Vimeo’s New Music Service

Philip: This is simply brilliant. The selection on music is outstanding, the quality is, for the most part, too. The pricing is completely affordable ranging from free with creative commons, to a couple of dollars for personal use to around $100 for a commercial license. Just from my browsing of the store I found some brilliant tracks which I have saved for potential future use. BRILLIANT service!

Licensing music has always been such a huge headache. Sites like this and the excellent but nowhere near big enough withetiiquette.com are much needed. Spend time searching through the library, see what is out there as much can make or break your work.

The vimeo/ filmmaking community has needed this. Nice one guys!!

Vimeo Has Done it Again!

By Preston Kanak

As many people know, I am in love with vimeo — for it’s quality of content and for it’s community. Unlike other platforms, constructive criticism rules all else. There are way less trolls and way less negativity as a whole!

The Collection

I have spent a little bit of time browsing through the collection, and unlike most music libraries, this one doesn’t completely suck! Within minutes, I found some great tunes. (Don’t get me wrong — there are still some pretty bad songs but overall I am happy).

Up until the release of the Vimeo music store, I have been using Sonicfire Pro 5 for most of my projects and will still continue to use it because of it’s flexibility and ability to manipulate songs right at the instrument level. You are able to separate instruments and vocals and create moods within songs — and create your own ‘hit’ points to match your edit. It’s integration with FCP7 is also flawless (also compatible with Premiere, After Effects, Pinnacle Studio… and soon FCPx).

One of the features that I love about the Vimeo music store is the ability to favorite tracks for future use. When you find a song you like, simply click the star beside it and it saves your selection to ‘My Saved Tracks’. Vimeo has also integrated a Recommended section. I am not sure how Vimeo generates these tracks — whether it is based off of music you have selected from your uploaded videos or the most popular generated by users but I was able to find a few tracks right away by simply visiting this section.

Use of Music

Using copyrighted music for personal use is a hot topic for many people. If you use copyrighted music in your videos, you have to credit the musician. In a perfect world, you should contact the musician and ask permission — even for a personal project. I really like what Vimeo has done to address this issue — by integrating it’s own music service.

Press Release from Vimeo

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.

Introducing Vimeo Music Store!

Vimeo Music Store is your one-stop-shop for finding, discovering and licensing high quality music for your videos. We’ve built a simple and intuitive interface for you to easily search for music using a variety of different music criteria, and then purchase and/or download the tracks you want. Search mood, genre, tempo, themes, instrumentations and then use the advanced search to whittle down the results even further.

As of now, Music Store offers over 45,000 curated tracks with a three different license options for you to choose from. Here’s the skinny:

Creative Commons-licensed music is curated and provided by Free Music Archive, one of the most-respected curators of Creative Commons-licensed music. There are many different Creative Commons licenses available, so make sure to learn more about Creative Commons and how to use them in our FAQ.

Paid music tracks are provided by Audiosocket, a music and media company that curates its content to deliver up-and-coming talent to the marketplace. Audiosocket’s catalog includes over 33,000 songs from more than 1900 emerging bands, composers and record labels from around the world. Audiosocket’s catalog offers both personal, non-commercial licenses for $1.99 per track and commercial licenses for $98 per track.

As a a token of our appreciation, we’re offering all Plus and PRO members one FREE, personal license track (a $1.99 value). This offer is only available for one week starting today, so make sure to head over to Music Store and cash in!

We’re very excited about this first phase of Vimeo Music Store and we hope you like it. Look for more features, more partners and more options for bands and musicians in the future!

Love,
Vimeo

Future Improvements

I am excited that Vimeo has included full length previews but would love if the ability to skim was built in as well. One of my biggest complaints about the current functionality is the time it takes to preview a song. There is no wait time for loading times but having to wait (on average a minute per song) to get an accurate assessment of a song is time consuming. It is better than a lot of other music sites that just preview a section of a song but the ability to skim would be amazing!

Recommendations

Like almost everything, the quality of music always comes down to taste. Personally, I think it is worth the time — and the rates are also great. Props Vimeo, you rock!

 

11 comments

  1. The legality of digital rights is in dire need of refreshing… the laws are dated, so it makes life very difficult for online video.

    This will help quite a bit, but I’d love to see the likes of iTunes, Amazon or Spotify get into personal/commercial licencing.

  2. I completely agree that this new service Vimeo has created is wonderful and will hopefully help filmmakers out there find and use music without violating musician’s copyrights to their music.

    However, I do take issue with the author’s statement: “However, as most of you know — that is near impossible in many cases.” I have not found this to be the case. My experience is that roughly half of the musicians I contact and ask permission to use their music in my personal projects, not only respond positively but are often thrilled to have their music used. Further, many of them thank me for asking.

    It’s so easy these days to lookup a musician on facebook, find the one or two emails on their Info page, and fire off an email briefly describing the project and asking for their permission to use their music.

  3. 20,000 pieces of license free & free to download music just on VimeoMusic alone … alongside **very** cheap licenses for quite liberal commercial use of almost 30,000 more songs.

    My music production studio closed down last year after a decade (evolution of the local ad/pop/film industry, no big deal) and quite frankly it makes more sense buying bottom dollar library crap for our sync work than waste time scoring, recording and mixing anything myself. A few painless edits, slap a hefty surcharge on top for music direction … the client never gives a toss as long as it sounds a bit like Moby / Hans Zimmer / Rob Dougan / Requiem For A Dream.

    And that’s the way it goes. Going. Gone.

  4. A lot of people making videos for personal use have a rough time finding music. Some of it is the cost, some of it is the licensing. This is very simple, and most people will not be intimidated by the UI. I think this was a damn smart move on Vimeo’s part.

    The thing I loved about Vimeo when it started was that the skill level of people using it seemed to be somewhat more professional than the majority of YouTube. This is just another tool to help there community grow in size and skill.

  5. Couldn’t find a way to contact you, but if you’re interested in fixing your site so the there isn’t a big gap between the bottom of the article, and the beginning of the comment section, try this:

    In style css, add these 3 things the indicated blocks:
    #pbsidebar -> float: right;
    .responsebox -> float: left
    #respond -> clear: left;

    In your theme’s page.php and single.php HTML, remove “span-p-100″ from the two following divs and replace them with span-p-66:
    (1) the div that holds the comments and (2) the div with id=”respond”. You can probably find these divs easier if you Ctrl+F search “span-p-100 first last responsebox”.

    1. thanks but the reason you have it is the numbers of ads is constant and the length of posts can be short like this. my whole site is being redesigned. I hope it goes live soon. my email is at the bottom of the page!

  6. Phillip, I just came across this blog post today. First off, thanks for the kind words. My name is Brent. I’m the CEO of Audiosocket. We’re Vimeo’s partner in the music store that allows for the limited commercial and “personal” video licenses. It has been an honor to work with Vimeo and all of the filmmakers that use the platform.

    I saw your comment regarding the “scrubber bar” that allows the filmmaker to more quickly scan a track. Vimeo is aware that the community is look for this feature and I know they intend to add it in the future. I look forward to that release and know it will be a major asset for those who are scanning through tons of tracks.

    Hope this note finds you doing great. If I can aid your efforts in anyway don’t hesitate to reach out.

    Cheers
    Brent

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