I was intrigued last month when I received a mes­sage from web­site AudioMi​cro​.com ask­ing if I was inter­ested in a link exchange. They seem to be an inter­est­ing mix of a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent musi­cal “ser­vices” rolled into one, and I thought they might serve as a good model for com­posers who, like myself, are inter­ested in cre­at­ing musi­cal value online.

On the most basic level, AudioMi­cro sells stock music: music to be used in com­mer­cials or for other sec­ondary pur­poses, which has been released from copy­right by the com­poser for this pur­pose, if you pay a fee. Fine, what­ever, there are a lot of these com­pa­nies online. I’ve actu­ally used them before, for a sec­tion of the opera I am devel­op­ing cur­rently with Colleen Mur­phy and Tapes­try.

But AudioMi­cro goes a lit­tle fur­ther than most. First of all, any­one can upload stock music to sell on their site, as com­pared to most stock music com­pa­nies, which employ a few com­posers to write all the music. Rec­i­p­ro­cally, they are try­ing to reach out to audi­ences other than the typ­i­cal stock music ones—for exam­ple, peo­ple mak­ing YouTube videos. And in addi­tion to their stock music ser­vice, AudioMi­cro has a series of resources for cre­ative artists online. They have a blog ded­i­cated to issues sur­round­ing online music and copy­right, with top­ics rang­ing from indi­vid­ual artists to tech­nol­ogy issues, copy­right law, and reg­u­la­tions. They also have a series of links to other online resources and inter­est­ing artists, cov­er­ing a wide range of inter­ests and gen­res. So you can actu­ally learn some­thing inter­est­ing about music that inter­ests you through their web­site, all while you’re find­ing back­ground music for the video of your cat you want to post online (or at least this seems to be their concept).

So while I gen­er­ally have not found many online music busi­ness mod­els worth endors­ing, I def­i­nitely give these peo­ple credit for try­ing to cre­ate real value. There’s cer­tainly a need for stock music, although it is only a small niche within music in gen­eral. But more inter­est­ingly, AudioMi­cro shows that there are ways to cre­ate value around musi­cal con­tent online, and this is some­thing that I have been sug­gest­ing, for a while now, that com­posers do. My blog shares many of the same goals as AudioMicro’s, and it’s nice to see other peo­ple think­ing along the same track.