Looking for free vintage film score music.

January 31, 2012 8:25 AM

Looking for some help in locating music. Friends of mine have created a short film for a contest and are looking for some royalty-free film music to complement the piece. Does anyone know of an extensive library of downloadable royalty-free soundtrack work from perhaps the 40s, 50s and 60s? We only have ten short days to complete the film, that is why we are seeking pre-recorded existing music. A lot of those music sites charge absurd rates for royalty-free tracks. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!
posted by ChaoticIndustry to media & arts (9 answers total)

Have you checked the selection at iStockphoto.com? I'd start there.
posted by jeffmilner at 8:30 AM on January 31, 2012

Vimeo Music Store is one place you can look.
posted by fings at 8:33 AM on January 31, 2012

see also this forum post.
posted by fings at 8:38 AM on January 31, 2012

Funny you should mention this - my mother was just telling me about Pond 5 last night. She uses royalty-free music in her work and found this site to be useful.
posted by rikhei at 8:40 AM on January 31, 2012

archive.org is often good for this sort of thing.
posted by Afroblanco at 9:01 AM on January 31, 2012

opsound.org (the open-source music project)
posted by sexyrobot at 9:22 AM on January 31, 2012

The problem with grabbing public domain recordings from archive.org is that sync rights (the right to synchronize a moving image with music) are tied to the composer/songwriter's copyright, and not the recording's. So while a given recording can be in the public domain, unless the underlying song's copyright is also public domain, you can find yourself in Nina Paley's shoes, when she made Sita Sings the Blues using public domain Annette Hanshaw recordings and then found she needed to pay thousands of dollars to distribute her film, because a number of the songwriter copyrights were still held by the big media companies.
posted by fings at 9:24 AM on January 31, 2012 [2 favorites]

Magnatune has a bunch of royalty free music with reasonable license fees.
posted by empath at 9:28 AM on January 31, 2012

http://www.audionetwork.com/ is an amazing resource for this. They have a library of amazing score music, created just for them. The best part is that under a "student" license (which includes things like film festivals) you can pay only a few dollars and be totally on the up-and-up.
posted by drjimmy11 at 9:52 AM on January 31, 2012