While wandering around some of the smaller booths in the back of the lower south hall a stock music site called ScoreKeepers Music caught my eye when I saw “virtual music supervisor” flash by on their sizzle reel playing in their booth. All editors who have searched endlessly for hours on end trying to find that perfect music track would love to have a music supervisor on staff so I stopped by to see what this virtual music supervisor was all about.
In its simplest form the ScoreKeepers virtual music supervisor is a much more in-depth way to search for stock music than I’ve seen at a lot of sites. Moving beyond the usual genre, tempo and mood type search strings ScoreKeepers adds both an energy and scenes search criteria. Imaging searching for Scenes > Contest TV > The Reveal-Winner. That’s getting into some pretty narrow search parameters that could shave a lot of time off of a music search. You can try the virtual music supervisor for yourself right on the web. Beyond the VMS, ScoreKeepers offers a great browsing interface, waveform previews via a list view and a click to move the playhead to any part of the waveform. There are full like suggestions after you preview a track and integration with NLEs via ALE and XML as well.
ScoreKeepers Music isn’t at the lower tier of stock music sites were you pay $30 and you’re done. They “are the ’keepers’ of 75,000+ tracks from Emmy Award-winning composers and emerging indie artists” so licensing is a bit more complex than that but talking to the ScoreKeepers rep they can be affordable for smaller productions. They also offer original scoring and a long credit list of broadcast television.
Rates vary depending on the type of production and the length of the program and where it is being broadcast. An example would be a Corporate video with a Worldwide license for viewing on the Web; a 1 year term for a track would be $200. Those licenses run the gamut from broadcast tv, to film distribution (DVD, festival, theatrical) down to industrial and web. Contact ScoreKeepers Music for more information.