Getty Images launches music service
Getty Images, one of the biggest stock-photo houses, has launched a music licensing business designed to give broadcasters, movie makers and advertisers quick access to songs.
The commercial service was built with the help of Pump Audio, which Getty acquired in June. The music unit is only the start for Getty, which plans to expand the kind of content it offers.
The service will start with 20,000 original tracks by independent artists, the company said in a statement Monday. That number is tiny when compared with music libraries offered by consumer services.
For example, iTunes now boasts more than 6 million songs. Even tiny SpiralFrog, which launched its music site last month with songs from only one of the four major record labels, has about 800,000 songs.
Getty said in a statement that the company intends to partner with major record labels and publishers.
Greg Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. E-mail Greg, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sandoCNET. 
only makes sense if those companies were getting into licensing
music - a completely different business from merely selling or
listening to music.
Getty won't make any revenue from selling music having people
"tune in." Music licensing is a unique and entirely separate
business and the size of their library should be compared to
other music libraries who offer music licensing online (which I
will admit, based on the bankroll behind the stock photo
behemoth, now stand a pretty good chance of being beaten into
the ground by a giant gorilla named Getty).
artists in, making it seem like artists keep their publishing
rights.
In fact, the company re-titles and re-publishes the song under
the company's name, in effect taking the artists' publishing
rights and royalties. They can then sell-out the artists work for
cheap, because the real money is made down the road in
royalties. They market the library to filmmakers and ad agencies
as "representing indie artists," all while turning a huge profit.
This is exactly why we started our own artist-run non-profit,
Waxfruit, and our own indie music licensing site
(www.Flicktracks.org if anyone is interested). All our artists keep
all their publishing royalties & copyrights. The money that
comes in from placement fees is shared evenly between the
artists and funding the organization's pro-artist projects.
We're small, but we're growing steadily. Our roster is selected by
an experienced volunteer A&R board, so what we do have is of
high quality and personality.
The more professional artists out there who pay attention to
their rights are very appreciative of what we're trying to do.
Hopefully, artists making films and other productions will feel
the same, and turn to resources like ours as an alternative to
these behemoth corporate stock houses.
I'd love to hear what people think of our project. What else can
we do to make it work? What other creative things are people
doing to keep online indie music free from big corporate
ownership?