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Moby (the musical artist and composer, not the whale) recently added a new section to his website called Film Music. The purpose of the film music portion of Moby’s site is “for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short.” If you’ve ever tried to find an affordable composer or navigate the waters of buy-out music for your short film then you know what rough waters it can be. What a great service this is to offer to film and video makers as Moby is a talented and established artist/composer. A filmmaker might never get the opportunity to work with this caliber of music. The tunes run the gamut from short beat driven techno style to some longer moody pieces. One must register and then log in to the site to sample the tracks and then request a license to use the music. The license request asks typical information like descriptions of the film and how it will be used. If you want to use the music in a commercial piece then you apply for a different kind of license with any profits going to the Humane Society. I’ve been thumbing around and sampling the music for a couple of days and I’ve found the site to be a bit buggy. I often get “access denied” messages when I try to log in even though I’ve successfully signed up for an account. And there is also the occasional “404” error as well.

This is the first of this type of thing that I have ever seen from an established artist. How wonderful it would be for filmmakers if other artists began to offer similar things. Get a few different artists with different musical styles and that would be a lot of choices that directors could only dream of having when choosing music for their film. The only worry would be the same music in several works. As long as they don’t screen back to back at a film festival then probably no one would know. Ryan Adams alone could use his catalog to supply a years worth of filmmaking. Thanks to Flippant News for pointing this out.