Video production
Music licensing
Music licensing is permission from the author or publisher to use a specific track in your video. A streaming subscription gives you the right to listen, not the right to publish that music with pictures.
What it means in practice
Music in video involves two separate rights at once. One belongs to the composition, the melody and the lyrics, the other to the specific recording somebody made in a studio. Recording your own cover version does not solve it: the recording is yours, the song still is not. Pairing music with picture is called synchronisation and is agreed with the author or the publisher holding the catalogue. Collecting societies handle other uses, such as music played in a shop or at an event.
This is the most common misunderstanding clients arrive with. A company paid for music at its own conference and believes it is covered for the aftermovie too. It is not. They find out the day the video goes up and a claim lands. Custom music from a Slovak composer costs roughly 20 to 100 euros per minute. A licence for a famous film theme can reach a thousand euros for two minutes.
For corporate video the sensible route is music licensing from a stock library on an annual subscription. Pick the track before the edit, not after, because the tempo decides the length of the scenes. From the client we need one answer: will this run as paid advertising. The scope differs between organic content and a campaign. Keep the licence confirmation with the invoice, not in an inbox you will not search next year.
Music licensing can also be overthought. An internal film for thirty people on the intranet does not need a lawyer, a stock library is enough. And watch something studios sometimes leave unsaid: some cheap licences are tied to one named channel. Upload the same film to LinkedIn six months later and you are technically outside the terms. Ask straight out how many platforms the licence covers and for how long.
A small text file goes into the delivery folder next to the video: track name, licence number, date. Two minutes of work, and it is the one thing that saves you three years later when someone gets in touch. We also ask whether the company has a sound of its own, because then audio branding beats buying other people's tracks over and over.