When adding music to radio adverts there are laws
that radio companies have to follow. Some songs are owned by the artist / band,
unless you have permission to use a certain song then you cannot use it; this
is called copywrite. Royalties means you can play the song but you have to pay
the artist / band to use it. Without music being played in the background of
adverts then they would sound very boring to the audience. This is why music is
important when producing radio adverts. Choosing a certain song will depend on
the context of the advert, for example if the voice over on the advert was
humours and cheerful an upbeat song would be used. Producers usually choose the
music that will work well when advertising a certain product but they don't
always have a wide variety of music to choose from. This is because a lot of
the popular songs played on the radio have copywrites and can't be used for an
advert.
Some advertisers and radio stations aren't too
sure about what songs they are allowed to play so this makes choosing songs a
lot more complicated. Radio stations have licenses to play songs but they do
not allow them to be used for adverts. If an advertising company uses a song
they are not allowed to use, then the legal responsibility is on their hands
and is nothing to do with the radio station.
There a few rules to follow:
Fair use: When a song has copywrite it is illegal
to use, fair use grants limited use of a song without needing permission. As
long as the song cannot be recognized by the audience and isn't played for a
long period of time then it is ok to use; otherwise it is illegal.
Licensing: If you wanted to play certain songs for
radio adverts you can get a license to use the music. Two licenses are needed,
one from the owner of the song and one from the owners of the copywrite.
The 7 second rule: Quite a lot of
radio advertisers use this rule which means you can use 7 seconds of a song in
your advert. This rule does not exist and doing this is breaking the copywrite
law because you need a licence to play any copywrited music.
Strategies: To get a license for a copywrited song is
very complicated and expensive, another option some radio advertiser’s use is
to create your own music and get a musician to perform for you.
A radio station needs a license to use commercial music. Here is a link for a website of a company PRS 'Performance Right Society'. On this website there it has all the information and costs about licenses for music.
http://www.prsformusic.com/users/broadcastandonline/Radio/radio_advertising/Pages/radioadvertising.aspx
A radio station needs a license to use commercial music. Here is a link for a website of a company PRS 'Performance Right Society'. On this website there it has all the information and costs about licenses for music.
http://www.prsformusic.com/users/broadcastandonline/Radio/radio_advertising/Pages/radioadvertising.aspx
In college we have a radio station and use sounds
fx and music. All of this is royalty and copywrite free which means we can use
this in our own radio advertising. None of the songs we use are copywrited so
we didn't pay for any although we do have a library of music that we paid for also.
These can also be used as part of our radio shows and adverts.
Here a few example of sound fx and music we have
for the college radio.
