I spoke with one of our musicians on the phone this week who asked a great question: “What tracks are making sales on your website right now?”.  Here are some royalty-free production music tracks that have enjoyed sales in recent months:

Colin Willsher

“Believe”

Jon Cooper

“Electrotek”

Shockwave-Sound

“Fade To Black”

Sonic Imagery

“World of Hope”
Mike Hines
“Gun Rack Serenade”

The Sound Room (New Zealand)

“Inspiration”

We love our musician community and are proud to have such amazing talent contributing music to our website. Thanks for letting us sell your music!

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Mike Bielenberg is a professional musician and co-founder of http://www.musicrevolution.com, a production music marketplace where media producers and business owners can license high-quality, affordable music from a online community of musicians.

New York-based sound designer Bill Milbrodt led a 22-person team to build musical instruments created with car parts from the Ford Focus. Composer Craig Richey then wrote a score to which was performed for this commercial by these musicians who mastered the music in just two rehearsals. Amazing.

Here’s the specific list of instruments created by Milbrodt’s team:

-Clutch Guitar (ornamented with a backdrop from inside a door),

-Spike Fiddle made from a rear suspension mount and a shock absorber,

-Ford Fender Bass made from fenders and a pillar/roof support,

-Shockbone made primarily from shock absorber parts,

-Window Frame Harp,

-Opera Window Violin,

-Dijeruba which works both as a dijeridu type of instrument and a primitive sort of tuba.

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Mike Bielenberg is a professional musician and co-founder of http://www.musicrevolution.com, a production music marketplace where media producers and business owners can license high-quality, affordable music from a online community of musicians.

There’s a great book by Julie Cameron called The Artists Way that teaches habits to unclog your creative process and get in touch with your “inner creative child”. You may be thinking, “That sounds great for a weekend getaway in the mountains, but my client is expecting a great pop song by Thursday. What do I do?”

One of the techniques taught in the book is called “morning pages” where you write stream-of-consciousness thoughts in a notebook WITHOUT allowing the pencil to stop.  I repeat: WITHOUT allowing the pencil to stop. I typically force myself to fill three notebook pages (single-spaced, one side only) before I even judge what’s happening.

That in itself can be really, really difficult at first until you review your pages and realize that at least one or two word phrases within your written rant is actually engaging and possesses its own innate rhythm.

For example, while scribbling along (possibly with a sense of anxiety) you may read back and find that you wrote: “Please make this song really, really strong.” Guess what? That phrase is actually kind of musical. And you just may have written a place-holder lyric for your chorus. At least you’ve got something to hang your hat on.

With commission projects it helps me to take a moment before writing and think of a memory in my life that makes me feel the emotion my client wants to evoke with the track. If it’s joy, I imagine my first child being born. If it’s hubris, I imagine the day I got my driver’s license.

This one creative technique has led me to places I never imagined, like being the lead singer in an alt rock band that cut an EP at a major Atlanta studio and being known around Atlanta as a “lyrics guy”. Which is hilarious because I still basically see myself as a piano player.

As a production music library we are seeing more and more requests for tracks with vocals. And as a consumer of popular culture I am seeing more and more tracks in movies and commercials that are vocal pop songs from independent artists who are, let’s be honest here, no more talented than you or me. I attribute musical career success more to a person’s ability to take risks than any inherent talent they possess. There’s a biblical parable in there somewhere about using the talents you’ve been given, but that’s another blog.

Start exercising those untapped creative muscles and maybe your stock music tracks will expand in a whole new directions!

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Mike Bielenberg is a professional musician and co-founder of http://www.musicrevolution.com, a production music marketplace where media producers and business owners can license high-quality, affordable music from a online community of musicians.

From a UK-based film production company: “I’m looking for some unknown, unsigned British rock bands. I’m ideally trying to keep this British, so I would prefer a home grown band if possible.
I’m looking for uplifting, Oasis-sounding, or borderline cheesy 80’s rock, along the Beverly Hills Cop/Top Gun lines.”

If you have a track on MusicRevolution that fits this description, please click on the link below to the forum thread and post a reply with a link to your track (see instructions below for creating a track link). We have asked this requester to check this thread frequently:

http://tinyurl.com/47ch349

If you wish to create or submit a new track for this project, please include “Track Request 43” in the description box and we’ll approve it as quickly as possible.

-To receive these track requests via Twitter please follow us at @musicrevolutio

-To receive these track requests via Facebook, please “like” http://www.facebook.com/MusicRevolution12345

-To submit your own request for music please go to https://www.musicrevolution.com/suggest_music/

Instructions for creating a link to Your MusicRevolution track:

1. Log into www.musicrevolution.com
2. Find your track on our search page
3. Click on the track title. You should be taken to a search results page displaying only that track.
4. Copy the URL
5. Click on the forum thread URL
6. Go the bottom where it says “Write comment”
7. Paste in your link
8. Describe your track.Thanks for letting us sell your music!

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Mike Bielenberg is a professional musician and co-founder of http://www.musicrevolution.com, a production music marketplace where media producers and business owners can license high-quality, affordable music from a online community of musicians.

This New York Times article explains how the producers of Oscar-nominated The Kings Speech got a world-class soundtrack virtually free of charge – by selling the rights to the score before was even created.

