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I Like Stock/Royalty-Free Music

2 years ago961 words

And it bothers me when I hear it in youtube videos but can't find the piece myself because the youtuber didn't care enough about it to mention what it was called!

The third Atonal Dreams alpha test has technically started, as of a few hours ago... though as far as I can tell, nobody's IMMEDIATELY DIVED IN or anything. Maybe Monday isn't the best time, and I'm aware interest has been waning in general as the months have gone on, and that feedback will probably come in eventually... But I suppose it's unavoidable that I'd feel at least a bit deflated after pushing hard to get to a certain point only to be met with essentially silence.

(Or maybe people don't even know about it? I've restricted it to Gold- and Diamond-tied patrons for now, and posted on Patreon and Discord. I might need to widen the net soon though. Also maybe this happened with the last alpha test, or with every other game test I've ever done; I can't remember!)

I've been wondering what to do next. I'd been intending to just keep working as usual on the game this week, but maybe instead I should take a break while I wait, at least for a day or two? The fact that that thought feels so 'exciting' - not quite the word, but something like that - to me is a sign that maybe I should? Ehh. I'll see how I feel tomorrow. Recently I've been actually enjoying working on Atonal Dreams, after all.

There are other things I'd like to get around to, though. I've mentioned a few times that I'd like to put some musical compositions on YouTube, and I've already set up a (sub-?)channel for that... But I keep putting it off largely because I strongly suspect nobody will care.

Here's a random youtube video that you're extremely unlikely to be even slightly interested in:



It came up in my suggestions since I've watched a few similar Lego-set-building-timelapse videos. That set seems overly complicated, I don't have any strong connection to Ghostbusters, and it costs like a billion moneys, so I wouldn't want to buy it or anything. But I find it strange that it exists at all! Lego has licenses for so many weird franchises and things these days.

The reason I mention that video though is because I watched the whole thing... or rather I listened to the entire thing while paying little attention to the visuals. It's a sequence of what I'm assuming are royalty-free stock music tracks, probably found by searching for 'ghosts' or something on the sort of site you get such music from.

And the pieces are really expertly composed! Whatever minds were behind them must have spent years honing their craft, learning music theory, the relevant software, practising by composing one piece after another as they experiment with techniques, analysing and probably transcribing the pieces of others to learn from them...

But who are these composers? I have no idea, because there's absolutely no mention of the music in the description or anywhere! And why would there be? I mean, it's just royalty-free music, right? Those things just, like, come into being somehow, don't they? And they're pretty much like wallpaper anyway so why even pay them any mind?? Their only purpose is to fill the silence, after all. It's not like they're music.

I saw a youtuber joking once about the very idea of listening to royalty-free music in his free time, for fun.

It frustrates me as a composer who's travelled this journey - though not, I'd say, as far as whoever was behind the compositions in that video - knowing the end results are so generally unappreciated, culturally-speaking, while people GO NUTS for simplistic, formulaic, or outright vulgar pop songs ∞ that all use the same chords ∞ because they have attractive, famous faces behind them, or because of social factors like how they'd affect one's image or what others appear to like because they've been told that's what they should like...

So many people say they "love music!", or list it high among their primary interests, but they probably mostly mean the sociocultural factors rather than the technical structure of the compositions. So technically excellent music barely even registers as such if it isn't wrapped in all that external fluff.

Or something. I don't know. I feel like I've talked about this before! In fact I'm fairly sure I have talked about it on this blog before, but it's something that bothers me all the time, so I'm venting about it again!!

I should put some of my music on YouTube anyway. I'm proud of it, at least, and even if hordes of people wouldn't go wild for it, a couple of other eccentrics might get at least something out of it. Maybe.

I do wish youtubers had to specify which pieces of music they use, though, so I could find them and appreciate them properly!

Or that there was some kind of app or website or other service that could identify music... I've certainly searched for such things in the past! But they only seem to recognise well-known pop songs and classical music; the sort of stuff that'd be well-known enough to have been worth manually adding to some database or whatever.

(In the case of the video included here, I could technically rip the sound and cut it up myself... but it feels wrong because I don't know the names of the composers or pieces. Most videos just have the stock tracks as background behind the far-more-interesting-to-most human talking over the top though, and can't just be ripped directly.)

Anyway. Yes. RANT OVER.