With stringent
copyright infringement regulations on YouTube, users have often been faced with having to take their videos down for using unlicensed tracks. Rumblefish, an official
YouTube partner, provides artists and music professionals a simplified solution that enables them to monetise content through an automated licensing system and in conjunction with the new Friendly Music website, which allows users to purchase affordable music licenses, original soundtracks for videos can be easily sourced by using the simple cloud-based Mash tool.
Rory Cottle, Head of Innovation at iGroup, says the project took considerably less time to build because of iGroup's Rapid Application Development platform, zeroPoint.
"A project on the scale of the Friendly Music website could have taken twice the time to build with a normal development system, but zeroPoint allows us to plug in customised modules to a standard framework, making it faster to use and easier to customise and build additional functionality in the future," says Cottle.
iGroup's head office is based in Johannesburg, South Africa, but opened a US office in Portland, Oregon last year.
"We felt the time was right to expand our offices and make iGroup into a truly global company," said Marc Seymour, CEO of iGroup. "We have the passion and the expertise to build world-class sites such as the Friendly Music website and the technology we have available to us enables us to work around logistics and different time zones. We're thrilled to be catering for a worldwide audience."
Mood MusicStuck for ideas for your video soundtrack? The unique MoodMap system suggests music for you based on the mood of your video. With options ranging from positive, happy, intense, angry, negative, sad, subdued or serene and everything in between, the MoodMap will help users find the perfect soundtrack for their videos every time.
Tracks can be listened to, mashed with a YouTube video, added to cart or queued to a playlist.
This way, the previously complicated process of licensing music has been stripped down to the basic elements: finding the right music and buying the license.
MoodMap is not the only way to find tracks on Friendly Music - users can use the Occasion section to look for tracks suitable for certain occasions, use the Playlist section to browse hand-picked playlists from the editor or do a traditional search by artist, title, genre or track length. Friendly Music also has an extensive SFX section for a wide variety of sound effects.
Social VideosharingUsers can log in using a variety of social platforms, making it easy to publish and share their video Mashes with friends. Each Mash has a unique link with sharing options, similar to that of a YouTube video.
No software download needed"What makes Friendly Music unique is that no other website allows the cloud-based mixing of videos with licensed soundtracks. That means there's no software to download, making it easy for anyone to add music tracks to their videos," says Josh Friedman, Chief Operating Officer at Rumblefish.
