Sean Corbett:
Good day everybody. It’s Sean Corbett, Websites.ca marketing. For today’s episode I brought in a very interesting expert that’s a little bit outside our normal comfort range because I want to expose you guys to a resource that every business owner should know about. So today we’re joined by Kevin MacLeod. He’s a musician, a composer, and a creator of Incompetech, which is the best royalty free music website on the internet. So Kevin, thank you very much for joining us.

Kevin MacLeod:
Thank you so much. Good times.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. I think we were talking before, and I was going to say it was the largest, and you were saying, well, I’m not sure if it’s the largest, but I mean, you have a ton of music on your website.

Kevin MacLeod:
It’s the bestest! It’s been used a long time, and a lot of people find it very useful. There’s music for most every occasion up there.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, totally. Well then before we kind of get into the website and how you started that, I’d love to know a little bit more about your background and your expertise.

Kevin MacLeod:
My background. So, I grew up in Wisconsin. I started going to college for electrical engineering, and then they tried to make me take chemistry, so I went into music instead. Then I got hired out of college by an internet startup.

Sean Corbett:
Okay.

Kevin MacLeod:
That’s about when I made Incompetech in 1998.

Sean Corbett:
So was it a solution for a particular problem that you had, or did you see that there was a need online, or what exactly was the impetus for starting it?

Kevin MacLeod:
The website just started, as I’m a website developer and I would just use it as a test site to do tech things.

Sean Corbett:
Oh, okay.

Kevin MacLeod:
But I had always been writing music, and at that time I had been writing some music for a few films, and a lot of my music cues were getting rejected. They weren’t bad cues. I’m like, well, I’ll just throw them on my little demo site over here. And even though the person that asked me to write it can’t use it, I had to write something else for them. Somebody else can use it. So I took those failures and sort of repurposed them into a little bit of a thing, and then it started catching on and people started asking for new stuff and it grew from there.

Sean Corbett:
Amazing. And I mean, during that time too, when you started it, it was pretty hard to find royalty free music and Yeah, people were getting clamped down on pretty hard for copyright issues, right?

Kevin MacLeod:
Copyright issues weren’t even a thing really back then, but yeah, it was very, very hard to find cleared music. The industry just wasn’t set up for it. It was set up for production houses, it was set up for, you pay your hundreds or thousands of dollars a month and you get access to these things. But at this time, I mean, it’s still a little pre YouTube, but there were people still making videos and video games, and they needed things that they could just use.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, 100%. I mean, that’s exactly why I wanted to expose you to all the business owners because videos become so important to get their marketing and their word across nowadays, and they need stuff like this. Yeah, I can honestly tell you that’s how I found you. It was more than 10 years ago, I was in the indie film space, and it’s exactly what you said. I remember wanting to put a clip from Fleetwood Mac in my movie. So I think Lindsay Buckingham’s lawyer called me up one morning, some nobody a 19-year-old kid, and he is like, “Oh yeah, what’s the budget for your movie?” And I said, “Well, $0.” He said, “Okay, cool. You can have the clip for $10,000.”

Kevin MacLeod:
Actually, that’s pretty cheap. I think the going rate is 15.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, no, they were totally trying to do me a favor just, there’s a big difference between zero-

Kevin MacLeod:
I’m sorry, you don’t understand what zero means.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. So I was like, all right, I’m going to have to make my own music up. And same thing with, like you said, with cues and with sound effects. We had friends in the industry that would smuggle backpacks worth of CDs, hundreds of CDs of sound effects from the movie studio. So it’s a bit of a different world nowadays, obviously, and you helped pave pave that world. So I have to thank you for that. So can you just describe to us as of today, because the site has evolved from when I first came to it, so how would you describe Incompetech today and all the various things you have going on there?

Kevin MacLeod:
So Incompetech started making money with graph paper, which is a weird one. If you’re going on two incompetent, there’s music, and you’ll see very prominently also graph papers. More people still come for graph paper than come for music.

Sean Corbett:
Interesting. How did that start?

Kevin MacLeod:
I was playing DND late one night and ran out of graph paper, and I needed some graph paper and none of the stores were open, but I knew how to program, so made an app that made graph paper, and then I’m like, oh, well, other people could use this too. And it turns out, yes.

Sean Corbett:
Oh, for sure. So Incompetech’s becoming a repository of all things people need that no one else is providing at this point.

