We are revisiting the idea of creating royalty free music. This music can be used by anyone from high school teachers to indie film makers. What makes it royalty free? As you may know, copyrights are complicated. For example, you can give away the rights to a performance, but the actual music score may have rights attached to it. You can't record the song of another artist, and then claim you own it.

When we looked at this topic about eight years ago, we thought the Magnatune system was the way to go (disclaimer: we release our recordings on Magnatune). On Magnatune, you keep all the rights to your "CD" as we used to call an album, but they distribute it. You get half, they get half. Half is way more than I got from the big labels, and Magnatune is a great label. We still OWN all of our tracks. AS a filmmaker, you could (and still can) license the tracks for really dirt cheap, and, again, the creator got a dollar or so, depending. We figured, no one is going to balk at a few dollars for a sound track that would cost thousands to produce. We figured wrong. People did use the license feature, but not in the waves that we expected.

Well, as it turns out, people have this "must be free" attitude, which in a way is a driving force of the internet--no one wanted to pay the artists, even though they themselves are artists. So rather than rant about how ridiculous this is, we are starting a different model, and we can see that others are doing the same thing.

The new model is to just give it all away, free, and raise the money to produce it through Kickstarter or something similar. You can see our Kickstarter project here. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/301451197/bach-brandenburg-concertos-the-great-works-project

Once it is done, ppl can use the soundtrack. It may not be what you are looking for, but it will be free :) You'll notice that the music is old, like really old. That way, it is solidly in the public domain. Composers of course can create new scores and using for example Creative Commons we can record newer music as well. We have some new music projects in the works right now.