The Corporate Video Music Track
A powerful music track can change a corporate video dramatically. Sure there are the times where a company is playing the video silently at their trade show booth, but most of the time, videos are watched and listened to.
The foundation of editing is the soundtrack. Often, when we’re in post production on a corporate video, the audio is the first thing we lay down. This is common with the “documentary” style corporate video. We find all the interview soundbites, lay in the music (so we know where to take a breath for a short video montage to music) and often cut to beat for the high impact sports style corporate video.
The Source of Corporate Video Music
Licensing music is an important aspect of corporate work. Production companies looking to cut corners have placed their corporate clients in danger of legal exposure by the use of unlicensed music. The standard best practices for video production companies is to have a music library they pay for, getting the rights to use it for their corporate clients. But what if they want to use that Journey song from the 70’s? Certainly as much as it’s played, it’s public domain?
No, it’s not. This is biggest place where companies get into legal hot water. Sometimes, the inaccurate public domain excuse is used. Or maybe that it’s for internal use only, so it’s okay. Or it’s just going to be used for a live conference– one time and forgotten. All these uses do require licensing. And it’s not as hard as you might think. A company can easily license song usage with ASCAP and BMI and the cost for internal corporate video use isn’t exorbitant.
Original Music for Corporate Videos
One area that’s a lot of fun is hiring a composer to create original music for a corporate communication project. We had one narrative (movie) style video for a large corporation and the character needed to begin by listening to a country song on the radio. Our composer cooked one up that the client absolutely loved. Original music can bring the level of the production quality up a huge notch.
At the end of the day, it’s about effectively communicating your corporate message. The music shouldn’t distract from that. The point is to enhance the message and get your story out for the maximum effectiveness.
