Buying a license from The Audio Village from our Library of music means that you are agreeing to the Terms and Conditions of Acceptable Use (hereafter TCAU) that we set forth. Basically, it means that you are buying the right to use one of our pieces free of any recurring royalty fee for your project. Once you purchase the license, you legally have the right to use that piece of music in any way that conforms to our TCAU. You will not ever incur any royalty charges for using the piece. Your license does not expire, and you are not limited to using the piece on only one project. It can be used on multiple instances where you feel our music would fit your production needs.

Depending on which option you purchase for each piece, the license includes the rights to use the included files as you see fit (again, as long as it conforms to our TCAU). If you purchase a "Finished Piece" license, you will be able to download from your account a CD quality (44.1kHz/16-bit) .WAV file of the complete piece. If you purchase a "+ Stems" license, you will be to download from your account CD quality (44.1kHz/16-bit) .WAV files of each individual stem listed for that piece along with the full Finished Piece. Some stems may have multiple instruments on them, but they are divided up by logical groupings, and many are panned hard left and right for you to be able to further extract only the tracks you desire.

For a more thorough listing of acceptable use, please refer to our TCAU. A general summary would be that any production that is not used commercially can use music licensed from The Audio Village. This means that any production that would make money by using your license is not an acceptable use of your license. Please contact us if you would like to use one of our pieces commercially - specialuse@theaudiovillage.com.

A couple of notable exceptions are:

• non-profits who may use their license in avenues that would be considered commercial
• independent short films whose duration is less than 30 minutes

Any non-commercial production may use their purchased license. There is no audience size cap, so a non-commercial production may use their license in front of as many people as they wish, including digital media such as YouTube, Vimeo, etc. (again, provided the production is not for sale but viewable for free.)

NO. The artists whose music is featured on The Audio Village retain all rights to their music, including copyright and publishing. By purchasing a license, you are entering into an agreement with their artist whereby they allow you to use their piece royalty-free, and you are agreeing to use it according to our TCAU. Any production who uses their purchased license outside of the TCAU will be considered in copyright violation.

No. When you purchase a license from The Audio Village, you are purchasing the right to use that piece for your production, but it in no way assures you exclusive use of that song. However, if you are concerned with maintaining a unique creation for your production, we recommend either purchasing a "+ Stems" license, which will allow you to edit & mix the piece to suit your needs, or let us create a Custom piece for your production.

We will be happy to create a custom piece for your production. Please view our Custom Music page to get started!

Yes, if you desire. Any custom music that The Audio Village creates for your production will entitle you to exclusive use of that piece of material for any application you desire (you do not have to adhere to our TCAU for Custom Music).

However, if you would be willing to allow us to use it in our Library, the cost for creating a custom piece will decrease by $200. In this case, you will retain the option to purchase exclusive rights at any later date for $200 should you decide to. Any licenses sold of your piece in the meantime will still stand for those who purchased them.

If you want exclusive rights, we can work with you on making sure your piece is published as you desire.

When you purchase a license for a "Finished Piece", you are purchasing a single .WAV file: mixed, mastered, and complete. The file you download will sound like any song you would hear on a CD. However, when you buy a "+ Stems" license, you will be able to download each individual instrument from the song on its own track (or group of tracks). For example, if you purchase a "+ Stems" license for the song "Adopted", one of the files you will be able to download will be the piano track by itself. Another individual download will be the marching snare drums. Perhaps it will best suit your production to use only the piano track, or you decide that you want to start off your unique piece with the marching snare section - without any other instruments. Buying a "+ Stems" license enables you to take CD quality, studio-produced tracks and mix-and-match them as you wish. For more about that, keep reading...

Specific terms are spelled out in our TCAU, but the basic rule of thumb is that you can the stems in any way you desire other than using them in a different song that you would then sell or that would be used for commercial purposes. In other words, you cannot take a Pad stem from one of our pieces and put it on top of your band's song which you then sell physically/digitally. You may add extra instruments to our licensed pieces if you desire. You may also manipulate each stem as you wish - crop it, compress it, EQ it, reverse it, add reverb, delay, whatever. Make it your own! Just don't use it elsewhere and sell it. :-)

Additionally, importing each stem at default volume and pan will yield the same volume and pan as heard in the finished piece. Thus, simply import all files "as is" to start with the finished piece, and adjust from there!

All of the stems are bounced from "zero", which means that if you import all of the stems straight into your audio editing program, they will line up as they do in the finished piece. Therefore, if a kick drum doesn't start until 3:15, there will be 3:14 of silence at the beginning of the stem. This allows you to keep the structure of the original piece if you want to, and won't require you to hunt-and-fish for the exact right place to drop a stem into your song. Feel free to move/copy/paste the stems wherever you want. They are provided as the full length of the song for your benefit. Additionally, importing each stem at default volume and pan will yield the same volume and pan as heard in the finished piece. Thus, simply import all files "as is" to start with the finished piece, and adjust from there!

Also, each license will include vital information on the piece, such as tempo & marker points. This will allow you to create a tempo grid and quickly and accurately, moving stems to new places without the hassle of re-syncing them to the beat.