With video marketing now more effective than ever, having a go-to source of music is important for any content creator. In the last few years, Musicbed has become our most common source of licensed music for our SLR Lounge videos and our wedding cinematography. Simply put, their music selection is diverse, highly curated, and easy-to-find. In fact, we’ve licensed over 300 songs with them over the last 5 years, making them a sizable, yet necessary expense for our businesses.
As you may imagine, we were absolutely ecstatic when we found out that they were offering an annual subscription. For a business like ours, this is the perfect way for us to save money without sacrificing the quality of our music selection.
How Much Is it?
The membership pricing (As of the time of this article) start from $8.33 to $99.99 (See the charts below). In comparison, their per license pricing starts at $49.99.
This means that as long as you’re creating at least one video every couple of months, the subscription route is probably the better way to go.
Paid Monthly
Prepaid
Who Will Benefit?
The following businesses/artists should take note and consider joining their memberships:
- Youtube Creators
- Filmmakers
- Video Production Companies
- Wedding Cinematographers
- Wedding Photographers who produce slideshows often
- Small businesses heavily reliant on video content
What happens when the membership expires?
This was one of the biggest questions we had with the membership. The last thing you want or need in your business is to get stuck paying perpetual fees for music in an old video from years ago.
The good news is that even if your membership expires, your videos are still covered and you do not need to take them down.
Watch the Video Review
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.
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.
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.
