Thread: Affordable Music for Bellydancers

There have been many discussions about rights and use of music by dancers wishing to make DVD/videos of their work for relatively small sale numbers in their local area. Costs of well known music and the disinterest from big companies to deal with low numbers have made legal licensing of music difficult. The BDSS organization and our record labels receive a wide array of music that often is perfect for a bellydancer but not of sufficient production value for our front line releases on the Bellydance Superstars, Desert Roses, Bellybeat or Belly Bar series. We have structured deals with some of this music to make available to dancers who can afford $100 a track, but not $1,000. We are making more deals to bring in more music to be available at affordable rates. We are in the process of setting up access to this music on the new revamped BDSS web site which will be launched shortly. Listening to the music, getting a license and downloading it for use will be all there on the site. Easy, painless, affordable, and legal. ..g.: We hope this can become a valuable service to the bellydance community and help keep music use legal.

This is super exciting!

Now, THIS is uber-cool!

Miles, that's great. Thank you. I would so much deal direct with you to license music for dvd sales, at a reasonable rate -
looking forward to it.

This sounds great!

Miles, what a great idea! This is super-helpful!

Wow, that's AWESOME!

You are awesome! What an excellent opportunity.
xo, B

Miles, the concept sounds really great! I've really appreciated your input on the tribe.net threads about music copyright & licensing issues, and it's great to see you using your position in the market to bridge the gap between dancer budgets and music licensing fees.

I have a question. You said, "There have been many discussions about rights and use of music by dancers wishing to make DVD/videos of their work for relatively small sale numbers in their local area." Does your planned licensing arrangement encompass dancers wishing to create formal instructional or performance videos to be sold on a national or even worldwide level? Or were you thinking more in terms of souvenir videos from local shows? Ie, would the kind of pricing structure you're talking about apply equally to someone who expects to distribute 500 copies per year as to someone who expects to sell no more than 30-40 total?

Music licensing has been such a stumbling block for dancers wishing to make commercially-available instructional or performance videos. Even if a dancer has the financial backing to pay for licensing, the legal intricacies of licensing music from another country are rather daunting. You're offering us a very elegant solution.

I wondered the same thing as Shira. The locally-distributed videos are usually videos of haflas or workshop shows featuring a variety of local dancers. I'm not sure it's feasible to get invitees to a show to choose only music from a limited pool of not-quite-ready-for-prime-time-distribution songs. And not financially feasible to license 25 songs (the average number in a show lineup around here) at $100 each when you're only likely to sell 40 videos at $10-20 each.

But of course, Miles knows that. I'm not sure what else might be meant by 'regional' in this context, though.

If a dancer can license a song for $100, choreograph it, and market an instructional video of the choreography, that's a GREAT deal! But why would she only market it regionally?

I'm confused.

Whhooooo hooooo!

This sounds great. Perhaps you can put a printable license to every song? In germany we have lots of troubles with the GEMA (the same like ASCAP etc.).
So if we can show something....