The Boring Stuff 3: Music Licenses
As a dancer, you need a music license to legally play copyrighted music during your classes and performances. A music license ensures that the artists and music creators are fairly compensated for their work. Without a music license, you could face legal consequences for using copyrighted music without permission. It’s like buying a ticket to watch a movie: you need to pay for the right to enjoy the content, and *in theory*, the proceedings will help support the industry.
In practice, things don’t always work that way, as reputedly the bulk of the licensing money ends going to the bigger companies and artists, so a percentage of what you pay would be going to, say, Taylor Swift even if you only played music by Hossam Ramzy and The Musicians of the Nile. As with the previous article on copyright, I am not a lawyer, so take the following as outlining my experience; this is not legal advice.
So, how do we deal with music licensing? Your most obvious choice is to only use music from which you’ve got direct, explicit permission from the copyright holders to use. Jeremiah Soto from Solace as well as Zoe Jakes from Beats Antique have publicly expressed that they are perfectly happy for belly dance teachers to use their music in live or zoom classes, but not paid recorded tutorials. We are lucky that other creators are equally accessible and you could, in theory, request permission directly. There are small companies that also offer yearly licenses for their whole catalogue, and where you know definitely the license goes to the artists in question. There are also royalty free offerings where you are specifically paying for the license to use publicly, not just the track for your enjoyment. If you only use music for which you’ve had explicit permission like this, in theory you should be fine. Another option is to find whatever music you want to use, contact their labels if there’s any involved, and ask them directly. Final “free” option is, of course, to commission or write your own music.
Regardless, always make sure you have your licenses and permissions saved and accessible in case there are inquiries. It’s also true that certain overzealous licensing companies have been known to contact teachers who are using these and demand payment despite the permissions; all I can suggest in these cases it to contact a lawyer for a quick consultation, as this exceeds the scope of my knowledge or experience on the matter.
If you wanted to have access to the full music catalogue from most labels, you might have to obtain a license to play music in public. In the UK, there used to be two types of licensing, although apparently now they’ve been merged into just one. As a teacher, the amount you will have to pay will be calculated according to whether you are using the music as background in the premises, or only as part of instruction, the number of classes you teach, and how many people you have in those classes. If you own your studio, your license calculation will be different. Always contact the licensing authority, ask questions as you need and don’t go just by the prices on the front page.
I *strongly* recommend that you first ask your chosen venue for information on what type of licenses they will require from you, and only then contact the licensing authorities for quotes and clarifications. The reason for this is because I have in the past made inquiries in a hall where after they asked me what type of dance we would be practicing, they demanded that I presented to them a particular type of license. When contacting the licensing authoring later, they informed me that said license was not available for purchase for individuals or groups and should be covered by the physical venues. There was no way I could get it without renting or owning a venue. The licensing authority rightly refused to sell us said license, and obviously we did not use that hall. I’ll leave up to you to decide whether this was an oversight by the hall, an attempt to gain a full license out of our pocket, or a polite way of putting bureaucratic hurdles to stop us from hiring the hall.
If you are in a different country, the rules are likely to be somewhat similar but with local variations: you might require local, state or federal licenses depending on local laws. But keep in mind that unless you have gone down the route outlined in the second paragraph, chances are that you should obtain a license according to local laws.
Finally, there’s the issue of licensing for Facebook Instagram and YouTube. These offer you tracks that you can use “free of charge”. Most of the times I’ve got the notice that my track was muted in “several countries”, it turned out to be muted for a handful of countries where I had no followers, so it wasn’t really that difficult to make the call. However, if you do not want to have this happen, Facebook has a “Meta Sound Collection” that you can access and use for your videos on Facebook and Instagram without getting penalised at all. There’s an ample selection that you can use, including some generic Middle Eastern-for-Westerners type of music that you might want to use.
For YouTube, if you’re not using one of their providers’ tracks, you will get a copyright notice. This is *not* a copyright strike so it doesn’t really affect your account, but as far as I know, it means that whatever revenue your video generates, goes to the company holding the music rights. This puts us in the uncomfortable situation of being unable to really monetize our videos even if we get to the point of having the relevant number of subscribers and viewing hours. So think carefully whether you want to use existing music for your YouTube videos. And if you want to attempt an influencer career by offering tutorials or the like, you might want to go back to the second paragraph above regarding royalty free music.
Do you have anything to contribute regarding legislation in your own country? I would love if you could leave your comment below.