What is Stock Music?

Stock music is simply any music that has been created specifically for licensing in television, film, radio, commercials, corporate and training presentations, web sites, video games and new media applications. It is generally used as an alternative to mainstream or popular music which can be costly, time-consuming and difficult to obtain.

In the old days stock music was generally provided on audio CDs stored in binders containing track listings. When you wanted to find a particular track you had to go through many CDs until you found the perfect track for your production. Now with the Internet and modern computer technology, entire libraries can be previewed online and delivered on DVD or CD ROMs so that editors and producers no longer have to swap CDs and search through endless listing to find their music. A television producer can be sitting in an editing studio with an Internet connection and preview and download CD quality music for his production instantaneously!

Stock music can be licensed in many different ways. The most common ways include:

• Subscription based music licensing requires that you pay subscriptions to a particular library and renew the fees each year. There can be additional charges, and royalty fees depending on the agreement.
• Needle drop music licensing generally bases licenses on factors such as the length of track, number of seconds actually used, whether the track is used in education, nationally, internationally, for broadcast, for non-broadcast and according to various other criteria. They usually charge additional royalties or fees if you decide you want to use the music for other purposes.
• Buyout music licensing (such as Stockmusic.net’s license). The user pays a one-time fee for a song or a collection and is then free to use the music as they like.