Hey, I'm currently in the early stages of making my game and I'm looking into getting music for it. How do I go about getting the rights to use music in a commercial project, or getting music made specifically for it?
I was wondering if anyone could offer me any advice or their personal experiences in this area?
Any help would be greatly appreciated, Thanks!
To add music in your game, there are several options you can choose from:
Get the license for professional music. In this case you would need to pay to use music that is already made, but its cheaper. You can find a lot of creators on sites like Youtube, where they post a sample of their work, and instructions on how to get a license. It might help if you make a search and include words like “theme” or “background music”.
Pay someone to make a track for you. For this, you would need to search on the right website (including on this one) for people that make music. Assuming this works similar to making visual arts, you would pay them a fee, explain what kind of track you are looking for, and that person would make a track for you. This is usually more expensive, but results in unique tracks for you game.
Search online for tracks with an open license, that you can use on commercial projects without limitations. My personal favourite is FreeSound, but keep in mind each track has its own license, not everything is allowed for commercial use.
Whichever option you use has its own ups and downs. If budget is tight, you can always experiment making your own music, which means you can use it on multiple projects without limitations or paying anyone.
That depends on you. Most indie artists would usually go for “Pay half now, and the other half when the job is done”. If you are looking for something more professional, you can make a contract yourself. I have little experience with contracts, so not sure how much I can help, but the minimum one would need is a non-disclosure agreement.
This is because when asking someone to work for your project, they will learn information about your project that is not for the public (yet), and you want to make sure information is not leaked.
You'd be okay just making a simple contract, basically so long as you have something in writing and both parties agree to it you should be okay and not need to worry.
Here are some things to read that should give you a pretty good idea of how to set up a simple contract geared towards music/audio:
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132537/game_audio_contracts.php -contract structure and pointers
https://vi-control.net/community/threads/how-do-you-make-a-contract-for-music-in-video-games.90291/ -Discussion and pointers
https://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/2r4x1t/signing_my_first_contract_as_a_composer_for_a/ Basically the same as the last two.
Hope this helped!
