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Buying the use of old licensed(?) music

by Robert Dowling · in Game Design and Creative Issues · 03/17/2008 (9:32 pm) · 2 replies

Hey all,

I have two old tracks (Quite a few decades back) that I've worked specifically into a sequence in a project. I'm just wondering if anyone would know if there's a guideline to the cost of licensing an old song (I'm sure there would be some license to them)? I understand it would depend on who owns the license and who the author is.
As I've never tried purchasing the use of a song before, how would I approach the publisher/distributor?

Also wondering to what effect you can 'distort' a song legally, I know this sounds bad, but the songs will add to the ambiance of selected areas.

To give you an example of the songs, the two track are:
"Teddy Bears Picnic - Val Rosing with the Henry Hall Orchestra" (1930's) and
"They're Changing Guard at Buckingham Palace" (1938) - I have no idea who sung this, but it's a version with a young girl singing.

I apologize for my ignorance in this field.

Perhaps I should just try to track down who the distributors would be and contact them hey?
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Associate David Montgomery-Blake
David MontgomeryBlake
#1
03/19/2008 (7:23 am)
Check the equivalent of ASCAP and BMI (I think it was BMI...it's been a while) in Australia. You will have to license two types of rights, usage rights (the simple ability to use it) and synchronization rights (the ability to sync it with video...or loosely to even use it with video sync'd or unsync'd depending on the way you are using it). When you find the rights holder of one right, you can query them about the holder of the other. Sometimes publishing houses only hold say, usage rights, but the artist holds sync rights. Or the same group may hold both.

Torque Owner Robert Dowling
#2
03/23/2008 (10:14 pm)
Thank you for that David, much appreciated. I also heard about the two types of license through another source, and it's helped me decide that I'll just focus on getting original content created.