And when I say free, I mean it costs nothing today and nothing tomorrow.
Royalties? No way, Jose!
I found this resource when I was in a jam for a background music track and had already sucked all the life I could out of Apple Loops and the Jingles found in iMovie (Hey, at least I am being honest…).
I am sure you haven’t been there, but the budget for this video was (drumroll please…): Zilch.
What’s a video editor to do?
This video was going to be distributed online through Facebook, on our website, in our streaming sermon videos and in our podcasts. So, I really couldn’t just grab a song from iTunes and go.
Enter DanoSongs.com.
With over 40 handmade instrumentals available and another dozen songs with vocals, I felt like I had hit the jackpot.
All of the songs were created by Dan-O himself and range in style from reggae to techno to acoustic rock. With titles like “Joker With Honey Lips”, I just couldn’t resist.
You might be thinking, there must be a catch; you are right, kind of: He requires that you give him attribution when you use his music (unless you make a donation, but our budgest was zilch). Understandable, but that posed another problem.
Say you want to use a song as a background track for a 30 second promotional spot. How would you credit him?
I found myself asking myself that very question. In fact, we used a white text over black matte lower third at the end of a few videos but it seemed tacky with such a short video. So, we contacted him directly and he allowed us to attribute him with 125 x 125 banner ads on a staff blog.
(We got the 125 x 125 ads from his Flickr account, which is available here).
You can contact him directly via Twitter if you would rather attribute through banner ads than directly in your video.
[Images from DanoSongs]
Kevin says
It’s great to see a CC business model like this popping up and being useful. Word.
Kevin
http://opensourcechurch.com
Blane Young says
Yeah, and with over a million downloads – people are clearly responding.
I think that the fastest way to spread a message (or music, etc.), is to make it freely available and DanoSongs.com is a great example of that!
Tara Nicole says
There is a new royalty free music library created specifically for church videos called missionalscore.com. It’s been an amazing resource! Only $99 for a year membership with unlimited downloads. Pretty affordable for most churches.