Friendly Music to Give YouTube Users Lifetime License to Edit Music into Their Videos

PORTLAND, Ore. -- (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Rumblefish® Inc., the premier music licensing agency for business, is launching a new music program for YouTube™ users called Friendly Music. Friendly Music allows users to purchase a lifetime music license on a selected music track and fully edit the music into their videos. FriendlyMusic.com provides the YouTube community access to Rumblefish’s extensive catalog of copyright-cleared songs, which they can use to create professional-quality soundtracks for their YouTube videos.

When a user uploads a video to YouTube containing music they did not create, there is a chance the audio can be removed or the video blocked by the rights holder. Rumblefish’s Friendly Music website contains a catalog of copyright-cleared music that a user can put into their video without fear that it might be blocked by a rights owner. Since 2005, YouTube has pioneered ways for users to get music into their videos, while respecting copyrights and generating revenue for the rights holders, including all four of the major record labels. With Friendly Music, users can purchase a license that grants them rights to edit and include a song in their YouTube video forever. This marks the first time a music company has offered YouTube users a direct license to use music for their video soundtracks.

How Friendly Music Works

• First, amateur video makers search or browse the Friendly Music catalog—thousands of songs from artists and labels around the world, all of them copyright-cleared for YouTube videos

• Next, users purchase and download the songs they want in their soundtrack and add them to their video using their favorite video-editing application. Songs cost just $1.99 per video.

• Finally, users receive an official license for every song they use, so when they upload their finished video to YouTube they can be confident it will remain on the site, not blocked or muted.

(Friendly Music Launch Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz5blevTBXU)

Greater Control for YouTube Community
“Rumblefish understands that YouTube and Google are all about creating a great user experience. Music licensing is rarely user friendly, but FriendlyMusic.com is a big first step toward changing that,” said Glenn Brown, head of music partnerships for YouTube.

“With today’s technology, anyone can be a filmmaker,” explained Paul Anthony, founder and CEO of Rumblefish. “The perfect song can transform a simple video clip into a movie—an emotionally engaging story. We believe it should be easy and affordable for everyone to create great soundtracks to tell their stories. That’s why we created Friendly Music.”

About Music Rights
Music download rights are different from soundtrack rights: a song downloaded from an online store for personal use may not be licensed for use as a video soundtrack. FriendlyMusic.com gives anyone the opportunity to directly license soundtrack rights from artists and labels for use in online videos. For $1.99, users receive an MP3 download of a given track, and an official license permitting them to add it to their video using their favorite video editor (e.g., Microsoft® Windows® Movie Maker, Apple’s iMovie and Sony Creative Software’s Vegas, etc.). Videos with Friendly Music soundtracks are licensed for unlimited views for the life of the video throughout the world.

Soundtrack Specialists
Rumblefish has been providing original music to Hollywood film and television studios, game publishers and ad agencies for more than a decade. With FriendlyMusic.com, Rumblefish is making its extensive music resources and licensing capabilities available to the general public for the first time.

A World of Music
Unlike catalogs of royalty-free music by anonymous artists, FriendlyMusic.com offers songs by both emerging and established artists in styles ranging from rap, reggae and R&B to country, pop and techno, as well as full orchestral recordings of familiar classical compositions. New music is added to the catalog on a daily basis. In the coming months, the Friendly Music catalog will expand to include handpicked collections of name artists.

About YouTube
YouTube is the world’s most popular online video community, allowing millions of people to discover, watch and share originally created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small. YouTube, LLC, is based in San Bruno, CA, and is a subsidiary of Google Inc.

About Rumblefish
Founded in 1996, Rumblefish maintains a hand-picked music catalog and develops innovative music supervision, search and licensing tools for a wide range of businesses. In 2006, Rumblefish launched the Music Licensing StoreSM to make licensing music for commercial applications fast, easy and affordable. Dubbed “an iTunes for Corporate America” (CNBC), the Music Licensing Store was the first online resource for 100% pre-cleared music for businesses. It offers a broad range of original music for use in television programs, films, websites, podcasts, professional videos, and more.

The Rumblefish client roster boasts hit shows like Entourage, high-growth startups such as Animoto, large media companies including NBC-Universal, HBO, MTV, ESPN and Showtime, every major video game publisher and numerous brands such as adidas, Columbia Sportswear and Kaiser Permanente.