While we can of course use our own music for presenting slideshows, it becomes an issue when we are using them for commercical purposes. If you use a video capture tool to record your slideshow as a movie, then music licensing is going to rear its ugly head. We don’t like when someone steals our image, and the music companies are the same about their music collections. One way around this is to find somewhere that you can license music. One place is Pump Audio. You can browse their fairly extensive collection and get music that you probably won’t hear anywhere else. As an example of prices, I did a search on for a little ambient track to suit using either for website background or web video. Using their Flash based Soundtrack engine, I was able to find a short piece I liked very quickly. I then had a look at some pricing options.
- Web Video/Animation: Stream only €25 per video in perpetuity
- Web Video/Animation: Stream + Download €35 per video in perpetuity
- Web Background: €40 per year
- Podcast (Audio only): €35 in perpetutiy
Now obviously there are more terms to the licenses, but that’s just to give you an idea of what’s there. Hopefully some of you will find this of some use!
