In our rich-media world, there are all kinds of ways to use music. These days, every website, podcast, or even PowerPoint presentation turns out that much better if it includes some music.

Where does the music for all these great applications come from? It seems as though the supply is limitless. Everywhere you turn there are new opportunities to hear and download all kinds of tracks.

But how much of that music can you feel safe legally using?

The royalty machine

The music industry is a very complicated machine with many players all vying for a piece of the musical money pie. A single piece of music may be tied to several revenue streams with many groups collecting a fee for its use. For this reason it can be very time-consuming and expensive to be able to gain the rights to use a musical composition in a commercial application.

Commercial music would be defined as the use of music in a public setting, or the use of music to aid in product or service promotions. When you purchase a song from Apple’s iTunes music store, for instance, your license covers personal listening use. Personal use is just that: for listening to. Personally. Adding a track to a podcast that's getting hundreds or thousands of hits is not personal use. If you do so, you're putting yourself on the hook for all kinds of fees and/or royalties.

There are several fees that are associated with commercial audio. All of these fees are mandatory if you are to use music commercially. The following rights/royalties fees must be purchased for every musical track:

• Mechanical rights
• Public performance royalties
• Synchronization & transcription rights
• Publishing rights
• Neighboring rights
• Master use rights

That single iTunes track could cost thousands of dollars for a simple use. In fact, popular music tracks have been known to cost in the million-dollar range for the use of one single song for a very limited time.

Helping simplify the purchasing of music for commercial applications has been made possible by stock music catalogs, where all of these fees, rights, and royalties can be purchased from a single entity. Some stock music libraries are called royalty-free where most of the rights, fees, and royalties are bought in a single 1-time purchase. Stock audio and royalty-free audio is not a new concept, however there have been some misconceptions into what Stock audio is, specifically in relation to royalty-free music.

Royalty-free Music

What is royalty-free music? This should be a simple concept; for example a royalty-free photo is a photo you can use for an indeterminate length of time at a single purchase price. This is the model of iStockphoto. Despite the fact that royalty-free music should be a simple concept, it is not — in fact most royalty-free music is subject to one or more royalties.

Try an Internet search for “royalty-free music” there will be no lack of results — but be warned; music purchased from the vast majority of royalty-free music sites do actually require royalties. In fact almost all royalty-free music sites have an FAQ with this question — What is royalty-free Music? They do this because performance royalties, and at times mechanical licenses, are not included in the cost of the track. Many royalty-free audio sites say that the music may be subject to performance royalties, or will require cue sheets to be filled (so artists can get their royalties), or that physical copies of the song can not be made (DVDs, toys, etc). If you are looking to purchase royalty-free audio you should be looking to see if their audio is truly royalty-free. For example if any of their artists belong to a performing rights organization(PRO) then their audio collection cannot be considered royalty-free, because performance royalties must be collected on that audio for public use of the music.

The iStockaudio standard audio collection is one of the only truly royalty-free collections in the world. That is the reason that we do not accept members of any performing rights organizations into our collection. It is important to iStockaudio that we offer a royalty-free audio collection that ensures our buyers they will never have to pay a royalty fee.

Some broadcasters are used to paying millions in performance royalty fees in the form of a yearly subscription. For these broadcasters it is not required to pay for each use since they pay annually. For them, purchasing from a collection that does not include performance royalties is a viable solution. But what about a small businesses phone hold music, a small restaurant's background music, a podcaster, or independent filmmaker? For many people it is not financially viable to be paying millions in performance royalties. The performance royalties on a music track’s single use could prove to be several times more expensive than the compositions original cost.

But I won't get caught

But, you're thinking to yourself, who's going to know? Who's going to find out? Why should I even worry about it? After all, no one has caught me yet.

Try this: type “ASCAP sues” into Google. The search will reveal hundreds of situations where (often unknowingly) a piece of music was used without paying performance royalties. American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) has gone as far as suing the Girl Scouts for singing campfire songs! The bottom line is – if you need music, and you do not want to pay re-occurring performance royalty fees, then iStockaudio is one of the very few safe choices for quality commercial audio.

Find out what the Top 5 digital licensing faux pas are and learn how to fix them.