Picking a Perfect Song

For this film opening, my group and I want to use the best quality music as possible to convey the dark tone of the production without it being too overbearing on the audience. We plan on picking a track that sounds subtle, yet dynamically develops to become more dramatic over time. As a bonus, we also thought it could be cool if it ended up matching with the 80’s aesthetic we are heavily applying to the project. This kind of high quality and meticulous music that we wanted was something I could not find for free after searching on popular copyright-free and royalty-free websites such as Incompetech and Bensound. These websites are filled with what I thought were personally corny and generic sounds that would have potentially ruined the atmosphere and distracted the audience. Of course I cannot afford a full professional license as a high school student, so I had to find a good middle ground.

The Middle Ground

Subscription based music services provide a professional quality library of music with royalty-free licensing for each song on their platforms for a relatively small price each month, or in some cases a couple hundred dollars when each monthly purchase is instead combined in a yearly plan. I think this is a reasonable route to go to get great tracks without having to deal with the trouble of either making our own music or purchasing highly expensive licenses. The two services that I looked into were Epidemic Sound and Artlist. Both are well reviewed and have the type of music we were looking for, but after taking a glance at this useful comparison for both I found online, I decided to go with Artlist. My reason behind this decision was the fact that the licensing for all of the songs on the service last forever. Once I download a song, I will be able to use it in any video production for life, even if I unsubscribe in the future. This is perfect for a student production like ours, so I took the leap of faith and began a subscription.

Using Artlist

The search page for Artlist with my selections applied.

I’ve spent some time using Artlist and found it super simple to find very specific music for any occasion. On the side bar, I am able to select specific moods, genres, instrumentation, and types of video production to find a killer track with ease. To find a similar song to the one that we had in mind earlier, I used the selections of dark, synth (driven instrumentation), tense, and cinematic. I went through a decent amount of tracks, but really enjoyed this one as it was simple, reflected the tone of the opening, and built up with the dark 80’s sound we were going for. Check it out:



My group really enjoyed it, with my partner Edward really being on-board with the selection to the point where he claimed it helped him visualize the scene in his head. That’s the moment I knew I picked the perfect song.