Licensing
Our music is available to license for your own projects. You can purchase a license to use Blue Dot Sessions in your podcast, film or other media. When you purchase a license you’ll be sent the high-quality WAV files as well as any stem files and variation files for the track. You can license whole albums (or “sessions”) for your project allowing you a consistent musical palette to work from.
All of the recordings we make here at Blue Dot are available under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International). This means that you can use the music for free so long as you give us credit and your project is in essence non-commercial.
Making original music available to creators and storytellers is an important part of our goal as a studio. We work with lots of artists to make their projects happen using our free non-commercial license. It’s how we got started in radio and audio production and it’s something we want to pass on to others.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Do I need a License?
Noncommercial can be a little confusing, but it essentially means that the project is not intended to make money for you or anyone else. If you are hired to make a video for someone, or making a crowdfunding page or producing any kind of product, you probably can’t use a noncommercial license. If you are making a personal video, creating educational materials for a class or working on your thesis, the use is probably noncommercial.
You can read more about the noncommercial license here
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Which license should I choose?
It depends on the project using the music. We use a very simple system based on the overall budget.
This is not always an easy thing to work out, but it doesn’t need to be exact: here are a few guidelines:
The budget includes the salaries or paid time of anyone who’s job it was to produce the work in question. For example, if the music is used in a weekly radio show for which the producer receives X per year. Then the budget includes X divided by 52 (weeks, or however many shows are made).
“The project” in this case means everything involved in creating the work in question, not just the aspect of the project that involves our music.
In the case of a crowdfunding video, the budget is considered to be the fundraising goal of the campaign (this is different from how we calculate the budget of other projects).
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How do I give credit?
If you’ve purchased a license for the music, you aren’t required to give credit at all (although we really do appreciate it!).
If you’re using the music under our noncommercial license then you are required to give credit, don’t worry it’s really simple!
You can use the following format:
Track Name by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).
If you are making media that has credits as part of it, like at the end of a short film or radio show, please include this text or say something like “Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions”. If it’s just a short film without credits than it can be included in the video description or other text where the media is embedded.
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What are stem files?
Stem files are the individual tracks from our recording sessions at Blue Dot Studios, separated by instrument.
We include these files because we found them so useful ourselves when scoring our own radio stories. Often a recording would fit pretty well but there would be a moment where we would want to remove the main melody line, or just use the background atmospheric sounds.
Most people won’t need the separate tracks but for some they can be very helpful in the mixing process.
When you’ve selected a recording to license it should say if there are stem files and how many different tracks are included.