Kevin MacLeod:
It’s basically solutions to problems that I’ve seen.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, no, that’s cool. So you’ve got sheet music, you’ve got graph paper, obviously the royalty free music, and do you have a particular angle or direction you’re going or it’s just going to continue to be this, as you see a need for something you want, you’re going to keep throwing it up on the site?

Kevin MacLeod:
Oh boy, big questions. Websites are going to be changing, and they’re going to be changing fast in the next two to three years. Right now you build a website with the expectation that a human being is going to come there, you set up your welcome page, you set up your user interface, but that’s not going to be the case. It’s mostly going to be autonomous agents going out looking for resources.

Sean Corbett:
Yep, 100% agreed.

Kevin MacLeod:
So right now, I’m transitioning my website into being very friendly to autonomous agents that are coming in. So I mean, you can come in-

Sean Corbett:
Be easily scrapable, easily loadable, that kind of thing?

Kevin MacLeod:
Absolutely. It’s like here is the data file of all the things that you need to know. Here is the schema of it, here’s how I’m offering these resources to people. Some of them are paid for, some of them are no charge, and it’s a lot easier to write a website for a computer than it is to write a website for a person.

Sean Corbett:
Hey, robots talking to robots, man. That’s what I’ve been saying about AI is that, I’m a writer. AI’s never going to replace what I can do creatively, but boy, the AI robot can tell me what the YouTube algorithm robot wants to hear, and that saves me a ton of time. It can if you prompt it the right way. But it’s funny that a lot of people are driven by what algorithms want them to be driven by. And of course, and you probably know this, a lot of people consume the internet passively and then orbit, they consume it, anything passively, and then find themselves with a series of conclusions that maybe they don’t quite realize they were led down a path to have those conclusions. So I kind of feel like, well, if the robot’s setting the narrative, I want to ask the other robots what I should do to help me set the narrative. That’s kind of where I’m coming from there, but I’m not sure how that would tie into your, so you’re going to be-

Kevin MacLeod:
Yeah, I’m trying to figure that out.

Sean Corbett:
So you’re trying to clean up the site as much as possible, get those schema tags in there, make it scrapable and everything, and then pardon me, I interrupted you.

Kevin MacLeod:
No, absolutely not. Just the opposite, because right now, let’s say I have, so I’ve got inventory on my website, I’ve got all my pieces of music, and they all have their metadata and you can look through it in various different ways. You can sort by length or genre or however you want to do that, but I only have, I don’t know, 2000 pieces, super easy. Couple hundred kilobytes, and you can give the autonomous agent, it’s like, here is everything that I have, and then you don’t have to worry about optimizing your website for, it’s like, oh, what if somebody wants to come in and they only care about mood? Well, I don’t have to write a use case for people searching on mood. I just give the AI an export of my database. It’s like, here’s the mood column. If they asked for mood, you figure it out.

Sean Corbett:
Okay, gotcha.

Kevin MacLeod:
So just pointing it to the raw data and then giving it clear instructions about what and how that data can be used. Who is the copyright holder? When was it written? Here’s the signature file of the hash to make sure that you downloaded the right file and stuff like that.

Sean Corbett:
Interesting.
Yeah, so I think it would be helpful now to pivot a little bit, now that we’ve got the bigger picture view, to pivot a little bit about how maybe we could direct some of our listeners to benefiting from knowing some of the stuff you’re working on. So for instance, first thing that came to mind for me, if somebody was trying to cut together a promotional video or something and like you said, they’re not sure where to start with music. Some people can’t even describe necessarily what they want. So if they went to a composer, they might say Professional, I want it to sound professional. But yeah, so like you mentioned, moods, you have genre indications and so on. That could be a very helpful starting point for perhaps a otherwise non-creative working person to come in, sit down and start narrowing down what sounds they like for their video. And then of course, you made it very easy for them to download it and use it in their piece. Did I get most of that right?

Kevin MacLeod:
I believe so. Charitably correct. Thank you so much. Yes, I do try to make sure that it’s very easy to get the things that you need quickly. A lot of websites will be like, yeah, we need to maximize time on site. I’m like, no, I need to minimize time on site. I want you to get in, get your thing and go away.

Sean Corbett:
That’s fascinating. Of course. And then by the results of that is we’ll keep coming back in the future to use it again. But yeah, you’re 100% right. Yeah, no tricks and no extra galleries to make them click through to get the answer.

Kevin MacLeod:
Correct.

Sean Corbett:
So folks, you’re not going to find really any in intrusive ads Incompetech. So good news.

