Commercial music licensing: what you are actually buying

Every piece of recorded music carries two separate copyrights: the recording (the specific performance captured) and the composition (the underlying song — melody, chords, lyrics). They are frequently owned by different people.

This is the single most common reason a licence fails when it is tested. A buyer clears the recording from a library, publishes, and is contacted by a publisher who controls the composition and was never asked. The licence was real; it only covered half of what was needed.

BFMG controls both for everything in its catalogue, so one licence covers both and there is no publisher to clear separately. That is what “one-stop” means, and it is worth asking any library whether they can say it.

A production cue is background; a released single with a featured artist carries the scene. Pricing them identically would say they are the same product, which is why the released catalogue costs more.

A 24-track collection is $189.00. The same 24 tracks bought one at a time would be $696.00 — so the collection works out at $7.88 a track, 73% less.

The rate falls on a curve rather than in bands, and that is worth explaining because it affects what you can plan against. Banded pricing produces a point where buying more costs less: a library charging $29.00 a track up to four, then a discounted rate from five, sells four tracks for $116.00 and five for less than that. A price list that contradicts itself is a price list you cannot budget from.

On a curve there is no such point: adding a track never reduces the total. You can check that against any collection on the site.

Being precise about it: prices round to a trailing 9, so two collections one track apart often cost the same, and across a single rounding step the per-track rate can tick up slightly. The rate falls steadily over any real range — 24 tracks at $7.88 against $29.00 singly — but “every extra track is cheaper than the last” would be an overclaim, so we are not making it.

This is the question that actually matters, and most libraries answer it with the word “royalty-free”, which does not address it at all.

Content ID and Meta Rights Manager are automated matching systems. A rightsholder enrols a recording, and the platform flags uploads containing it. If your music library has enrolled its own catalogue — which many do, because it earns them a share of other people’s ad revenue — then your video can be claimed by the library you licensed it from. Your licence is valid. The claim still happens, because the system matching audio never saw it.

Nothing in the BFMG catalogue is enrolled in Content ID or Meta Rights Manager. Enrolment is opt-in and paid — through DistroKid’s Social Media Pack, which has never been purchased for any release here. So we do not claim or mute our licensees’ videos, because we have no mechanism to.

The honest limit: we say we do not claim, not that no claim can occur. An unrelated rightsholder’s automated system can raise a false match against music that resembles their catalogue — a real risk with AI-assisted recordings and outside anyone’s control. If it happens, your account gives you a dispute pack: your licence number, its public verification link, and a statement to submit. We cannot submit it for you — platforms accept disputes only from the account that uploaded the video.

Five things are excluded, and each is quoted per project rather than sold:

• Broadcast television and radio, and cinema release.
• Paid advertising campaigns — anything backed by media spend.
• Public performance — playing music to an audience or in a business. No download or sync licence covers this, from us or anyone; it needs performance rights, usually from a PRO.
• Reselling the music on its own, including uploading it to another library or sample service.
• AI and machine-learning training.

These are quoted rather than priced because a national advertisement and a student film are not the same number, and neither are one café and a gym chain. Tell us about the project and you get terms and a figure, usually within two business days.

Recordings in this catalogue are AI-assisted or AI-generated, and we tell you so in writing on every licence. The legal status of copyright in AI-generated material is genuinely unsettled and varies by jurisdiction.

That is why your rights here are contractual: the licence binds us regardless of who owns what, which is a stronger position than a copyright claim nobody has tested. If a broadcaster or platform asks how a recording was made, you have the answer in writing — which is not true of most catalogues, AI or otherwise.

Most libraries give you a PDF receipt. A PDF proves very little on its own: it can be edited, and it cannot tell anyone whether the licence behind it is still in force — a licence ended by a payment reversal looks identical on paper to a live one.

Every licence issued here has a number and a public page at /verify/<licence number>. Anyone you hand the certificate to — a client, a broadcaster, a platform reviewing a dispute — opens that address and sees our current record, with no account and without contacting us. It shows whether the licence is valid or revoked, what was licensed, the ISRC, the date, the rights granted, and which version of the terms was accepted, linked through to that exact text.

It shows the holder masked — initials or a partial email — which is enough to match the person presenting the document without publishing their identity to anyone who guesses a licence number.

The certificate also carries a verification code and a QR code. Scanning it opens the same page with the code attached, and the page states plainly whether it matches. That matters more than it sounds: a forged certificate can print any code it likes. What it cannot do is make this domain agree with it. So the proof is the page, not the paper — which is why every certificate we issue says so in those words.

Being precise about it: this is a code we issue and check, not a cryptographic signature your PDF reader validates — no green tick appears in Acrobat. Its whole strength is that a third party follows the link. A certificate nobody checks is just a document, the same as everyone else’s.