About a year ago, the CEO of Poptent was visiting Chicago and the company set up a dinner where he could meet some site members.  I got to go and the CEO was a super nice guy.  He went around and asked everybody what they thought about Poptent and he listened to everyone’s suggestions and ideas. My suggestion was that Poptent should team up with a website that licenses music for commercial use.  I had been licensing music for my Poptent submissions from a site named PremiumBeat.com and having professional music really made my entries seem a lot slicker.  I said maybe PremiumBeat would want to licensee tracks for free or at a discount if Poptent officially partnered up with them.  The CEO seemed pretty interested in the idea and I think we even exchanged e-mails about it later.

But I guess I was just ahead of my time!  Poptent never teamed up with a music site but yesterday I got a press release announcing a new partnership between Mofilm and the music licensing site AudioSocket.  The details of the arrangement are extraordinary; Filmmakers can now license music for use in their Mofilm entries for free.  When I first read about this I figured there might be 50 or 100 special tracks that AudioSocket set aside for Mofilm members.  But naw….there are more than 33,000 songs available in AudioSocket’s Mofilm Music Storefront.  All you have to do is pick your track and add it to your cart.  But don’t let words like “storefront” and “checkout” fool you.  When you go to check out, you don’t actually have to pay.  To peruse AudioSocket’s Mofilm catalog, head here.

And guess what else I just learned….the video contest site Tongal ALSO has partnered up with AudioSocket!  So filmmakers can also license music for free for their Tongal entries.  Here’s some more info about that:

Tongal has partnered with Audiosocket, a boutique music licensing agency representing more than 1,400 emerging bands, composers and record labels. Audiosocket tracks will be available to Tongal members at no charge solely for their incorporation into Tongal members’ submissions to the Nespresso project. Tongal members are encouraged to browse the Audiosocket catalog, available at http://audiosocket.com. If you are interested in using a track from the Audiosocket catalog, as described above, please email music@tongal.com for account and password info, which will allow for the download of up to three tracks.

I think these partnerships are a HUGE deal.  Every contest site should be doing something like this.  When you shoot a video on spec or for a contest you feel the sting of every dollar you spend because there’s a very good chance that you’re not going to make that money back.  Every time I license a track from PremiumBeat it costs me $30.  And that 30 bucks can be a factor in whether or not I actually shoot an entry for a video contest/assignment.  I usually try and keep my budgets around $150 so if licensing music is going to push a project over that number, I might just scrap the idea.  If filmmakers can gamble less money on their contest entries, they’ll probably wind up shooting more of them.  So in the long run, a partnership with a licensing company is going to pay off for site like Mofilm and Tongal in the long run.
 

I have that same wig

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!

Hey, did you create a funny music video last year?  Do you want a free trip to LA?  And would you like to get to appear in music video with Weezer!?

If you answered yes to all of these questions, then I have one more for you; do you have  a time machine??  No!?  Well then you’re shit outta luck, man because you should have submitted your funny 2009 music video to the “Contest of Awesome” like 3 months ago.  But let’s not dwell on the past.  BarelyDigital.com picked a bunch of finalists earlier this year and then let the public vote for their favorite funny video.  Actually, online votes only counted for 50% of a video’s score which is always nice to hear.  Judges gave the other 50% of a video’s score which means that basically, it was up to the judges who won.

The sponsor put together an “award ceremony” video to announce the winner.  It is amusing and contains an attractive lady in a low-cut dress so I will embed it:

And here’s the video that won.  The song is funny but the guy that steals the show is the Taco Bell employee that actually managed to get their whole order.

Grand Prize Winner.  Prize: Trip to LA to appear in a Weezer video

You can see the other 11 finalist videos here: http://www.barelydigital.com/awesome/page/contest-vote

NOTE:  Our traffic has gone up a good bit thanks to the Crash the Superbowl posts.  So if you’re new to the site, thanks for visiting.  If you’re looking for a place to promote your Doritos commercial, scroll down to the next post.  But if you feel like reading some non-CTSB video contest news, scroll your eyes down to the next paragraph.

There are lot of reasons NOT to enter certain video contests.  If the winner is picked by a public vote, you should probably stay out of that fight.  If the prize is really small that means the company is cheap and might not even pay up if you win.  But the most offensive red flag is a contest that charges you an entry fee.  All I can say about that is Fuuuuu*k that noise.  Finally, I try to avoid contests that are run by non-U.S. based companies.  For one, those contests are usually open to everyone, everywhere which means that your competition is THE ENTIRE FREAKING WORLD.  But more importantly, if you have a problem with that contest, what are you going to do?  Fly over to their home country and sue them?

So those are what I consider to be deal-breaking red flags.  That said, I think I have officially discovered the WORST video contest I have ever seen.  Somehow they managed to pull off the rare, 4-red-flagger contest here.  It’s “Doc Sniper’s Make Some Noise Video contest” and it immediately comes off as suspicious because the point of the contest is incredibly vague.  Check out this description:

That’s it?  Make a video with music in it?  What the heck is the point of that?  Ohhh..I know.  The point is that to enter the contest, you have to pay a $10 ENTRY FEE!  Pretty much any filmmaker will already have some kind of project that includes music in it.  So maybe a ton of them will decide to take a shot, pay the 10 bucks and enter to win the massive $500 jackpot!

This just has “scam” written all over it.  The winner of the $500 prize is picked by the “Doc Sniper” community.  So think about that; you have to PAY to enter the contest and then if you want the prize, you have to get a bunch of people to register to the site to vote for you.  I repeat, Fuuuuuuu*k that noise.

I kind of feel bad for ripping on DocSniper.com because after looking through the site, it seems to be the passion project of some young entrepreneurs hoping to build a new social networking site.  I don’t think they actually want to rip people off but based on the business model they are presenting, I think that it’s inevitable that people are going to get screwed.  Basically it looks like they are trying to build a pyramid scheme for video contests; if 100 people each pay 10 bucks to enter the contest then 50% of that money goes to the “winner” and 50% goes to Doc Sniper.  According to the site, it is their goal to do one contest like this every month.  But so far, just 3 people have entered the “music” contest.  Are they still going to pay out the 500 bucks if they only take in $30 in entries fees?

The final red flag here is a little weird but there are several videos on the site from “Doc Sniper” himself in which he explains certain aspects of the site.  Click right here to visit the site and watch one of these videos.  (best example is on the front page in the upper right hand corner)  Something is weird about Doc Sniper.  It took me a second to catch on but the guy in the video is doing a fake American Accent.  I kept poking through the site and in the forum, someone mentions that Doc Sniper is based in Australia.  So there you go, the final red flag.  And this red flag is so scary it has a picture of an even redder flag on it!  The people behind this site are going out of their way to make it appear like they are based in the US (besides the accent, they seem to really drive home the fact that prizes are paid in US dollars.)

Like I said, I feel bad for coming down so hard on this site.  Despite the weird fake accent, “Doc Sniper” even seems like a nice guy.  So Doc, if you have a google alert set for your name and you see this, I recommend that you drop the entry fee idea ASAP.  There are just way, way too many free video contests out there for the concept ever to catch on.

Hope you like that song because it’s gonna be stuck in your head alllll day long.

Yesterday Infolinks, the online in-text advertising company, announced the 3 winners of their “Infolinks Challenge.”  The premise of the contest was that participants should create a video showcasing “crazy, creative and funny ideas of making money online.”  Overall I think the top three videos are good.  Here they are:

First Place.  Prize:  $5,000

Second Place.  Prize:  $1,000

Third Place.  Prize:  $500