We recently visited Fes, Morocco for a week or so. We stayed in a beautiful hotel just on the edge of the Medina on a hill. It was a perfect spot to record the Call to Prayer that happens 5 times a day beginning at 5AM.
For those that might not be familiar with the Call to Prayer it is one of the strangest things you’ve ever heard, especially in the Medina as there are hundreds of mosques and minarets, all equipped with distorted loudspeakers and cheap microphones. The elder of the mosque starts wailing into this old fashioned PA system, then times that by 200 with each mosque trying to outdo the next in volume. It is eerie sounding.
It goes on for a while and is basically just a reminder to get to the mosque to do your prayer ritual.

Here is one of our recordings of the Call to Prayer:
call_to_prayer-fr9t_11-02.mp3

We’d like to welcome our newest composer to the Partners In Rhyme family,
Alan Marchand is adding his huge catalog of traditional jazz to the www.musicloops.com catalog.

A few of my current favorites are:

Summer Solstice with its steamy, romantic sax melody.

Down Memory Lane with its upright bass and 1930’s feel.

and of course there’s Melodious Thunk

These are all royalty free music clips that you can download immediately and start using in your commercial projects today. If you need that old-time, traditional jazz feel these royalty free music clips from Alan Marchand may be just what you need.

Here is my weekly free royalty free music clip (or sound effect clip).
This it is the Gothic Loop 1 from our new Film Music Series
. This particular music clip is from the Film Series: Main Theme Songs collection.

Gothic_Loop1.mp3

(This is an MP3 file which usually means they won’t loop properly, however I have gone in with an MP3 editor and removed the blank audio at the head and tail that the MP3 conversion usually adds to the file.)

Some great questions from musicformedia over at filmandgamecomposers.com:

When you first created your library was it all music you had already made, or was it stuff that you created specifically for the purpose of selling in a stock music library?

We started out our music career as composers for TV shows and commercials, radio ads and video games. We would always give our clients 3 or 4 different ideas to choose from for their spot. These were all fairly well-developed ideas. They would choose one and the rest would go on the shelf. Our first collection of royalty free music (published in 1996) was a collection of these alternate choices.

Once that collection started selling we realized we needed to create music specifically for our production music library.

If you were creating your library of stock music from scratch again, what would you do differently?

I think I would have kept track of the different mixes better. In the old days once a mix was done the set up was pretty much lost forever. Now we can recall any mix and have it come back sounding exactly the way it did a couple of years ago.

Do you think there is a set “package” of types of music you should upload? What I mean by this is, if you sell a lot of music, is there a certain amount of of types that sell more than others – ie. should you create a library of 50 songs (each with a 60 second edit, 30 second edit, 15 second edit and 2 or 3 loops), maybe 4-5 sound effect bundles – like a “Video Game” Sound Effect Bundle, “Horror Movie” Sound Effect Bundle etc. I hope this makes sense – my general question is, should you be creating a set amount of each type to maximise sales?

Bundles are great, the more creative the better. In my experience many of our customers go for the full length track but people who just need a loop for their website will buy one or two of these from the package. Lots of people buy the 60 second version because it is usually a bit cheaper.

We have some composers who upload bundles of music loops and corresponding button sounds. Music and complimenting sound effects is a good idea (we did this with our Horror! collection and it sells very well).
In your case maybe some nice ambient nature sounds to go along with your piano music.

Some advice on pricing your packages; if your full length track is 1:30 I would price it the same as your 60 second version.
In general I would price the 60 second version of the tracks close to or the same as the full length track price.

How long are your tracks usually? I have a lot of 20-30 second piano pieces, but I’m not sure they’re long enough.

This is considered fairly short, you might want to extend them. 20 seconds is good for a website, most of our 20 second loops go for $9.95.
The 30 second version might be $14.95 or $19.95 but you really want to get up to at least 60 seconds for most uses.

I’ve noticed a few full sized scores for films – ie. 10-15mins tracks – do you sell any of these yourself, and do you find they sell well?

Most full scores are actual symphony recordings of classical music. At least on our websites I haven’t seen any composers uploading anything over 5 or 6 minutes.

