Is it feasible for a one person indie game development project to license popular professional music for their video game, or is the process too complicated and require attorneys, contacts and negotiations? I’d like to have some short cuts of popular songs from artists like Rage Against the Machine in my medieval combat/strategy game I’m working on. This is just a hobby for me, but if I do get lucky and make millions, I don’t want anything to stand in the way of that.
If possible, how? Maybe websites where you can easily purchase music licenses? Kind of how legalzoom.c0m makes it easy to do certain legal tasks.
It is completely possible for indie developers to license popular music to place in games/apps, however it is not an easy process. You could do it on your own, by contacting the record companies. It would be much better, however, to hire an attorney to do it for you.
As my attorney has told me in the past “legal speak is a language of it’s own” and he couldn’t be more right. When licensing anything from another company there is guaranteed to be a contract littered with tons of “legal speak” that (unless you have extensively studied law) you will not understand.
Not to mention negotiations will be difficult for an individual to pull off. As an indie developer a record company could pretty much charge you anything they wanted since (especially if you are just starting off) you don’t really have a large fan-base and their records won’t get much publicity from it. Not to mention, if you haven’t already established yourself with a couple of good releases how will they know you product will be any good? They don’t want to make a bad name for themselves by attaching their product to a poor release.
My suggestion would be to get a lawyer (many offer free consultations) and speak with them about this. They would know much more about the process then anyone here as I highly doubt anyone here has done this on their own without a lawyer.
Also: Unless you are just doing this project for fun and you don’t plan on releasing feel free to use whatever song you want. But if you plan on releasing it to the world do NOT put anything you don’t have a license, lease, or some other agreement to use in your game.
Now that pirating has become an issue many companies are starting to crack down HARD on unlicensed use of their products.