Rumblefish Offering Music Licensing for Personal Videos

YouTube—and, let’s face it, the Internet as a whole—is a barren copyright battleground. Co-opting licensed material for personal use is a practice battled by media giants and artists alike. YouTube is the current D-Day of the copyright war, with hundreds of videos broadcasting licensed material or taking licensed music to provide soundtrack to everything from wedding videos to the cutest cat in all the land. Media licensing company Rumblefish is tossing its weight in by offering a new service, called Friendly Music, that allows users to purchase licenses to music titles for personal use.

Just $1.99 purchases personal rights to one of over 35,000 tracks that can then be edited to your heart’s content. The New York Times reports that as of yet, none of those tracks are from big-name music labels. (We’ve seen many a video removed by Warner Music Group.) The licenses are only good for personal videos; another license is required to use music in a commercial project.

YouTube owners Google collaborated with Rumblefish on offering the service—one that has not really been an option for personal filmmakers who can usually find music they want to use through less salient means. A $1 billion court case against Google was thrown out last week due to the internet giant’s policy of removing licensed content as soon as it is alerted to its presence.

Users can search Friendly Music by mood and genre and can be sorted into songs with vocals and songs without. Rumblefish is reportedly in talks to add more tracks to the offering, including what they call “named artists.”

Check out a pretty entertaining promo video for the service below: