It’s a compliment, I know. Over the past year I’ve received several inquiries from budding songwriters seeking to use our royalty free background music as accompaniment for their words. I got a phone call just now from a songwriter asking if she could use our Extreme Metal Mayhem disk and sing her own words and melodies over the tracks. It is always hard to tell these folks that this is not the intention of our production music, that we cannot license it to be used in this way.
The reason we don’t license music this way has to do with copyright. All of UniqueTracks’ music compositions are copyrighted and owned by one of our publishing companies. The recording itself is copyrighted and owned by UniqueTracks. In other words, the music has already been published. If you were to add vocals to the exisiting music, you would be creating a different musical work which would need its own copyright and that would involve sharing publishing rights and other legalities.
I’m always surprised when I receive these calls because it just never occurred to me that this could be a possible use of our music. When I was young and starting to write music, it never occurred to me to take an existing recording and write my own words to it and then call that a song I’d written. But in today’s world of digital sampling, peer-to-peer file sharing music sites and loops software like Acid and Garageband, where you take small pre-recorded snippets of music and combine them into a track, it’s easy to see how some young people, eager to get started with their musical careers, become confused about what songwriting entails.
digital sampling, loops software, production music, publishing rights, royalty+free+music, songwriting
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This is an interesting area of usage. In Jamaica, the reggae musicians do this all the time. It’s called Version. Meaning that a three piece one drop band writes a track and then a multitude of singers write their own take. The result is an album. Usually, many of the best selling singles in Jamaica come from these Version comps. What it does is to help find truly remarkable lyricists and singers without the complication of assembing a band (and dealing with the ego of the reggae bass player or the monetary demands of the dub drummer. for years, that was the barrier to entry).