Click here to read “A New Model for Film Music”

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Mike Bielenberg is a professional musician and co-founder of http://www.musicrevolution.com, a production music marketplace where media producers and business owners can license high-quality, affordable music from a online community of musicians.

From an Atlanta-based audio post company: “Do you have a library piece that is in the spirit of Black Eyed Peas “I’ve got a feeling”? If not something hip and fun that we can license for a corporate meeting.”

If you have a track on MusicRevolution that fits this description, please click on the link below to the forum thread and post a reply with a link to your track (see instructions below for creating a track link). We have asked this requester to check this thread frequently:

http://tinyurl.com/4hjbufo

If you wish to create or submit a new track for this project, please include “Track Request 42” in the description box and we’ll approve it as quickly as possible.

-To receive these track requests via Twitter please follow us at @musicrevolutio

-To receive these track requests via Facebook, please “like” http://www.facebook.com/MusicRevolution12345

-To submit your own request for music please go to https://www.musicrevolution.com/suggest_music/

Instructions for creating a link to Your MusicRevolution track:

1. Log into www.musicrevolution.com
2. Find your track on our search page [URL]
3. Click on the track title. You should be taken to a search results page displaying only that track.
4. Copy the URL
5. Click on the forum thread URL
6. Go the bottom where it says “Write comment”
7. Paste in your link
8. Describe your track.Thanks for letting us sell your music!

___________________________________________________

Mike Bielenberg is a professional musician and co-founder of http://www.musicrevolution.com, a production music marketplace where media producers and business owners can license high-quality, affordable music from a online community of musicians.

A direct performance license is when the publisher of a song and a business that wishes to use that song decide to work directly together instead of going through a performing rights society like ASCAP or BMI. There are several scenarios where this makes the most sense for everyone:

1) The end user is unable to pay the PRO’s full rate and the publisher is fine with what the user IS willing to pay.

2) The PRO’s billing cycle is too long or simply not set up to process one-on-one transactions.

3) The end user is purchasing multiple licenses (mechanical, synchronization, etc) and the publisher wishes to provide a higher level of service than just, “You are publicly performing our songs. Pay this bill.”

For most production music libraries, all three of these scenarios come into play on a daily basis.

The simple fact is that most PRO’s are only set up to protect and serve big-name artists who are household names. It’s difficult enough for PROs to police every bar in their territory to ensure that Usher’s latest single is not being publicly performed without a license. You can imagine the diminished resources that are left over to protect an unknown composer with an instrumental techno track being used for a YouTube video.

So why did BMI object to DMX using this loophole to establish direct performance licenses with enough major music publishers to put quality popular music in hundreds of retail businesses around the the US?

It’s that great line from the Tom Cruise film Vanilla Sky: “What the answer to 99 out of 100 questions – money.” More next time on direct performance licenses, this landmark case, and what it means to the royalty-free stock music community.

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Mike Bielenberg is a professional musician and co-founder of http://www.musicrevolution.com, a production music marketplace where media producers and business owners can license high-quality, affordable music from a online community of musicians.

“Thinking music” is one of the most frequently used aesthetics in broadcast advertising. Spots that employ this approach normally open with an onscreen actor asking, “Have you ever thought about….”.

A pioneer in this style of music was certainly composer Thomas Newman, who assembled exotic configurations of percolating mallet percussion instruments to create his score for the Academy-Award winning film American Beauty.

MusicRevolution is lucky enough to have some great “thinking music” as well. Check out these 15 production music tracks I recently pulled for a client music search. All these tracks essentially say, “Feel like learning something new today?”(scroll down until you see a playlist on the left):

https://www.musicrevolution.com/?binid=79

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Mike Bielenberg is a professional musician and co-founder of http://www.musicrevolution.com, a production music marketplace where media producers and business owners can license high-quality, affordable music from a online community of musicians.

Occasionally musicians will experience difficulty getting our website to accept the way their tracks are formatted. Here are things you should know before uploading to make the process go smoother:

1) For every track you submit, you’ll need both a WAV version (16 bit, 44kHz) and an MP3 version (192 kbps Constant Bit Rate). Different customers need different formats and we like to offer both.

2) Ensure the MP3s are set to Constant Bit Rate and not Variable Bit Rate. Our system will kick back Variable Bit Rate.

3) Before I do an upload I always “wash” every track through a WAV conversion stage (I use SoundConverter for Mac) and an MP3 conversion stage (I use Switch for Mac) regardless of how confident I am in the track’s compatibility. A quick batch conversion through software you know will work every time is always better than rolling the dice with a new server configuration and fixing problems after the fact. For me, “washing” my tracks is a process that takes just a few minutes and is completely automated. It’s a great chance to grab a cup of coffee.

As always, thanks for letting us sell your music!

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Mike Bielenberg is a professional musician and co-founder of http://www.musicrevolution.com, a production music marketplace where media producers and business owners can license high-quality, affordable music from a online community of musicians.

The popular dating website www.plentyoffish.com licensed this great song by Amos Transparent, a six-piece group out of Canada, to tell this very touching split-screen story:

“Find Your Other Half”

The song is called “After All That It’s Come To This” . Here’s the full length version. Enjoy!

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Mike Bielenberg is a professional musician and co-founder of http://www.musicrevolution.com, a production music marketplace where media producers and business owners can license high-quality, affordable music from a online community of musicians.