8 Bit Rocket has a fairly large selection of really cool music loops available for free download and free use in your projects:
http://www.8bitrocket.com/music.aspx

11k versions of the music clips (loops) fall under the Creative Commons license (see their website)

The 44k versions have different licensing requirements.

One of my latest uploads to sound-effect.com is called Cannon Battle.
It is a recording of the revolutionary re-enactment group here in Gracia (Barcelona, Spain).
All of the actors have a gun called a Blunderbuss. The guns are enormous and enormously loud and the revolutionary soldiers roam through our streets with them firing at will.
It is an awesome sound to wake up to.
So, I woke up and took my NAGRA out to record the Blunderbuss Battle.
When I got back to the studio to edit the sounds I tried pitching it down without changing the length and it accidentally turned into a Canon Battle.

Right-click (control-click on a Mac) and choose save as:
cannon_battle.mp3

I’m making this available royalty free to my blog readers and especially to Machinima producers as I have been talking to some of them recently and they seem to be having a hard time finding high quality music and sound effects for their productions (for free since most of them are broke).
I will posting more free stuff every week.

I found some more free royalty free music clips today available from Purple Planet.
They have a variety of genres available like calm, dramatic, jazzy, blues, mystery, horror and comic.
Their website states:
"All the music here can be used essentially for free (though we appreciate a small donation) for any type of film production or web presentation (youtube, podcasts, blogs etc). This includes revenue-generating, commercial uses."
Check them out if you need free music, it all sounds pretty good.

I have been selling royalty free music for more than 10 years now. I receive composer submissions and demos on a daily basis. I also see what sells and what customers are requesting everyday.
I don’t often give advise to composers but thought I would post some basic observations in case it is of any use to composers looking to get into the royalty free music industry.

1. Be Prolific
If you want to make a living at selling your production music the first thing you need is a large library of music.
The composers who have large catalogs on our sites earn the most and earn very consistently. 75-300 tracks and up is considered a large library.

2. Create edits and loops with your full length tracks.
The customers on our websites love the fact that we offer not only full length tracks but edits, loops, underscores and alternate takes. You can also sell the whole package of full length track, edits for a higher price than the full length track alone.
This coupled with a large library will practically guarantee steady sales (as long as the music is top quality of course).

A typical package would be:
Full length track 2 to 3 minutes
60 second edit
30 second edit
15 second edit
2 or 3 loops.

3. Write What You Know
Professional production music composers are a very versatile lot. They can write music in many styles and can do it convincingly. However many of the demos I receive are from composers who are trying to be all things to everybody, writing in as many styles as possible with the majority of the track coming across as mediocre. We pass on these types of demos 99% of the time.
If you are an excellent New Age Music composer don’t try your hand at Nu-Metal just to fill out your catalog, write more New Age Music instead. Write the music you love to write, not what you think will sell.

4. Add Something Real
In this day of laptop studios, garageband and reason it seems that everyone is now trying their hat at being a “composer”. I may be old skool but back in the day musicians used to practice their instruments for hours everyday and went to school to study harmony and composition. Today it seems that anyone who can download some free drum loops from the web calls themselves a composer.
All this to say when you compose try adding something real to your compositions. Instead of only relying on your loop library (the one that thousands of other people are using) try adding some real guitar parts, or a weird vocal part, or a sax, get your friend to play harmonica, pick up any simple percussion instrument, even a tambourine, and record it live. Give your standard loop library composition a soul by adding something real.

5. Melody
Just like in popular music melody plays a big factor in royalty free music. Sure there are lots of instances where you want the music to sit in the background and not attract too much attention but according to our sales stats music with a good, strong, uplifting melody outsells all other types of music.

6. Holiday Music
Would you like a Christmas bonus every year in your royalty free music paycheck? Then do Christmas and holiday music in whatever style your composition skills are strongest. A hip hop version of Jingle Bells, an ozzy osbourne version of The First Noel.
This would go for all types of public domain music, a Nu-Metal version of God Bless America, a jazz version of the Star Spangled Banner, drum n bass Auld Lang Syne, etc.
Our customers just love this kind of stuff.

