Leading Leaders is a non-profit educational organization that teaches kids about art, understanding art, and helping kids express themselves and their feelings through art. Our music is featured in this really nice YouTube film documenting the project. In the film we get to learn about the project and to hear some insights from teachers, volunteers and students alike.

The music you can hear throughout the film is the track Day After Day composed by Pawel Blaszczak. A royalty-free music track which - as you can see from the film - is not fingerprinted by YouTube, not in a Content ID program, and thus does not cause the video to be sullied by advertising or nasty copyright warnings from YouTube. (This is the case with all our music. We do not fingerprint our music - see this article for details.)

The film itself was created with the help of Peter Galperin and David Frieberg at Significant Films, a creative company that produces short films for big events. Highly original, engaging, theme-based films that entertain and inspire at special events, or online.

At Shockwave-Sound.com we represent about 150 different music composers/producers who receive their royalties from us quarterly. We've been using Paypal Mass Pay to pay out their royalties and the Paypal fee for this has been capped at $1 per recipient. So when we sent out royalties to 150 receivers, it cost us $150. No problem.

Last month however, Paypal massively increased the fee for sending Mass Pay, to 2% of the value of the payment, up to a max of $45 per recipient. This means that when we now pay out royalties to 150 composers, it costs us over $1,000 in Paypal FEE for one Mass Pay. This represents a price increase overnight over several hundred percent!

The Mass Pay function is a fully automated operation that nobody in Paypal has to lift a finger to make happen. As a Paypal user we do the whole operation ourselves, using our Paypal account screen. It seems excessive to me, for Paypal to charge over $1,000 in fee for one automated process.

Looks like Paypal are starting to realize some of the monopoly they have on this market and is starting to maximize profit by blackmail type fees. :-(

Ironically, it's still slightly cheaper than sending 150 international bank wire transfers, and of course, the Paypal Mass Pay is a lot less work.

We have communicated this with our composers and they have kindly agreed to share the new 2% Paypal fee with us, so we are now paying 1% and the composers the other 1%, and I guess we can just about live with that.

From time to time we like to give a mention to a project where we feel that our customer has used our music in a cool way, or in a nice project. One such project is the new iPhone and iPod Touch game, "Hanzi Warrior", up for release on 11/11/11, including our royalty-free Chinese music track "Zhongdu".

Hanzi Warrior is a neat game in which you can learn Chinese and save the earth! Gong Gong has created a hole in the sky. Yellow Dragon holds the key to repair the sky. There are over 28 worlds across five realms. Unite the winds to summon Yellow Dragon.
Learn Chinese, Save the Earth, and have a great time doing it. An entertaining and educational game for iPhone and iPad.

We thank the developers, Difint, for using our music in this cool game, and we'd like to suggest you check out the game trailer video at YouTube.

The "Suggested Production Types" music browsing tool is something that we introduced to our site quite recently. We used to have just a list of Music Genres (Jazz, Rock, Classical, Ambient...) and nothing else. But searching for the right music for your project can be more complicated than that. You may not know exactly which "music genre" you are looking for. You may simply be looking for something - anything - that works for your project.

This is why we introduced the Suggested Production Types. You can find this as a Browse button in the music browsing tool on the right-hand side of our site. Click on Suggested Production Types and you'll be able to click on things like "Relaxation, Spa & Indulgence" or "Spy, Secret Agent, Undercover" and more, to bring up a list of music tracks that we felt would work well in those types of productions - regardless of the actual music genre of that track.

Additionally, we've written a page where we illustrate and explain a little bit about what we mean by the various "Suggested Production Types" and what criteria we've used when selecting music tracks for each of them. A little bit of background as to what makes certain music / sounds work well for a particular genre of production, be it a video game, TV show, YouTube video, or any other media.

Should you be interested in reading about each of our Suggested Production Types and the thought process behind them, click here. Hope you enjoy it.

It's almost Christmas time again and we can see that time coming, as people start buying royalty free Christmas music from our catalogue. Tracks like "We Wish You a Merry Christmas", "Jingle Bells", "Silent Night" and "O Come All Ye Faithful" are so popular that many of our composers have made their own versions of these, from the straightforward and cosy to the cool and funked-up, to the downright silly. We also have a lot of Christmas music that aren't actually traditional or well-known tracks, but that are new, original compositions made by our own composers in a Christmas style. We call this area New & Fun Christmas Music so if you're looking for something a little bit different for this year's Christmas presentation or electronic Christmas greeting card, you may want to check out those tracks.

But where are the other famous Christmas classics, such as Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow and others? What about Walking In A Winter Wonder Land? Why don't we have it? We get customers writing in and asking about these tracks and about why they can't find them on our site. It seems odd for us to have 66 search results for "Jingle Bells", but nothing for other famous Christmas classics like the two I just mentioned and Frosty the Snowman? What's up with that?

The simple answer is, that these "missing" Christmas tracks are under copyright and therefore cannot be offered up as royalty free music / stock music / library music, by anyone. In contrast to "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" and "Jingle Bells" where the actual compositions are in the public domain, and only the recording and arrangement is in copyright to who ever actually created that recording -- these other tracks including Frosty the Snowman have the actual composition still under copyright to the authors and their publishers. Therefore, these tracks cannot be done up as royalty-free music and this explains why you can't find them here, or indeed on any other music licensing website:

• Frosty the Snowman
• Holly Jolly Christmas
• Let it Snow
• Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
• Walking in the Winter Wonderland
• Rocking Around the Christmas Tree
• ...and others

We are a little bit bummed out about this, because several years ago we actually spent quite a lot of time and energy on making our own arrangements and versions of these tracks, and we have some pretty good recordings of these tracks that we've played and made ourselves. We wrongly assumed that these compositions were public domain until just before we were going to start selling them from our site.

Anyway, for those of you who were looking for this, and possibly other Christmas tunes that you can't find on our site -- that is the explanation. Merry Christmas!