Back in April, one of my favorite music licensing sites announced they’d be offering a membership option for filmmakers. As someone who licenses from Musicbed constantly, for wedding films and for YouTube videos, the idea of getting at their catalogue while spending less money was very intriguing.
It’s here now, and the pricing is genuinely impressive. They also launched a service called SyncID, which makes dealing with YouTube’s Content ID easy. I never thought I’d say that sentence.
Here’s the Musicbed membership page. That’s a referral link, so it does help me out if you sign up through it.
Background
Musicbed has always been the highly curated end of the music licensing world. The catalogue is smaller than the all-you-can-eat libraries and the artists on it are actual artists. The trade-off was always price: you licensed one track at a time, and a single track for a wedding film was not cheap.
Membership flips that to a subscription.
Pricing
One note before the numbers: this video is from 2018 and every price below is what Musicbed charged then. Their tiers and pricing have almost certainly moved since. Use the numbers to understand how the structure works, then check the current page for what it actually costs today.
The monthly pricing is tiered by what you’re using the music for and how big your audience is.
YouTube and social. If you’re making videos for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo, any of that, unlimited licensing started at $9.99 a month, or $99.99 if you prepaid for the year. The tier is set by your YouTube subscriber count: 0 to 5,000 paid the $9.99, 5,001 to 10,000 moved up to $19.99, and it climbed from there. Even at half a million to a million subscribers the ceiling was $59.99 a month, dropping to $39.99 if you prepaid.
Wedding filmmakers. This is the one that got me. Unlimited licensing for wedding films was $79.99 a month, or $59.99 prepaid annually. For roughly ten dollars more than the cost of licensing a single track, you could license unlimited music for your films. That is a huge change if you’re delivering a wedding film every weekend.
Commercial. Started at $99.99 a month, or $89.99 prepaid. I have friends who shoot commercial work who were going to be shocked by that.
The site lets you plug in your own numbers, which is a lot clearer than me listing tiers at you.
SyncID And Content ID
Here’s the problem this solves. I upload a video with music I have properly licensed, and YouTube’s Content ID flags it anyway, says I don’t have the rights, and slaps ads on it. Now someone else is making money off my video. And if I want to turn ads off, say because it’s a wedding film and I don’t want the couple watching commercials over their own vows, I can’t.
Every song you license with a membership comes with a code called a SyncID. There are two ways it works.
If you have a YouTube creator membership, you link your YouTube account to your Musicbed account. Upload a video, get the claim, and SyncID goes to work in the background to remove it, usually within minutes. You get an email saying it’s cleared.
If you have a different membership, a wedding filmmaking one like mine, you cannot link the channel directly. Instead every song comes with a SyncID code you can paste into your video description, or request separately. When the claim lands, you select “I have a license” and paste the code in as your explanation. Either way the claim should come off within an hour.
One genuinely useful side effect: because the code comes with the license, if you’re delivering a wedding or corporate video and the client wants it on their own channel, you can hand them the SyncID and they can clear their own claims with it.
Worth It?
Between the membership pricing and SyncID, as both a wedding filmmaker and a YouTuber, I’m genuinely excited about this. The membership page is here, and yes, that’s a referral link.
If you want to hear what Musicbed tracks actually sound like in a finished film, two of mine: High School Sweethearts In The Hill Country and an almost-elopement in the forests of Nashville.