Vimeo recently announced its Music Store, a service which allows you to pay as little as $1.99 per track for a personal license, or $98 per track for ‘limited commercial use’ (read: everything you’d probably ever want to do with online video).
Introducing Vimeo Music Store from Andrea Allen on Vimeo.
So what’s the big deal? Vimeo Music Store addresses a lingering problem in the world of corporate video. The music that comes with production software like Final Cut Studio, Logic, etc. is all over the place in terms of quality, tone, and length. These free libraries are a nice starting point for production companies, but you’ve probably heard the half a dozen or so good tracks in hundreds upon thousands upon millions of online videos and tv spots. The next step up from these tracks has traditionally been to license music from commercial music producers. Unfortunately, the largest of these shops determined en masse that online use should be more expensive than corporate/industrial use, and perpetual licensing typically started at around $2000/track. If you’ve got a $20,000 production budget, that’s all well and good, but when you’re trying to produce quality two minute videos in the <$5,000 range, you can’t afford to drop 40% of your budget on a jingle.
Music can be a powerful tool for creating mood, adding production value, and smoothing over rough spots in corporate video. Resources like the Vimeo Music Store and iStockPhoto (which has even better pricing but is horrendous to search) are a great start for bringing sanity to the market and increasing the quality of corporate videos everywhere.