Kevin MacLeod:
You will not.

Sean Corbett:
Really, you’re sort of one of the pioneers, honestly, of giving things away for free online. I mean, I know, that sounds a little bit crazy because obviously the early web was everything and anything, but yeah, I don’t know. I have to give you credit, man, you made, I know the life of me and a lot of people I know as projects a lot easier by the way that you organized it.

Kevin MacLeod:
Oh my God, thank you. It’s not a zero amount of work and I really do appreciate it.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, no, no worries. And obviously at the end of the show, we’ll make sure we get people a link so they know where they can contribute and use your stuff and so on. What would you say is the biggest misconception that people have around composing the royalty free music or using music in a project or what have you that you’ve experienced?

Kevin MacLeod:
The biggest misconception about music usage?

Sean Corbett:
I mean, you kind of touched on one already, right?

Kevin MacLeod:
People screw up. Oh, what do they call that? Fair use, all the time. It’s like, “Oh no, I can use up to eight seconds of this thing.” I’m like, “No, no, you cannot. That is not a rule that came from anywhere. It’s a very persistent urban myth.” That’s probably the biggest one. It’s like, “Oh yeah, I can use this journey song. I’ll just use six seconds of it.” It’s like, are you critiquing the journey song, or is it adding value to your piece? If it’s adding value to your piece and you’re not directly critiquing it or parodying it, the answer is no. You can’t even use one second.

Sean Corbett:
There you go. And again, the robot online who looks for that sort of thing is going to find it right away and probably copyright strike you.

Kevin MacLeod:
Oh yeah, it may well. Which is why we all need to just stay away from that stuff. Just don’t, plenty of Creative Commons music out there now for all of your backgrounding needs.

Sean Corbett:
Love it. So yeah, let’s take this opportunity then please. Just if you could in a pithy way, explain to my audience what Creative Commons license means.

Kevin MacLeod:
It’s a standard license that is common across many media, and it allows people to give away the copyrights that they were automatically assigned by the government.

Sean Corbett:
And with attribution, right? With attribution?

Kevin MacLeod:
Well, that’s one of the things. There is Creative Commons with attribution, which means you can use this stuff as long as you give me credit. And then there’s Creative Commons with attribution non-commercial, which means that you can use it in anything non-commercial. I don’t know what non-commercial means anymore today. I mean, I really cannot tell a YouTube channel that is commercial versus one that isn’t. So that’s just a distinction that I don’t care about. And then there’s also Creative Common Zero, which so now this gets into international copyright law, which is problematic.

Sean Corbett:
Anything other than pithy for sure.

Kevin MacLeod:
Right, oh yeah. Oh, yeah. Pithy talk about international copyright law. So in the US, when you create a thing, you are assigned certain rights, which are very onerous if somebody else wants to use it. Creative Commons is a standard way that you can say, I’m literally giving up these rights so that my piece of art can do its job. And it’s common. It’s not been super tested in court. It seems to be solid. I shouldn’t have brought that up. That is not pithy.

Sean Corbett:
Okay. No, that’s totally fine. I put you on the spot there, but no, that’s great. So yeah, now people know this, I don’t know if folks, most people I think are old enough to remember when the band Radiohead first put out an album that was pay what you want of, during that time, there was a big argument or discussion around some of the stuff that you just said, Kevin, how does one waive their rights? Because maybe I might want the piece of work to take on a life of its own or reach more people. And a lot of folks were coming back and saying, “Well, that’s fine and good for you artists starting out, but what about us guys who established ourselves?” And we’re like, “Well”, and then a few more well established people started testing it for themselves.
I think there was some comic book artist in the UK, I think it was Alan Moore, I can’t remember, but he basically just said, “Yeah, I’m going to start not non copywriting my work. And I’ve found that I sold more books”, because of goodwill that he generated. So folks can come to Kevin’s site, they can go to your site and they can get that music, and then it’s very important. But what we were just talking about, it’s royalty free. You can use it how you like, but you do, correct me if I’m wrong, you do have to give that basic attribution, which you provide a snippet of an example on your website.

Kevin MacLeod:
You are not wrong.

Sean Corbett:
Should we clarify it more than that, or is that a pretty good starting point?

Kevin MacLeod:
The percentage of people that actually follow the instructions and actually credit me, not high.

Sean Corbett:
That’s a shame.

Kevin MacLeod:
It’s all right. the music is doing what it’s supposed to do, and that’s all I care about.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. Well, no, that’s true. Your stuff is going to be ubiquitous. We’re website designers. So we had to look at stock images all day, all the time, and you start to see those images everywhere, and it starts to get weird, a particular girl’s following you around Walmart, the packaging of Twizzlers, underwear or whatever it is. But yeah, your music’s out there, which is like you said, the main point, and that’s really cool. So I always do like to ask how people can follow up, what kind of services they can get from you. Before I transition into that though, I do just want to say folks listening, regardless of what Kevin just said, if you use his music, I would like you to attribute it, please.

Kevin MacLeod:
I would also liked that. I would like that.

Sean Corbett:
Take 30 seconds for the free music you got, and please just go and look into that. Put the attribution. It’s no big deal. Everybody wins that way.

Kevin MacLeod:
I understand it’s very difficult in a radio ad to throw attribution in, but you could just buy a $30 license and be done with it. It’s fine.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, there you go. That would be nice. YouTube videos are super easy, so if people, oh, go on.

Kevin MacLeod:
Sorry to turn the tables on you. So you were talking about the stock image stuff. How has Midjourney changed that? Or is it in the process of changing it, or does everyone still go to stock sites, or do you just type in what you need into Midjourney?

Sean Corbett:
Well, yeah, so that will change a lot. I haven’t been on the front lines in a while, but I can tell you that when I was still active in building websites rather than managing the marketing of them, even then, our designers were transitioning away from large stock image libraries to stuff like Unsplash, if you’ve heard of that. It’s just a really cool, it is a stock image website, but it started as a sort of hipsters would go out with their vintage camera gear and take really nice authentic pictures of real cities and tag the cities appropriately. So as a website designer, if someone said they wanted an image of money or pizza for the longest time on stock image libraries, the only thing we could find would be money and pizza from Eastern Europe, let’s say. And then the client would come back and say, “Well, that doesn’t look like my pizza.”
And then you’d say, “Okay, well I’ll tell you what, book a book a session with a photographer for $2,000 and maybe stop complaining.” So when we found that in between that those beautiful boutique, smaller level stock images, I think there’s still a huge benefit there. I think it’s true what you said, yeah, people are going to start being able to just create them whole cloth, but also there’s been a huge change. The same deal when I first found your site until now. Also on the image side, there’s been a change in how many clients are willing and now capable of capturing a great image with the little computer they carry around in their pocket.

Kevin MacLeod:
Oh yeah.

Sean Corbett:
So even five years ago, it was impossible to get someone to take a picture in focus, and now their $4K camera can give me a IMAX rendition of it.

Kevin MacLeod:
Oh, yeah. With beautiful Boca. Well, I mean, I’m not necessarily sure I would trust-

Sean Corbett:
Digital Boca.

Kevin MacLeod:
With an iPhone.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah.

Kevin MacLeod:
They can do some good stuff. I use Pixabay a lot. Are you familiar with those guys?

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. I mean, I’ve heard them bounce around. You’re happy with that service?

Kevin MacLeod:
Yeah, because all of those images are public domain or as close to public domain as they can legally make them.

Sean Corbett:
Right. And they’re mostly available as well for commercial stuff.

Kevin MacLeod:
Yeah, I mean, it’s public domain. You can do anything you want with it.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. Okay, sweet.

Kevin MacLeod:
Absolutely, commercial stuff. Absolutely.

Sean Corbett:
There you go. There’s a little two-fer.

Kevin MacLeod:
And now, yeah, they used to be images, but now they also have music, and a lot of my music is up on there, and they also have drone shots and video clips now, and it’s all free and it’s joyous. I think we need to talk about Pixabay and how awesome that is instead of Kevin MacLeod.

Sean Corbett:
Oh, we can do both. We can do both if you need, and they can find you on there.

Kevin MacLeod:
Yes, I am on there. And a lot of my composer friends, I’m recommending it to everyone. It’s a really great resource. And back in the early days, it used to be second tier Shutterstock or whatever, but no, everyone’s gotten really good.

Sean Corbett:
Oh, that’s awesome to hear. Yeah, it’s definitely on my radar now then.

Kevin MacLeod:
Yeah. And again, publicly, everything’s free, free, free, free, free, free, free.

