Music

Recently on one of the photographer forums there was some discussion about using music with slideshows or on a website. The slideshows were mostly in the context of wedding clients or other direct-to-consumer work, and the websites were both for that market and commercial (editorial, corporate, advertising) photographers.

Now, I can totally understand photographers wanting to use music with their images. Many photographers are musicians themselves (at some level) and MTV changed the way we as a culture view both images and music–combining them so that not having them together seems almost odd in some ways. It seems to make sense to use sound to complete the sensory experience as much as possible–if you could do smell, taste, and touch too I think many of you would.

However, music is often NOT a good idea for marketing your images, especially on websites. First off, many buyers are in open office environments and so sound is not welcome. Secondly, your musical tastes may be very different from your buyers and that can result in your buyers having negative reactions to your work just because they hate the music. At the very least it can be distracting–there have been some studies recently examining listening to music (as well as things like audio books) and driving. The data indicate that sound distracts the driver significantly. In other words, drivers have a hard time concentrating on what they see when they have non-driving sounds (i.e., car and street noise) in their heads. We can make a not-too-huge leap of logic to conclude that music may distract from concentrated visual-related actions, like reviewing images.

Now, I will make a small break from my main point of no music on websites to say that if you have a wedding business, using music can be a good thing. The bride (and her mother, usually, maybe the groom) want to imagine their perfect day and that includes music. Picking the right music is important, but it can work.

But for commercial sites, I’d say “no” to music…if for no other reason than this last point: you probably are using that music illegally.

You must license music to use it on your site. There are no excuses for NOT doing this. It makes me so frustrated to hear photographers saying things like “I’m not selling the music so why should I pay for it!” or “It’s promotion for the musician–they get a credit line!” or “I put a link to their site, that should be enough!” Let’s see…where have we heard those lines before…oh yeah, I remember, from every site owner who uses images illegally! Pot/Kettle/Black…mean anything?

Look, you cannot base your business of selling licenses to reproduce intellectual property (your images) and then not respect others’ intellectual property rights–writers, illustrators, designers, and, yes, musicians. You can’t complain about the unfairness of having to license other creative work and then demand it for your own work. It’s simply wrong. It doesn’t matter if the recording industry is corrupt and the artists get pennies from a license (have you seen what some photogs get from stock sales these days?)–it is the law and, more importantly, it is fair and ethical to stand up for intellectual property rights for all if you are in this business.

Oh, and you must license any of this material for use in slideshows, too–whether as a promo, on a disc with images you are delivering to clients after a shoot, or (especially), for anything that will be shown to a group–like at a wedding.

So, I suggest dropping music from most/all of your materials and, if you are going to choose to use music in any way, license it for that use. It’s not hard to do (most commercial tunes are licensable via BMI or ASCAP).

If only photo licensing were as simple. 🙂