considering royalties are something most video creators might want to avoid. Fret not. It’s actually way less complicated than it might seem at face value.
By now some of you might be wondering “What is Bard?” That’s a totally fair question. The music licensing landscape is filled to the brim with music libraries. In fact, there are thousands of them. From the well established music libraries to the solo indie composer, there is no shortage of places to find music. And this is exactly why Bard exists: to make it easier to find music from across all of those libraries from a single place! Let’s dig into this a little bit.
Bard™ is drastically simplifying the way media creators find production music on the internet. Instead of searching hundreds of different sites for music, Bard searches them for you.
With a single search, you can see content from Pond 5, Audio Jungle, and Jamendo, with more coming soon. That way you can spend a lot less time searching, and a lot more time finding the best song for your project.
Digital creators (and especially YouTube creators) face a particularly difficult challenge when acquiring music for their productions. The biggest threat is getting nabbed by YouTube’s Content ID system or, worse, getting a DMCA strike. It doesn’t help that music licensing is a particularly muddy topic.
