Between Extremes : Music Libraries vs Composers

Let’s say X has been given a responsibility... They need to get music for a video project.

The project is not a musical project and the role of music here is to enhance and support the video.

The makers of the video and the management are more than 61% aware of the content specifics of the music required.

There are ways this responsibility can be undertaken...

One is to use pre-existing music. There are thousands of options available on the internet; both free and paid. The job is to look into those, shortlist and finalise. There are various resources available today that gives you access to huge libraries of great music to choose from. This is also almost always the more budget-friendly option.

This option however, has its downsides.

First, is sometimes the feeling, of looking for 'a needle in the haystack’. As the internet keeps getting more gigantic than ever, in terms of volume… I know editors, who have spent 5 days only to shortlist music for a 7 day edit project. That's almost cruel if you don't enjoy the process.

Then there are partial fits.

X has found the perfect music for the first 25 seconds of the video, but the rest doesn’t seem to go at all. They scour the internet for a worthy fit, but nothing really satisfies them. They come across these other pieces, that have only one or two elements of mismatch and hence ruled out from consideration.

Finally, after more hours of digging through library music (and not getting distracted/exhausted off the process), they finally manage to find a piece…but the length of the music just won’t match their video. Any edits they try only makes it sound really off!

They are now forced to take the other route - fresh music, custom-made for the video.

They can go to an online freelance service, like fiverr or upwork, and hire a professional to get it done. Good chances of getting the desired music for slightly higher charges. In many cases, it takes time to find the perfect professional for the given job, and hence X may end up paying considerably more. In my opinion, the good professionals won't charge anyone peanuts; and finding rare scenarios where someone good is charging peanuts, may leave X spending both more time and money than stipulated.

Between these two extremes, there are some new solutions that may fit.

For example, Beatoven.ai will not require X to know music, to get music for their videos. They would just need to upload their video and let artificial intelligence compile fresh music (from their ever-evolving library of various artists,) and generate a timeline that fits the video. And since this is completely a web-app, all projects are always saved on the cloud to be accessed from anywhere.

So, with the superpower of algorithms at one's fingertips, the next time X wants to go to extremes of hiring a composer, maybe they could spend their time and money better.

by #abhikism