I am currently working on a website which will also feature some short movies that eventually will be uploaded to YouTube. It is a real estate based site, and i saw on Ebay "Royalty Free Music" CD collections which i am planning to buy to use as a soundtrack on my movies. Could someone here please confirm that it is 100% legal to use them on the videos? I believe they are okay, but i would like to double check. Please help! Thanks
For a definative answer, do not rely on DP. Check with ASCAP, the association that handles music licensing.
if they say it is royalty free then it should be ok. ask them if they own the music. that is the most important.
"Royalty free" does not mean it is in the public domain. It might allow you to use it without royalties but with some restrictions (most common restriction is that you can't make copies of the CD and sell them). Music which is in the public domain has no restrictions and is also royalty free, but we don't know if this specific CD has public domain music or not. You can try looking for other sources of music also. If you look in the FAQ for archive.org you can CONTROL-F search for "public domain" and find a URL for searching for items which mention a public domain license. Then use the pulldown menu to restrict the search to Audio>Music and see if there's anything suitable. Looking on eBay for '"public domain" music' right now shows someone in the UK who thinks that 1950s music is in the public domain. The UK does have a 50 year copyright on music, but the song and lyrics has a copyright until 70 years after the author's death. So the audio might be in the public domain, but there are restrictions on what you can do with the lyrics of most songs which were recorded in the 1950s. Using it as audio might be OK in some situations, but discussing the lyrics in your blog would be more complicated especially if you list all of the lyrics of the song.