Music, Sound Effects, Tech News, and More — The AudioMicro Blog

We have just added over 13,000 record label owned, production music tracks to AudioMicro. The new offering is being called “The Premium Collection“. Historically, this entire collection has only been available to major television networks and feature film producers in a rights managed licensing format. We are please to offer this material to you and hope that you will enjoy all the great new tracks. All Premium Collection Tracks have a special flag that appears in search and browse results to let you know that you are listening to premium material. Please note that with this great new collection carries a more limited, royalty free music license. The main restriction is that the tracks cannot be used on network / cable television or in any project with a budget over fifty thousand dollars. For full license details, please be sure to check out the Premium Content License Agreement. If you need to use tracks in a manner outside the scope of the Premium Content License Agreement, our standard collection is still available with over 24,000 tracks and suitable for nearly any audio visual production imaginable.

Posted in: Free Sound Effects, license music, Production Music, royalty free music, sound bite, sound clips, Sound Effects, The Premium Collection

We’ve all seen rough and tumble fight scenes or screeching shoot-em-up car chases in movies. But it’s what you don’t see that really makes these scenes so emotionally compelling.

It all comes down to sound effects. It might seem like a less-than-astute observation, but oftentimes we forget that what we’re hearing is something added after the fact by foley artists. Especially when it comes to animated films, where every sound needs to be created from scratch.

The Cognitive Daily science blog wrote about this phenomenon back in 2007, and they have some interesting examples of actual scientific studies on this topic.  But having recently re-watched Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a film with notably complex sound design, it got me thinking about how important sound effects are in film, TV and the media — The film won two Oscars for sound design and sound effects editing in 1991.

For instance, check out this guy’s retooling of the famous Hindenberg disaster. The original footage was silent, but he adds stock sound effects and Herb Morrison’s news report of the incident. The result is an emotionally compelling piece of news footage that, though containing unoriginal audio aspects, more clearly conveys the horror of that fateful day.

One of my favorite skits from the show “Whose Line Is It Anyway,” is when they pick people out of the audience to provide sound effects for a couple of the players. Compare that to when they have one of the players do sound effects. Quite a different experience.

Also, in honor of our recently deceased King of Pop, here is a (somewhat stupid) reworking of Michael Jackson’s “Bad” video with added sound effects.

Michael Jackson Bad (added sound effects)

The addition of “boing” sounds here and there distract from the song and make the video seem sillier than it really is.

It’s funny how sometimes when you really think about it, the most obvious things can surprise you.

Posted in: audio engineers, free sound clips, Free Sound Effects, post production, sound, sound design, sound designer, sound effect, Sound Effects, wav sound

Curious to see the AudioMicro sound library in action? Check out a few videos samples that incorporate music and sound effects from our library. Examples include movie scores, professional presentations, promotional videos, and personal slide shows.  Enjoy!

And here are a few links from around the web.

If you like motorcycles, you’ll enjoy this one…

The making of California Balloons, a short film about French spies…

A personal travel video about a trip to the beach…

A Trip to the Beach from Kerri Sheehan on Vimeo.

Support your favorite charity….

and last but not least, from Equal, the makers of LonelyGirl15, one of the most popular YouTube video series’ of all time…

Posted in: audiomicro customers, Eqal, Free Sound Effects, license music, lonelygirl15, pictorvision, promotional, royalty free music, shadylogic, slide show, Sound Effects, soundtrack, stock music, videos, YouTube music

AudioMicro presently pays 50% of all cash received back to it’s artists on a monthly basis.  For comparison purposes, we will list the royalty percentages and payout patterns for various other types of music licensing:

1. For iTunes like downloads from digital music stores – including iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, Walmart, etc. the artist typically receives a 10% royalty.  But wait a minute, this 10% comes from the net amount received by the record label.  Record labels typically receive around 70 to 60 cents from each 99 cent download, thereby leaving the artists with only 7 to 6 cents per iTunes sales.  
2. For ring tones, artists typically receives 10% of the amount received by the record label.  For instance, if a ring tone costs $1, the record label will received around 50 cents and the artist will receive around 5 cents.  For a standard recording contract, the artist typically nets 10% of what the record label receives. 
3. For Audio streaming services like Pandora, and Project Playlist, as well as video streaming services where advertisements are displayed along with the music streaming, the amount that gets paid to the artist is still in negotiation, and not yet set.  In short, the artist can expect to also receive 10% of the net revenues received by their record label, for their pro-rated portion of the streams.  The interesting thing to note in regards to music streaming services and satellite radio (Sirius and XM being the largest) is that the record label and the artist are paid by a government sponsored entity known as Sound Exchange.  In contrast to traditional radio, the royalties are paid not to composers and publishers but to the performers (artsts) and the copyright holders (typically the record label).

Posted in: audio micro, Free Sound Effects, Open Source, Pandora, Project Playlist, Sound Exchange