7. Structure
Make sure to think about the listener when you’re are putting together the structure of your royalty free music tracks.

a. Don’t have a 2 minute intro before getting to the main melody. You need to grab the listener quickly, get to the point as soon as possible (within reason of course).

b. Give them an ending. No fades. Give them a proper ending with a chord and cymbals that ring out. This is very important for the ends of commercials and radio spots.

c. Give them a B section, also known as a bridge. You can do the same thing with a breakdown if it is dance music. You need to give the customer some variety in the track, something to play with in editing.

Hope this helps. Let me know what you think.
I’ll be posting more tips for royalty free music composers in the coming weeks.
-Mark

The day started (for me) with a panel discussion on digital music and mobile distribution. This was in a separate room from the other discussion regarding podcasting. The mobile discussion didn’t have translation and the entire panel was speaking in Spanish. It was basically an hour long Spanish comprehension test for me. I was then invited to a panelist’s lunch by my new friend Sam Levin. It was great to be able to sit down and talk to the panelists over lunch. Everyone had great stories that I could really relate to (and would most likely be extremely boring to 99.9% of the rest of the population). Gerd Leonhard told me about his days at the helm of licensemusic.com during the internet bubble, spending tons of venture capital money with big offices in San Francisco only to crash along with the hundreds of other companies during the time. It actually sounded like lots of fun.

Simon Wheeler of The Beggars Group told me about his day to day accounting headaches. Sheets and sheets of invoices for royalties of pennies all to be added up, accounted for and paid out. We have the same types hassles at PIR but on a somewhat smaller level. It was a good warning to keep building good accounting practices as we grow.

Talked to a couple of people from Pitchforkmedia who I had never heard of before but their music site is apparently very popular.

There were quite a few representatives from various Catalan government agencies and when asked about what they do and how they promoted their service they answered “we have spots on the radio”.
Sam was incredulous, “have you heard of internet!? do have any internet promotion at all?”
To which they replied “we are working on building our website”.

If there is one thing I learned from this entire conference is that the Catalans (for the most part) are firmly stuck in the 80’s.
They go on and on describing how the internet is a terrible thing, people are stealing music! the government must do something to stop these people from stealing our music!! we have to go back to the old days when people bought CDs from us!!!

Good grief! Wake up!

Anyway, the panel on internet payments was promising in the beginning but turned into a “let’s go back to the old days and shut down the internet!” type of argument in due course.

The final workshop called Digital Distribution with the 7 major Spanish digital distributors was about as boring as they come, long Powerpoint presentations, people reading from their scripts with their heads pointing at their shoes.
I left after 20 minutes and enjoyed the rest of the beautiful sunny Barcelona afternoon.

All in all I enjoyed the Digital Music 2.0 conference in Barcelona, it had it’s good and bad points but it was great to be in a roomful of like-minded people for two days.
Oh yeah, there’s also a good chance I’ll be one of the panelists next year.

Here is an excerpt of some of the discussions resulting from the panels on the first day of Digital Music 2.0:

We need a Networked Music Business. We need a Web-Native Music Business.

What does Music2.0 look like:

1. Respect for the Creators and the Users, first and foremost
2. Based on Access first, then Copy
3. Based on Usage Rights, not (just) Copyright
4. Based on dozens of revenue streams, not just ‘selling copies’
5. Driven by Sharing
6. Driven by Syndication (and users marketing what they like)
7. Decentralized
8. Powered by an entirely new kind of Advertising
9. Multi-platform access but mostly mobile
10. Bundled in other services, basic access ‘feels like free’
11. Open and transparent

Kevin Kelly:

The key is to offer valuable intangibles that can not be reproduced at zero cost, and will thus be paid for:
1. Immediacy – priority access, immediate delivery
2. Personalization – tailored just for you
3. Interpretation – support and guidance
4. Authenticity – be sure it is the real thing?
5. Accessibility – whereever, whenever
6. Embodiment & Experience
7. Patronage – “paying simply because it feels good”
8. Findability & Curation

Today I will be going to the Podcasting discussion, the Mobile Content discussion, the online payments workshop and the final panel discussion called ‘Digital Distribution’.

The conference itself is pretty amazing as it is happening in three different languages. The panelists are speaking in either Catalan, Castalleno or English and they beam out instant translations via wireless headphones.
Very cool.