A Word About Music and Licensing

Music has always been an important storytelling tool for movie makers. I'm not just talking about a score here. A score is a great thing because it is focused and tuned in to the emotional heartbeat of the moment. It engages the audience to believe in the world being built on screen and can enhance the performance being delivered. But a musical soundtrack is important as well. I know that in recent years the soundtrack has become more and more involved in the marketing of a movie - which I don't always see as a bad thing - but in the post-MTV era, musical montage is simply a part of our cultural thinking. While the worst case of this might be the latest jock rock hit playing on the new episode of some CW teen drama, the best case is something like "The Graduate," which just wouldn't be the same movie without Simon and Garfunkle.

When it comes to the 52 Weeks Project, stories I'm trying to tell in less than 3 minutes, a good song in the background  is important(or the foreground since there's generally no sound shooting Super 8). And, though I've done it before, and there are quite a few gems to be found, I don't want to spend a lot of time combing through Creative Commons libraries to find a song that kinda-sorta fits. I want to use songs that I know and love and have influenced who I am, how I think, and therefore the movies I make. I also want something the audience can identify with. This became abundantly clear while editing the first 52WP film when I put a great Guns n' Roses song under the video as a temporary track. It was really the ideal song for the film and I didn't want to take it off.

So I did some homework.

ASCAP, who license most music and have a huge repertory of licensable songs, apparently has a new media license that, all things considered, is quite reasonable. It may not be the right fit for every film project, but given that the main venue for these movies is going to be my website and I can measure how much gets played, it works out. It does somewhat limit me in terms of distribution (of course I can re-license appropriately if my needs change) and there is a little cost involved, but these facts are totally outweighed by the fact that for these 52 movies (and anything else only on my website, such as perhaps a web-only reel) I can use "real" songs (for lack of a better term). And the expense? Well, considering I'm not making any money, I'd have to get somewhere above half a million views for it to cost me much more than film, processing, and transfer for just 4 of these films. In other words it'll work out to about $5.50 a movie for the year. 

There's kind of an ethical point in this too. I could rant all day against the intellectually bankrupt concepts of intellectual property that we hold in this country and around the world, but I've always held that if the business models evolved to something reasonable we should support them. ASCAP notes that this new media license of theirs is an experimental license. I can already see ways in which it could use improvement (or perhaps I don't yet understand every aspect of it), but I do see an effort to be reasonable and I'm happy to work with it.

(Photo courtesy Flickr user Almogaver)

The Myth of "HTML5 Video"

Why then is the argument here Flash (which is not a standard) versus HTML5 (which is)? The only reason is that it's a smoke and mirrors game being played by certain manufacturers to conflate their product with something that is open when the truth is a little more complicated.

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