Video soundscape

Yesterday, I spent hours auditioning royalty-free music for the video. Choosing the right music is critical to the tone and feel of the project and it's one of the hardest things about the artistic process for me.

You may not ever have listened to royalty-free music on purpose, but I'll bet you've heard it. The background music of training videos, corporate ads, commercials, and TV news programs is the sort of music that can be found in royalty-free collections. Lots of this music is really terrible!

So why use royalty-free? Because getting the rights to songs people would recognise is expensive, time-consuming and complicated. I'm cheap, impatient and lazy. For the cost of a meal, I can download a royalty-free track; for a couple hundred dollars I can buy an entire collection of royalty-free music. Once I've bought it, I can use it as often as I want without paying another yen.

Although inexpensive sometimes means bad, there are some talented musicians working in the field: FreePlay has a good selection and so does Unique Tracks (formerly Loud Neighbors). I love the music at Future Web Sonics but it's not right for the Hello Tokyo project.

I'm not 100% happy with the music I've selected for Hello Tokyo, but I think it's 90% right, so I'm going with it.