License music for video

What this is about

A piece of recorded music carries two separate layers of rights: the composition and the specific recording. A stock library licence normally bundles both for defined uses, which is exactly why the definition matters — territory, duration, media, whether paid advertising is included, whether the client or the agency is the licensee. In Germany, collecting society obligations can apply on top depending on how and where the film is used. None of this is complicated, but all of it has to be decided before the edit, because a temp track that survives three review rounds becomes emotionally impossible to replace.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• Licence scope is the whole product: territory, term, media, paid promotion, and who is named as licensee
• A track that is free for organic social is often not free the moment money is put behind the post
• The licensee should be the party that owns the film long-term, usually the client, not your agency account
• Keep the licence certificate and the invoice with the project files; a platform dispute is resolved by documents, not memory
• Choose the temp track from the library you can actually license, or the temp track becomes the final track by default

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Clarify the intended use before searching for music: which countries, how long, which channels, and whether the film will ever run as paid advertising or in a cinema.
2. Pick the source that fits that use. Subscription libraries suit ongoing content, single-track licences suit flagship films, and a composed score suits campaigns that need something nobody else has.
3. Search with the temp track discipline in mind: only audition tracks you could actually buy under the agreed scope, so the version everyone falls for is the version you can keep.
4. Read what the licence excludes rather than what it promises. Exclusions around broadcast, paid media, political content and resale are where surprises live.
5. Register the correct licensee. If the client owns the film, the licence should be in the client's name, otherwise the rights end when your subscription does.
6. Check whether collecting society obligations apply for the intended use in your market, and agree who handles the registration and the cost before the film is published.
7. Download and archive the licence certificate, the invoice, the track ID and the purchase date alongside the project. Store them where a colleague could find them in two years.
8. If a claim appears after publication, respond with the certificate rather than by taking the film down. Most automated claims are resolved by supplying the licence reference.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Falling in love with a temp track from a chart record and discovering the price in round three
• Licensing in the agency's name and handing the client a film whose music expires without warning
• Assuming a subscription covers paid advertising because it covered the organic post
• Losing the licence certificate and having to buy the same track twice to prove it

With TillyGen

Because the intended channels and territories are already recorded in the TillyGen brief, the music search starts from a defined licence scope instead of ending in a late question about whether paid promotion was included.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.