See that fancy fellow with the violin?  That’s the Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi.  I was first exposed to Tony V’s music in “Humanities” class during my senior year of high school.  And this exposure happened to occur at a time when my hobby of “making videos” was starting to become a full-blown obsession.  Consequently, Vivaldi’s music as well as a lot of other classical music tracks found their way into my projects.  (In my mind a classical score = artistic depth.)

Years later I learned that by using Vivaldi’s music I was technically committing copyright infringement.  Vivaldi has been dead for 270 years now which means all of his compositions became “public domain” long before my great-grandparents were even born. But in most cases, filmmakers can’t use the work of long-dead composers because the recordings of those pieces are almost always copyrighted.  So you are free to use a Beethoven sonata or a Mozart concerto in your work but the living musicians that performed in those recordings are going to expect to get paid.

Or at least that used to be the case.  The other day I came across a brilliant website named MuseOpen.  Some ingenious and highly motivated person named Aaron Dunn raised enough money through a kickstarter campaign to hire musicians and orchestras to perform popular pieces of Public Domain music.   The musicians had to sign away their rights to the recordings and MuseOpen publishes the music online, for free.

That means the classical tracks featured on MuseOpen are 100% Copyright free!  Filmmakers and other artists are welcome to use those recordings in any way they see fit.  And this is great news for video contest filmmakers. Pretty much every, single video contest you’ll find on the web will require you to get permission before using a piece of music in your entry. And some contests take things a step further by explicitly prohibiting the use of any material that someone else has copyrighted. That means that even if you buy a license for a song, you can’t use it because someone else still owns it. But the songs on MuseOpen are literally owned by no one. No one has any copyright claim to those works.

So MuseOpen is a real bonaza for video contest filmmakers. But take caution when using music from the site. Some of the tracks are so good and sound so professional that video contest judges will probably assume you stole that piece of music. So it’s always a good idea to credit the source. You may want to add a quick title card to the end of your video that explains where the music came from and that it’s totally copyright free. Personally, I always cite my music source in a video’s description box, if possible. But if you really want to err on the side of caution I would advise you to e-mail the contest organizers and explain to them how MuseOpen works and why you are legally allowed to use the music posted there.

Here’s a link to the site: http://www.musopen.org/

You have to sign up if you want to download anything but membership is free.

UPDATE: Check the comments to see read an important note about the copyright status of some of the songs on MuseOpen!