The classy video-hosting site Vimeo launched a new service to connect their noncommerical community of creative independent video producers with quality legal music options. The Music Store utilizes the Free Music Archive API to index the portion of the FMA library that can be used in video projects under the Creative Commons framework (i.e. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike; about 11,000 tracks) and offers these curated jams as its free options. This is an exciting moment for those of us who share our music under open licenses to inspire new collaborations and expand our reach.
From Vimeo's announcement:
As many of you know, finding music for your videos can be somewhat... well, painful. Licensing music on your own can be confusing and finding good free music can take forever. Many of us here at Vimeo are video creators or filmmakers as well and we experience these frustrations on a regular basis. So, we decided to do something about it.
The majority of FMA's library is pre-cleared for noncommercial use only, so it might seem strange at first that free music is included in something called a Music "Store" alongside paid music from a company called Audiosocket. But for many artists, allowing for hands-on engagement with their work in the noncommercial sphere plays into a broader promotional strategy, and even leads to lucrative commercial licensing opportunities. We always love to hear about the collaborations that result when producers who actually have a budget discover one of the many great artists who share their work via the Free Music Archive, about artists being commissioned to score new documentary films, mobile app soundtracks, and viral videos that reach 2 million views.
Vimeo introduced Creative Commons licensing for video last summer, and we've already seen a flurry of videos powered by CC music from the FMA -- everything from educational projects, travelogues, time lapses, recipe-sharing, and science videos to the immensely popular cute animal videos (although I guess that's more a YouTube thing). I'm including one example after the jump, along with the latest in FMA's series of mixes curated with the online video producer in mind. Vimeo's Music Store seems is totally new, so it's sure to be refined over the course of time. If you have feedback you can leave a comment here, and we look forward to the new collaborations that this bridge between the CC Music Community and the CC Video Community will inspire!
Thank you. from Andreas Brixen on Vimeo -- After receiving a bunch of congratulatory comments on my birthday, I decided to take the time to write each and every friend a personal thank you card. This video is a collection of all those "thank yous". Music: Broke For Free - "Something Elated"
I have never posted before
Posted by: Madison | October 08, 2011 at 04:33 PM
This is a great idea. It will save many of us countless hours of searching youtube for "Creative Commons", and wading through the endless junk. Another option, of course, is to recruit someone on Fiverr to produce you a specific royalty free piece of music. There are literally thousands of willing struggling musicians on there ready to take an order.
Posted by: Neal Mayhem | June 27, 2013 at 04:55 PM