Getting the right music track for your latest cinematic masterpiece can be a difficult and costly task, especially if you make a lot of videos. The multitude of websites selling royalty-free music generally come in one of two varieties: full of cheesy music, or offering high quality but with a price to match. Prices can start quite low for personal use on your family cat video, but when you start talking about using tracks for commercial or broadcast TV things can start to get pricey.
Enter Art-list, a new resource that aims to change the way you license music for your projects. Instead of paying by the track, and having to check the terms of individual track licences, Art-list introduces a curated collection of music that can be used in your productions for a single flat-fee. You can use the music for commercials, feature films, TV programs, Facebook,YouTube and/or anywhere else and never pay additional fees. Art-list is specifically aimed at film and video production and has some talented artists already signed up. No matter whether you use 10 tracks or 100, the company say the price is still the same.
To get an idea of what’s on offer check out the videos above and below. They’re clearly trying to market these tracks as the work of “real musicians” worthy of careers in their own right, rather than geeks hovering over keyboards in their bedrooms purely for the cash. The high production values of the videos are striking.
The collection will have a user-friendly web-based interface that allows you to browse all the available tracks. Once you have a subscription package you can go on and select your music without having to worry about anything other than your creative choices.
This is how Art-list’s Ira Belsky describes the site, “Art-list is a new website that offers licensed music for film and video production. We have created a curated catalog of high quality music by artists from around the world, always evolving, producing and adding more music so that the content will always be relevant to you.
“Art-list has a simple design that has an almost ‘software’ like feel to it that will make finding the perfect song easy and inspiring.”
This all sounds great if the music is high quality and the selection diverse enough; it’s not clear how many tracks there will be at launch. The other key question is what the price will be. I’ve been told that it should be low enough to attract many professional users to the service, but we’ll have to wait till Art-list launches on February 2016 to find out the actual cost.
Check out the Art-list Facebook page to keep an eye on updates in the run up to the launch of the service.