Sean Corbett:
Beauty. That’s the best. So Kevin, let’s say, okay, if people know where they need to go now if they want graph paper, if they want royalty free music, if they want images they can go to Incompetech, and we’ll put the link up obviously in the show notes. But I know you used to offer, I don’t know if you still do, you used to offer composition services and so on. Is there anything that you’d like to tell the audience about some of the more hands-on services you offer that they would have the pleasure of paying you for?

Kevin MacLeod:
Absolutely. Would love to talk about that. I don’t do it anymore. I mean, if you’re dealing with a larger film, there are films that are so big that I won’t take them, and then you can’t really hire me anymore. Maybe if you have a really cool video game, I still do a lot of video game composing. You can hire me to do your video game, but I don’t do scoring for narrative films much anymore.

Sean Corbett:
There you go.

Kevin MacLeod:
Am I too old? I don’t know.

Sean Corbett:
What do you mean you don’t want to score a Spider-Man 467?

Kevin MacLeod:
I do not. I do not. Yes. Yeah. Do not want to do Lord of the Rings episode, quite a lot. I guess there got coming up with now, no. Yeah, not interested. That’s a downer note to end on though. Sorry.

Sean Corbett:
No, that’s good. I like the mystery. They’re going to have to go to the site and hunt you down like I did.

Kevin MacLeod:
Yeah. Yeah. And people do and people are like, “Okay, I got this video game. You have the quirky style that I need to make this go.” And then I’ll be like, “Okie dokey.” So if you do hire me, by the way, it will cost money and you will not get exclusive rights to the things that I make. I’m going to take that all and share it with the world as well.

Sean Corbett:
Nice. Okay. Yes, that as a consistency there as that, it’s still going to be Creative Common.

Kevin MacLeod:
It’s still going to be available to everyone else. And if you do hire me, you’ll also be helping create new music in the world that other people can use. But there’s a lot of people that are real persnickety about, it’s like, “No, I want to own all the intellectual copyright to this, and I want to put out these things and that thing.” And I’ve done those films in the past, and without exception, those soundtracks have not done anything. Having the intellectual property rights to that doesn’t help.
So let’s say you’re making a short film, you hire me to do it. I do the thing. I give you the stuff. You can take that. You can sell those, but I can also sell them. So if you want to make a perfect soundtrack, some people still make CDs. I guess that’s a thing. You can do that with the music that I give you, and actually, you can do that with the music that you download from my website. If you want to make a soundtrack of, I don’t know, relaxation music and sell it to health spas, that’s just legal. You can do that.

Sean Corbett:
That’s awesome. There you go. Got a little appeal to video game makers, but also appeal it to the, what do you call it? Second, business grind hustlers listening to the call.

Kevin MacLeod:
Yeah.

Sean Corbett:
Just gave you a million dollar business idea.

Kevin MacLeod:
No, no, no. It’s not worth that much. Believe me.

Sean Corbett:
That’s funny.

Kevin MacLeod:
Yeah the initial business needs to be worth at least a million dollars before you can get a secondary business.

Sean Corbett:
Love that. Yeah. I’m still looking for the guy that I owe royalties too, for using the English language.

Kevin MacLeod:
Oh yeah, that might have expired. There you go.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, yeah. Well, so last part goes, oh, go ahead. Go ahead, Kevin.

Kevin MacLeod:
I was just going to say I hope you only use words that were developed after 1921.

Sean Corbett:
Of course. Yeah.

Kevin MacLeod:
Oh, before 1921.

Sean Corbett:
Before, yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah, if thou whilst. So last word goes to you, Kevin. It can be really, but we covered a lot of ground here today. It could be anything music related, copyright related, whatever you like. What would you like to tell the audience to think more deeply about or pay more attention to on any one of these things we’ve covered today?

Kevin MacLeod:
Yeah, if you’re doing anything online and you’re presenting product to clients, look into making your website agent friendly. I know this is three years too soon. Because right now, most people who go to your website are people, and they’re not robots, but it’s a lot easier to make your site robot usable than it is to make it usable with a screen reader or things of that sort. It’s not hard to do, but you should be looking into it.

Sean Corbett:
Beautiful. Yeah, good way to wrap it up. Be friendly to the robots now people and perhaps when the Terminator 2 scenario happens, they’ll be friendly back to you.

Kevin MacLeod:
Yes. The agents are going to come on behalf of their clients, and you want to tell them what you can provide.

Sean Corbett:
Beautiful. So Kevin, thanks for being here today. And again, I just want to tell you thanks again for all the music over the years. It’s been a huge, huge help.

Kevin MacLeod:
You’re welcome. Hope this works out great.