Friday, November 26, 2010

Music rights, various music licensing terms

As someone who works in the music licensing business, I know that there are a lot of terms and jargon in music licensing and music copyright issues that many music users don't understand as they simply don't have that background and inside knowledge. In this article I'll try to explain what the different "Rights" in music are and what each of the terms mean.


Sync Rights: Means that you get the legal right to synchronize the music with images. In other words, to mix the music into a film or other audio-visual project.

Mechanical Rights: Means that you get the rights to manufacture physical items (such as DVD film, audio-CD) that contains the music, where the music is used as part of a film / game / presentation / project that includes the music.

Performance Rights: Means that you get the rights to broadcast the music and play it in public. Please take note that for the most part, this right is not included with royalty-free music or stock music, because most stock music and royalty-free music available today was composed by composers who are members of Performance Rights Organizations (PRO's). That means that anybody who performs that music in public or broadcasts it on TV/Radio need a license from their country's Performance Rights Organization. Of course, most broadcasters already have this license. Broadcasting corporations pay an annual fee to the PRO's. So they can broadcast the music as much as they want, and it doesn't cost them anything extra. 

Moral Rights means the composer's right to deny/reject having his music used in a project that he doesn't like. For example, advertising for alcohol, or racist projects, or whatever that particular music composer may be strongly against. In the world of stock music / royalty-free music, usually the composer has to sign away his moral rights, because it's not practical to discuss every project done by every client who buys a stock music track from every stock music site that distributes his music.

If you're interested in learning more about the differences between various types of royalty-free music and "just how royalty-free is this royalty-free music" you may want to read this article at Shockwave-Sound.com which describes the differences between different "grades" of being royalty free.

Thursday, November 25, 2010

The entire BBC sound effects library now for sale through 1SoundFX.com

We at Lynne Publishing are very happy to announce that our Sound Effects download site 1SoundFX.com now is the proud online distributor of the entire BBC Sound Effects library sporting 30,000 sounds from the BBC. Combined with many other libraries now available through 1SoundFX.com the total number of sounds now on offer is 112,221 sounds (as of November 2010) - with thousands more lined up to be added over the next few weeks. We would like to to thank Paul Virostek and Nery Bauer who both helped us immensely with the logistics of adding and cataloguing over a hundred thousand sound files. Together we're building the best Sound effects site on the web!

Monday, November 22, 2010

Guitars galore at Shockwave-Sound.com this week

Jeremy Sherman
Jeremy Sherman is an exceptionally talented guitarist and composer who is entirely self taught, and is one of the senior composer/producers here at Lynne Publishing. His music is always guitar based, as Jeremy likes to write and perform on a multitude of stringed instruments including the acoustic guitar, dobro, banjo, various electric guitars, basses and mandolins.

His music always feels organic, acoustic and human, whether it's latin music such as Andean Nights or Cantina, whether it's raw, southern blues-rock like in Shuffle Off , or it could be funny and upbeat hoe-down, country dance like in Take Your Partners or more contemporary country rock or country music such as Country Mile, Jeremy always delivers exquisite melodies and a feelgood, warm, homely sound.

We've been lucky enough to add 17 brand new tracks by Jeremy this week. As Jeremy is one of our signed-on composer/producers, we always keep his music totally exclusive to Shockwave-Sound.com for a minimum of one year before that music becomes available anywhere else.

If you are producing commercials, radio spots, fishing, hiking or outdoors videos or other projects that need an earthly, somewhat folky and wholesome feel, you really should check out the music of Jeremy Sherman. We're lucky to have him as part of our team.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

This week's activities at Shockwave-Sound.com... So far

This week, as indeed every week, we're busy adding new music releases to the ever growing stock music / buyout music catalog at Shockwave-Sound.com. There was a period from last Friday when we sent out our most recent new music newsletter when we didn't add any new music for about 3 days - that's partly because we don't like to add any new music at the exact time we're sending out the newsletter because it may cause some confusion as to which music tracks have been mentioned in a newsletter, and which haven't. And partly because I myself was working on a new music composition that I was producing here in my home studio so I wanted to keep concentrating on that for a couple of days and get that new track completed without being sidetracked.

