Norwegian site about royalty-free music

Hello people,

I just wanted to mention quickly that today I have launched a new website in Norwegian language for Norwegian media production professionals looking for royalty-free music. The site is www.AvgiftsFri.no and it explains the use of partly royalty free and fully royalty free music in Norway, and how it relates to TONO (Norway's composers royalty collection organisation) and Ncb (Nordic Copyright Bureau).

I'm sorry that this is of course completely irrelevant for non-Norwegian people, but it should be a useful resource for people working in film production and other media production in Norway. I hope some of you will find the site valuable and useful.

High Resolution, 24-bit , 48-khz Sound-FX series from Lynne Publishing

Hello everyone,

Over the past several months I have been working on developing a high resolution, high definition sound-fx library. These days most video editing and media editing suites operate at 24-bit, 48-khz resolution, however the vast majority of sound effects available from commercial sound libraries are still at standard CD-resolution, 16-bit, 44.1 khz.

Check out the sounds at Shockwave-Sound.com

In fact, we have nearly all of these sounds in 24-bit 96-khz, but "only" 48-khz files are available to the general public at this time, because this is the resolution at which most professional media editors are now working.

The library contains somewhere around 1,000 sound files so far, spanning several categories of sounds from spacey whooshes, swipes and zooms, to high performance cars and motorcycles, everyday household sounds, footsteps, nature sounds (rivers & streams, ocean, forest), traffic sounds / city noise and more, billiard sounds, horror sounds, office / work sounds, industry & machinery sounds and much more.

The sounds were recorded and edited by myself Bjorn Lynne (in Norway), Christos Panayides (in Cypros) and Ric Viers (in USA) and published by / copyrighted to my company, Lynne Publishing.

We plan to keep adding to this collection of sound effects in 24 bit 48 khz over many years ahead. If you are a sound recordist yourself and you are interested in recording sound effects on-location for us, we may be interested in buying the sounds from you. Please get in touch with Lynne Publishing if you would like to talk about this.

Check the high definition sounds at Shockwave-Sound.com

Why my MIDI music tracks are not free for use on websites or in other projects

From time to time, I get emails from people who want to use my MIDI music tracks on their websites, or in their own developed games. My answer is always the same:

• To use my music on a website, you have to buy a license. The license costs $29.95 and can be purchased from Shockwave-Sound.com. (Specifically, the MIDI music can be found here: http://www.shockwave-sound.com/royalty_free_midi_music/). It doesn't matter if you make a profit on your web site or not. Either way, you need a license.
  
  
• As for home-developed amateur games: If your game will only ever be seen and played by yourself and your immediate friends and family, then you can use my music for free, without paying for a license. However, if the game is going to be included on a web site, available for download, or distributed in any other way beyond your immediate friends and family, then you will need to buy a license. Again, it doesn't matter if you make a profit on your game, or if you sell the game for money or give it away free. If my music is in there, you need a license.
  

There used to be a time in the past when I allowed people to use my music on web sites for free, only in return for a link back to my site. But. about 3 years ago, I took the decision that everybody who wants to use my music for anything (other than personal listening) have to buy a license for it.

The reason is that I had already for many years before that tried the idea that I let some people use the music for free, in return for credits/links, which would in turn lead to more people getting interested in my music, and then some people paying for it. Unfortunately, after years of trying this, I realized that it just doesn’t work like that. The only thing it leads to is even more people who want to use the music for free, and nobody who wants to pay for it. The more people who got it for free, the less reason there seemed to be for anybody to pay for it. And this is my work and my living. It's not a hobby for me. It's serious. It's what feeds myself and my family. I can't afford to take it lightly.

It also started to get difficult to determine what was really a “free” project and what was a commercial project? Some people had “free” projects that they didn’t charge money for, but they had lots of Google Adwords advertising on their page. This means that my music was part of their project, which drew lots of traffic to their web site, which in turn generated a profit for them. Is this a free project or now? And how about if somebody made a free demo, and the super quality of their demo resulted in the fact that those people were then able to get a paid project? My music was then part of the free demo which, in turn, led to the team earning money from it, although not directly. It was starting to get very difficult to determine what was free and what wasn’t...

So in the end I took the decision that everybody who uses my music will now need a license, it doesn’t matter if the project is a free project or a paid-for project. This has worked better for me. There is more real interest in my music, and I am now able to make a living as a musician. My music has more value, both to myself and to other people.

If you feel that my music really adds something of value to your website, your game or any other project, then you should buy a license. If you don't think my music is worth anything, then you also won't be losing anything when you can't use my music in your project.

I hope this all makes sense, and I hope that this puts a rest to the endless questions of whether you can use my music for free in your project. :-)

Thanks for reading!

- Bjorn Lynne