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old royalty free music

Tales

Tales

Member
Hello!

Sometimes I search for music, like "noir movie" music atm. You know there is free license thing like Lovecraft, I ask if there is some free old music where nobody have the licence. I search for "free royalty music" on the web and free is 200dollard for one song for some website... very "free"... I find this one time (I guess its really free for use) but its hard to find. http://www.openmusicarchive.org/browse_tag.php?tag=1920s
 
Slow Fingers

Slow Fingers

Member
Copyright expires 100 years from the composer's death. That makes pretty much all classical music in the public domain. But you have to make the difference between that and the MECHANICAL AND PERFORMANCE RIGHTS, which has no relation.
Say, ripping Betthoveen's 5th Symphony is ok, but whose recording is it? Not Beethoveen for sure! So the performing orchestra has rights over the recording (which you probably CANT use, even if it's a public domain piece), but not the actual composition.
You'll have to find something that's free to grab in both department, otherwise some AI will eventually pick it up and flag it.
And yeah, Royalties-Free dont mean "free", it means you pay the same if you sell 2 copies of your thing than if you sell 10 000 000 of it.

EDIT: That also means lots of early bluesman stuff from the 20s (like |Robert Johnson) will very soon have all their stuff available up for grabs in some cases, because they are the original recordings.
 
kburkhart84

kburkhart84

Firehammer Games
Kevin MacLeod has done some interpretations of some classical music. What Slow Fingers is saying is directly stated on the license Kevin's website in fact. It specifically states that while the composition itself is public domain, these interpretations are not. It basically means that you are allowed to use the actual song(the notes, melodies, chords, etc...), but if someone makes a modern interpretation(whether a direct rendering or a remake or similar), you can't actually use that. You could easily take the sheet music and make a MIDI out of it for your own usage, doing your own modifications as you wish.
 
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