The new track that I (Bjorn Lynne) composed is called Digital Concepts and it's what I would consider "mainstream electronic" music, in as much as it's based on a techno / dance beat, but it's neither hard, nasty or too mechanical. It's a rather more "friendly" type of techno music that I feel goes well with multimedia productions. It also features a little bit of guitar and piano to make it more "pop" like and not so stuck in the techno genre.

John Radford
Today we have also added 6 new tracks by John Radford, a composer from the UK who makes various types of ambient, chill, pop and electronica genres. He has been working with us for several years and his latest tracks combine atmospheric pop / contemporary with ambient and film styles. Check out some of his latest works, including Soul Searching and Bridge And Tunnel. I think his music is great, it's deep and soulful without being difficult. These are slightly melancholic and thoughtful tracks that can fit well as background music in films, drama, commercials and many other project.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Redwood National Park Forest set to music

Redwood National Park
There's something about the sound of a plucked acoustic guitar that makes us think about the forest, the outdoors, camping, hiking, fishing and being close to nature. So, it's perhaps not without reason that composer and guitarist Bjørn Lynne chose high definition video footage from California's Redwood National Park Forest when he put together the video for his latest track, "Outback Ramble".

In this track, 4 layers of steel stringed acoustic guitars - some gently strummed, others plucked, to great this earthy and melodic music track. Also featured is a Didgeridoo which is an instrument that makes it sound "aboriginal" or "indigenous", just something that makes it feel like it comes out of the earth itself. The track is a quite simple, yet inspiring and inviting. We think it goes well with video productions about hobby & leisure. Check out the music and video at YouTube by following this link. Hope you'll enjoy it.

General MIDI files live on

The General MIDI file format was created in the late 1980's by Roland (correct me if I'm wrong here) and it was essentially a way for music files to be made "interchangeable" between different music playback equipment. By agreeing that certain instruments / sounds were located at certain "slots" in the various keyboards and synthesizers around the world, it was made possible for a composer to have his music played back by somebody with different equipment, and still have the music sound, more or less, the same on that other equipment.

Now almost 30 years later, digital audio is all the rave and the General MIDI file format seems to be going out of fashion, but it's not dead yet. Some platforms still use the MIDI format and MIDI files, for example hand held game systems and mobile phones. If you are developing a game for mobile phones or other hand held game system, you may require MIDI music that can be legally downloaded and used within your game. The place to get that would be at the MIDI music area of the royalty-free music licensing site Shockwave-Sound.com. Here you can legally license and download MIDI music files that you can implement into your own media projects, such as games, videos, websites and more.

We just added 16 new MIDI tracks today, by Piotr "Jazzcat" Pacyna. These are actually more than just regular MIDI files, because in addition to the normal General MIDI file, you also get specially tweaked versions of the same MIDI music that's made to play back perfectly on various formats, including Alcatel / LG / Sagem phones and systems, MMF files, OTT files, Siemens phones, Sony Ericsson phones, SP-MIDI (that's the "regular" MIDI file) and SPF midi. All these different files and versions come included with any purchase of the Mobile phone MIDI music by Piotr "Jazzcat" Pacyna from Shockwave-Sound.com.

The Lynne Publishing Blog is launched


Hello world! In this blog we tend to write about the activities of the music and sound effects publishing people at Lynne Publishing AS.

Lynne Publishing is a label for publishing music, sound effects and related services. We deal with music licensing for media, music composing services, sound design, sound effects recording and engineer and publishing of various related media.

We have several outlets on the internet, including our Royalty-Free Music website www.Shockwave-Sound.com, our Sound Effect Download site www.1SoundFX.com , our site for Workout and Exercise music, www.WorkoutMusicSeries.com and more.

We intend to try our best to update this blog quite often. Posts will be short and to the point, often with links referring to activities we have carried out on one of our other websites.