Digital Home Thoughts: American Music Company - Licensed Music Reviewed

Using Music
There is no doubt that music can make a huge difference to the way a viewer interprets a film or TV programme. The music itself sets the tone - you know whether you are supposed to laugh or cry. Without music, the images don't have as much depth.

Unfortunately, we aren't all talented enough to compose and play our own music. I know I'm not :). Instead, we turn to other sources. There is a tendency, particularly when making a home video, to use commercial music from CDs that you've bought. The trouble with that, though, is it's illegal - perhaps slightly less so in the US where there are fair rights laws, but, once you start giving your video to someone else, you've broken the copyright laws.

To stay on the right side of the law, which becomes even more important if you are making a video for sale, you either need to licence the music or purchase royalty-free music. There are a number of libraries of royalty-free music available and they vary immensely in quality.

For this review, I'm going to look at the American Music Company - a supplier of music available for licence - a subtle but important distinction from royalty-free music.

The Library
The basis of the American Music Company's service is a collection of themed albums. At the time of writing this review, they had 56 albums available, covering a very wide range, including:

• Christmas;
  
• Rock;
  
• Horror, suspense and mystery;
  
• Quirky.

For a few albums, there is a second album set that contains underscore versions of the originals. These have had the main instruments removed whilst keeping the main melody in place. These underscore versions might be used in a sequence where you've got a narrative going on but want to keep the theme going in the background.

Each album contains approximately 13-15 tracks; the total library currently offers nearly 1000 pieces of music! If you are looking for a number of tracks with a consistent theme, the easiest way to do this is by browsing the catalogue. This displays the album number and title, plus a short description of the music within that album.


Figure 1: American Music CDs.

In order to make it easier for you to find a track to meet your needs, there are a few ways that you can search the library. The first, and probably the easiest to get started with, is to search by style or genre. A list of the genres is available from a drop-down menu ... and it is a long list!


Figure 2: Available styles and genres.

If you've used music from American Music Company before and you are interested in finding more music by a particular composer that they use, there is a drop-down available to help with that search.


Figure 3: Composer choices.

Other search options include searching by CD catalogue number, CD title, track title, tempo and "Style-A-Likes". This last option has a lot of potential. For example, if you were working on a production and you wanted a piece of music that sounded as if it had been written by John Williams, you can enter his name here, do a search and tracks that potentially sound as if they have been written by him are returned.

You can enter any group, artist or concept and the database tries to match it. It might be useful if American Music Company gave some examples on the site of what works in this field. In addition to John Williams, I tried "Madonna" (which returned two tracks) and "Britney Spears" (which didn't return any). For concept, I tried "wedding" and "encouragement", both of which failed to return any results, so I'm not really sure what is intended by "concept" or what concepts are understood by the database.

Once you've found some music, either by browsing or searching, it is time to listen to it to decide whether or not it is going to meet your needs.