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  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.