Dryden Just Spent $15,528 on Killer Tracks Music
NASA DFRC Award: Production Music Contract
“Contract Award Amount: 15528.00
Contractor: UNIVERSAL MUSIC/KILLER TRACKS 2110 COLORADO AVENUE SUITE 110 SANTA MONICA, CA 90404
Classification Code: A — Research and Development
NAICS Code: 512110 – Motion Picture and Video Production”
Keith’s update: Looks like someone did not get the memos.
The draft RFP for this was a hot mess. We actually looked at it as we had some contacts in the music business, and originally it sounded as though they were looking for original compositions. But the RFP was so confusing no one could tell. When the revision came out it was obvious they wanted to buy rights to an existing catalog, and a high-class one at that. My questions were, one, why not one catalog for all NASA video products agency-wide; and, two, why aren’t they using Creative Commons or commissioning their own original work? How about a contest to generate some good publicity?
“ why not one catalog for all NASA video products agency-wide“
I agree 100%, not just because it’s cost effective, but because a simple piece of music, well chosen, can give you more recognition and better promotion than thousands of expensive words. And once it takes off, everyone who hums it, sings it, or even makes fun of it becomes part of your worldwide sales force, potentially for a long time — at no additional cost to you!
“Hold the pickles, Hold the lettuce“…
Not having looked recently, so I’m not sure, but typically, licensing for stock footage/music has a geographical restriction. So GM or Warners can’t buy one license and use it all over the world, but they could use it in one production facility, which might be multiple buildings in a single city. This isn’t all that different from licensing any other IP on a site license. Go license a IP core from Xilinx, for instance..
Then all the more reason to use Creative Commons or commission their own.
I suspect you’ve never had to do industrial (e.g. small scale) video production on a day in and day out basis and used a library like this. Have you looked at what’s in the Killer Tracks library? It’s something like hundreds if not thousands of CDs worth of music. There’s no way you could commission that many hours of music for $15k. And NASA lawyers are civil servants so they’re not expensive, but the acquisition process to negotiate that commission would be expensive and painful. It would cost more than that to try and locate the thousands of pieces needed that are CC or PD (and make sure that the licensing is appropriate). It’s not the composition costs, either, it’s the cost of the performance (hiring an orchestra isn’t cheap) Given the size of the library, it costs substantially more than $15k that to properly index and file them all.
What you get with a music library like this is the convenience and ability to find (quickly) a piece of music for background or interstitial in a video production. You have a search engine that lets you identify potential candidates (selecting by tempo, key, style, orchestration). This is a pretty time consuming process if all you have is a pile of CDs. I suspect a lot of what you’re paying for is not so much the large music collection, but the time savings of having a good indexing and selection system. It also has lots of similar but different pieces of music, so people watching that training video don’t go “not Handel’s Water Music again” It’s a moderately expensive tool that can save hours of work in production. Think of it like a CAD tool for video production, similar to a high end mechanical CAD or RF design tool with an extensive library of components already loaded in.
Or as another comparison, it’s like getting access to a library full of books with a catalog and summaries, as opposed to a warehouse full of boxes of books on pallets.
This is just stupid… how NASA allocates and disperses funds, in spite of sequestration, is just wrong.
There needs to be a forensic audit of the entire agency so we can really see where the dollars are being spent.