Why your film can’t use your first-dance song

Everybody asks. The song you danced to, the one from that first summer, the one playing when you met — you want it under the film, and it is the most reasonable request in the world. The answer is usually no, the reason has nothing to do with your editor being difficult, and almost nobody explains it. So here it is.

There are two copyrights in a song and you need both

• The composition — the song as written. Owned by the songwriters and their publisher.
• The recording — that specific performance, the one you actually know. Owned by whoever released it, usually a label.

Putting music to picture is called synchronisation, and it needs permission from both owners: a sync licence for the composition and a master use licence for the recording. Two owners, two negotiations, and neither is sold over a counter. Buying the track, streaming it or owning the record gets you none of it — those buy the right to listen, which is a different right entirely.

For a well-known record the practical answer is not “expensive”. It is that the licence does not exist at the scale of one wedding: there is no desk at a major label where an individual buys the right to put a hit under a nine-minute film. Wedding films you have seen doing it are either unlicensed or made by people who have accepted the consequences below.

What actually happens when you post it

None of this is enforced by lawyers. It is enforced by fingerprinting — every major platform scans uploaded audio against a database of commercial recordings, automatically, within minutes.

• YouTube claims it. The video usually survives, but the rights holder takes it over: adverts appear on your wedding, and it can be blocked in whichever countries that owner chooses.
• Instagram and Facebook mute it. Often not immediately — a film can sit up for weeks and then go silent — and the mute is frequently applied to the whole video rather than the offending section, so the vows and the speeches go with the song.
• Vimeo removes it. It is the strictest of the three and the one that matters most here, because wedding films are very often delivered as a Vimeo link rather than posted socially.

That last one is the outcome worth avoiding, and we say so from experience rather than in the abstract: our own delivery pages are Vimeo-hosted. A muted Instagram post is annoying. A take-down is the film itself going away, from the place you were sent to watch it, years later, with no warning.

The distinction almost everyone misses

Scoring a film with a record is not the same act as filming a room that a record happens to be playing in.

Your first dance, shot as it happened, with the song coming off the DJ’s speakers and your uncle shouting over the bridge, is the music being part of the event. Laying the studio master under a montage is using it as your soundtrack. In rights terms both are uses; in practice the platforms treat them very differently, because a fingerprint is looking for a clean match and a ballroom full of people is not one.

Which is why the real first dance usually survives on a wedding film and the montage usually does not. It is also why we would rather cut those moments with the room’s own sound than replace it — it sounds like your wedding rather than a music video, which was the point of filming it.

This is a description of how the platforms behave. The platforms are not the law, none of this is legal advice, and if a film is going anywhere commercial you want somebody who does this properly.

What editors use instead

Licensed music libraries — Musicbed, Artlist, Soundstripe and Epidemic Sound are the common ones. A studio pays a flat annual fee and gets a licence covering both the composition and the recording for everything in the catalogue, which is the whole reason those companies exist. We licence through Musicbed, and The Loaner has a music form that asks for exactly this: paste links, or simply name the songs you love and we find the closest licensable match.

It is much better than “royalty-free music” sounds. These catalogues are written specifically for film, by people who know a wedding edit needs a slow first ninety seconds and a lift where the speeches end, and a good editor is not choosing by title at all — they are choosing tempo, where the vocal enters and where it opens up, because those decide where every cut in the film lands.

What you can actually do

1. Send your editor the songs anyway, as references rather than requests. “These four” tells them tempo, era and mood in a way that no adjective does, and a library track chosen against your references will fit the film better than a stated genre would. It is the whole design of our own music form, and it is the request editors actually want.
2. Ask about a per-track licence. There is a small trade in licensing real commercial records for online video — Lickd is the best-known — which will clear a genuine record for a real but survivable price. Read what it covers before paying: these licences are usually scoped to one platform or one channel rather than to a file you keep forever.
3. Keep the actual song where it belongs. In the room, on the day, on the film as it sounded, with everyone shouting over it.
4. Ask for a licensed cover. Several libraries stock properly cleared re-recordings of well-known songs — not the record you love, but the song, legitimately, which is sometimes enough.

And if you want one private cut with the actual record for yourselves, understand what you are trading: nothing scans a file sitting on your own drive, but the moment it is uploaded anywhere it is fingerprinted, private link or not. A hosted video is still a hosted video.

The part nobody expects

Films with less music in them are usually better. The best minute in most wedding films is a voice — a vow, a bad joke landing in a speech, a father losing it halfway through a sentence — and a song laid over that is competing with the exact thing you wanted to keep.

Heavy scoring is very often covering weak audio, because when the voices were not recorded properly there is nothing else to carry the film. Which makes the ceremony microphone worth more to your film than the soundtrack is — fifty dollars, spent on the day, that no amount of music fixes afterwards.