If you are looking for royalty-free music for wedding professionals, indie film makers, and so forth, the internet is a great resource. In this week’s Rapid Review, we will be talking about our favorite site, The Music Bed.
Acknowledgement
The first thing I am going to do is preface this review by saying we were not paid or asked to do this review. Every now and then we run into a website or service that does such a great job that we want to give it a shout out, and that is exactly what we have with The Music Bed. The Music Bed is a website for licensing royalty-free music and we loved their selection so much that the almost all of the licensed music that we used for our recent SLR Lounge videos came from The Music Bed. We use them, we love them.
Watch the Video Review
What Makes The Music Bed Great?
So how does it differ from all of the other music licensing websites, you ask? Well, to put it simply, their music is actually really good. The Music Bed does such a great job of finding and curating artists that their library consists of music that you would actually enjoy listening to it as if it was Pandora.
You can search by music genres, music mood, instruments, tempo/BPM, and the type of shoot that you will be using the song for. You can also download watermarked full-length song previews to insert into your video. If you like a particular song, you can then purchase that song and swap it into your edit.
Additionally, their licensing is simple, easy to understand, and affordable. Single-use licenses for wedding photography and videography can be purchased for as low as $49 per song, while indie film-makers can smile as they can get wonderful songs for their film festival works for only $199. The pricing tiers for non-profit and business use is also clearly laid out.
The iPhone and iPad Apps
Finally, The Music Bed now has an App that enables you to listen and find new songs right from your iPhone or iPad. And as long as you have purchased at least 1 license from The Music Bed, you get unlimited full previews of every song in their library. No irritating 30 second clip limitations.
What’s Not So Great
There are two minor areas that I can critique. One, I wish there was a 30 or 60 second preview mode with auto-advance feature available that would automatically move to the next song after one song is done. This way I can listen to multiple tracks quickly while working on other tasks.
Second, while the website design is pleasant, simple and intuitive, I do find it sometimes a bit on the sluggish side. At times I will click and wait a few seconds for it to respond.
Conclusion
Despite those two minor shortcomings, The Music Bed makes the incredibly unenjoyable task of finding the perfect song enjoyable again. An easy to use website, along with awesome royalty-free songs and a simple licensing approach makes it easy for me to give this service 5 stars.
I highly recommend The Music Bed the next time you are looking for royalty-free music.
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