Hello everyone, I am currently in the process of putting together our team’s reveal video. I have a particular song I want to use, but I don’t know how to get access to it to use it. I know I have seen some teams using songs by Macklemore, and BLRS used “Who Let the Dogs Out.” Do you know how they went about gaining access to these songs to include them in their videos, without their videos getting taken down for copyright claims on YouTube?
It looks like there is a way to attribute the music in YouTube, but I don’t know how to do it, or go about gaining access to it in the first place. I would like to pull it into my editing software (Da Vinci Resolve) so I can include it in my video.
Any input would be greatly appreciated!
tl;dr I want to know how to use popular music in my robot reveal (preferably legally), without the video getting taken down.
There’s pretty much no way you’re going to get rights to any popular song. Your best hope, and what happens in the case of most of those reveal videos, is that rather than the rights holder taking the video down (which they are within their rights to do), they instead just do the thing where the song gets automatically listed below the video (that’s what the attribution actually is, YouTube automatically detecting the song being included) and they play ads against the video and take the ad revenue.
EDIT: And to be clear, none of this is legal advice, and technically doing it and hoping you just get away with it is, in my not a lawyer opinion, just straight up illegal copyright violation.
I’ve made a handful of reveal videos with copyrighted music and none have been taken down (so far). YouTube automatically detects and credits any songs that they know are copyrighted, demonetizes the video. As previously mentioned, the right’s holders are free to take it down, but they’ve tended to just let us be. (This not official legal advice)
As for how to get the mp4, wav, or whichever audio file type you’re using, you probably won’t be able to download it legally. There are multiple sites that allow you to illegally download songs from YouTube to mp3, but once again, this is illegal. This is not legal advice and I do not condone breaking copyright law.