So you're planning an online promo campaign for an e-commerce Web site and you're itching to use some theme music from a song that you can just barely remember from back in the '80s. You want to do things right and get permission, maybe pay a small royalty, but you just don't know where to turn.
Well, soon there may be an easy way to avoid stepping on someone else's digital music rights. (Yes, I know, information wants to be free and all, but you need to pay attention to digital rights. Just look at Napster.)
Now, Billboard.com (as in "yeah man, the No. 1 song on Billboard for eight weeks straight") and Broadjam.com are teaming up to create "a comprehensive online music search portal."
The project will offer entertainment and media professionals a single source for accessing, auditioning and licensing music of all types. Right now the sources appear to be all over the Web, at various sites.
The new operation will be called the Billboard SongSearch powered by Broadjam. Launch is scheduled for next winter. The site will integrate a lot of Billboard's music chart archive, which dates back to 1955.
Madison, Wis.- based Broadjam is a Web-based provider of software, tools and services for musicians and music industry executives. The company was founded by Roy Elkins, a music industry veteran, songwriter and keyboard player.
Billboard, of course, is the newsweekly magazine for the music, video and home entertainment industries. Billboard.com is operated by VNU eMedia, a division of Billboard parent VNU Business Media.
The new service will let music professionals and others search and retrieve information on repertoire authorized for inclusion in the service. The service also will provide links to existing music publisher Web sites and catalogs.
The idea here is to provide an answer to the need for a central source for copyright and music licensing information, according to Ken Schlager, vice president of business development for Billboard Music Group.
"The Billboard SongSearch will help facilitate music searches for media and entertainment professionals worldwide who need to acquire copyrighted works for a wide variety of commercial purposes, whether for film, television, advertising, or corporate productions," he said.
Billboard.com and Broadjam said they plan to forge partnerships with all of the major and independent music publishers to include their repertoire in the service. Additionally, independent musicians and songwriters will be able to upload their music to the site.
For Web site operators and Internet advertisers looking for a little theme music, the search options are very cool indeed, including beats per minute, so you can get, say, just the right pace that you're looking for.
Subscribers will have access to details on specific songs, including copyright ownership, publisher information and Billboard chart history. Other search options will include such things as genre, beats per minute, publisher, lyric content and similar artists.
So you could, for instance, find all the slow country and western songs that made the charts in 1979 containing the words "jail" and "blues."
The Billboard SongSearch powered by Broadjam would compete with ACE on the Web, the operation run by ASCAP - the American Society for Composers, Authors and Publishers, which has a database search function there.
ACE is a database of song titles licensed by ASCAP in the United States. For each title, you can find the names of the songwriters and the names, contact persons, addresses and, in most cases, phone numbers of publishers to contact if you want to use the work.
However, many songs are not licensed through ASCAP, and so are not in the database. Other clearance departments can be found at BMI (a performing rights organization that represents approximately 300,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers) and SESAC, (Society of
European Stage Authors and Composers).
"Content developers seeking to locate the rights for the perfect piece of music for their projects will find the Broadjam offering to be a useful service," said Steven Vonder Haar, digital media analyst at research and consulting firm Interactive Media Strategies in Arlington, Texas. "That could include both movie producers and commercial makers."
According to Vonder Haar, the approach provides "a good foundation that Broadjam could build from if it ever wanted to chase the opportunity of offering searchable music information for the mass market. Serving this market paves the way to creating a revenue stream that makes later expansion possible."
Initial subscribers to Billboard SongSearch will pay $49.95 per month. You can take it for a test drive at the demo site.
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
