How to license music by Australian artists

Australia has a deep independent music scene, and most of those releases are not sitting in an international stock library. That is an opportunity if you are making something here: real records by real artists, at independent prices, and the only hard part is the paperwork. There are three routes to it.

Route one: direct with the artist

Find the artist, email them, agree a fee and scope, get it in writing. This works, and for a single track from an artist you already know it can be the best option going: nobody takes a cut.

What it costs you is time and certainty. You are drafting the agreement, which means deciding territory, term, exclusivity and permitted use yourself. Many independent artists have never issued a sync licence and will not know what to ask for either. Reply rates are what reply rates are. Budget weeks, not days, and expect to be the one who knows what the document needs to say. The glossary is the place to start.

Route two: a sync agency

Agencies represent catalogues and negotiate placements. If you are licensing music for a national campaign or a broadcast production, this is the right route: they are set up for negotiated deals, rights across masters and publishing, and the scale of paperwork that comes with it.

The trade-off is that agencies are built around deals worth negotiating over. If your budget is a few hundred dollars, the transaction costs more to arrange than it is worth to either side, and the artist's share of what you pay is smaller once the agency takes its cut.

Route three: a marketplace

Terms and prices are set in advance, so licensing is a transaction rather than a negotiation. You pick the track, pick the use, and get a licence. This is usually the most practical route at creator and small-business scale, because it removes the two things that make the other routes slow: drafting and haggling.

The thing to check is what the marketplace actually is. Stock libraries and artist marketplaces both sit in this category and they are not the same product: one sells catalogue music made or owned for licensing, the other licenses real releases by named artists. Both are legitimate; they differ in what you are buying, and in whether a human made it.

What does it cost to license an Australian indie track?

For ordinary creator use, an independent Australian artist's track usually costs tens of dollars, not thousands. On cadential. each song is priced individually per use type in AUD: for an emerging artist, social and podcast licences are typically roughly A$37 to A$67, and YouTube roughly A$41 to A$73.

One-off, per track, per project. No subscription, and the licence does not expire. Film and brand licences are priced higher, and licensing a well-known commercial release is a completely different market: negotiated, and far more expensive.

Where can you use an Australian artist's track?

Wherever your licence's territory clause says. "Australian music" describes where the artist is from, not where you can use the track. cadential. licences are worldwide by default, so a creator in Manchester can license an artist in Melbourne and use the track anywhere, within the licensed use type.

The territory clause is the one to read first if your content has any international audience, which, on the internet, it does.

Where do APRA AMCOS and OneMusic fit?

APRA AMCOS manages songwriters' performance, communication and reproduction rights, and OneMusic, run by APRA AMCOS and PPCA, licenses businesses to play music publicly. Neither replaces a sync licence for putting a song in your video, and a sync licence does not cover playing music in a shop or venue.

Many independent Australian artists are APRA AMCOS members, and that does not stop them licensing sync directly. If you also play music in your business premises, that is public performance, which a sync licence does not include.

How do you check a licence is real?

Ask for a licence number and verify it independently, because a PDF proves nothing on its own. Every cadential. licence has a number that anyone, including you, your client, a broadcaster or a platform, can check at usecadential.com/license/ followed by the licence number. If it does not verify, it is not genuine.

Whichever route you take, a licence is only worth what a third party can verify.

Why do artists get 80% on cadential.?

Because paying independent artists fairly is the reason the platform exists. Of every licence fee paid on cadential., 80% goes to the artist and cadential. keeps 20%. The agreement is non-exclusive and the artist keeps their masters, so licensing here does not stop them licensing the same song anywhere else.

For you as a buyer that changes nothing about the price or the paperwork. It changes where the money lands. For a lot of people making things in Australia, that turns out to matter.

Related guides:

• Is royalty-free music AI-generated?
• Royalty-free music vs a sync licence
• For artists, if you are the one being licensed.

This guide is general information, not legal advice. For advice about your own project, talk to a lawyer. Licence details on cadential. are set out in the licence terms.