Music is the Drug.

That was printed on a sticker that I got with a Cowboy Junkies CD. It really stuck with me because it speaks to the power of music.

With that in mind, I've decided to do a series of posts about music. So this is part one. If you're reading this and seeing so much text with no pictures, by all means feel free to skip the chatter for now and scroll up or down to another post to find some cool pictures to look at ;) This isn't going anywhere, so I'll see you when you come back. (OK, I will not really see you, but you get the idea.)

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You may have noticed in the posts immediately preceding this one that music played a crucial role in the wedding itself, and subsequently in the slideshows I made......

So let me go down that road for a minute.

Slideshows. Does anyone remember what a slideshow actually was? Maybe you, your parents, or grandparents have some slides around the house? It occurred to me that a “slide” may make as much sense to the yougans' out there as, say, a “record” or “rotary dial” ......something analog and archaic by “modern” standards.

Back in olden' days of film when I first started shooting, there was also this cool stuff called chrome (as we photogs called it). While the use of most film results in a negative image, slides are a positive process, not a negative one. In non-geek speak, after you develop film in toxic magic potions an' stuff, you literally get a negative image, but with slides, you get a positive image.

So anyway, the point here is that back in the day we shot slides, we would shoot, process, edit, and then put our mounted slides in a slide projector. And if we were lucky, we could find/beg/rent/borrow a dissolve unit. Those were really slick ;) With a dissolve unit, you could run 2 projectors simultaneously and the images would dissolve and blend, thus making a seamless transition that could be synced with a soundtrack of your choice. Contrast that with a clunky one projector set up where there is a pause between each slide as the projector swallows and spits out one image at a time. So with a dissolve unit, you get visual *and* auditory deliciousness!

That brings us back to music.

I still remember the images from some slideshows that I saw 15+ years ago. The reason I remember those slideshows more than other images is because of the combined power of pictures + music + words. Images by themselves can be powerful, and frankly they should stand on their own, but the power an image has can be greatly magnified when accompanied by cool music. Sound like a movie? Well, in a way it is. That would be where the show in slideshow comes in ;) I'm not a scholar, but I think one could say with some degree of accuracy that it was early multimedia. In any case, when well done, it was great storytelling, which is what photojournalism is about.

It's with that in mind that I raise the issue of (cue dramatic pause with tense music): Music copyrights!
I can hear you now. “Huh? Uhm, I was thinking something more... I don't know, exciting perhaps? Something remotely interesting?” Yeah, I'm guessing you were not looking for a buzz kill or boring crud about the minutia of legal issues, copyright royalties, music in the digital age, etc., etc.

I raise the issue because it's like a huge elephant in the room that affects a lot of creative artists—musicians, song writers and photogs alike—and to a lesser degree couples. Some photogs, wedding shooters especially, talk about the issue behind closed computers, but I have not seen it addressed that much openly.

In the slideshows I have on my blog, technically I do not have the right to use an artists music in my slideshows without their permission. You may even recall that during the heat of the recent election, some bands objected to candidates using copyrighted material without permission. Of course, national politics are a much bigger spotlight than my sliver of cyberspace, but the issue is similar.

So why is this important and why should you care? Well, it's not so much that you should care, but *I* do, so I want to provide my rationale for using music as well as some context.

As a wedding photographer, trying to secure rights to popular music is a sad and pathetic joke. Seriously. The hoops that you have to jump through are lengthy, time consuming, ridiculously confusing, and enormously expensive. It really is an onerous affair, and is most often fruitless, and if not it's because you either got lucky or you are very wealthy.

The alternative is to use royalty free music. There are companies that are set up for the sole purpose of this.

OK, so why not use that stuff? Fair question. My response: most of it sucks :( Sad but true [wow-there is a hidden Metallica pun in that!] I just cannot stomach using muzak for any of my work. Blech!!! Yuck!!!

OK, true not all of it sucks, but IMO, most of it does.

There is another reason I dislike it: often no one knows who the hell any of the artists are or any of the songs either because we have never heard it before. As such, that *usually* means that there is no common reference point for anyone. And even if it is uhm, non-sucky enough,  I know that another photographer has the same music from the same company, so they will be using the same music. Yes, I have seen that happen with other photogs work, and I swear I cringed.

Ouch.

That is definitely not the kind of familiar reference that I'm going for! The last thing in the world I want is for my work to seem generic or cookie-cutter like. More to the point, can you imagine being my client and going to look at your slideshow that I created using your stunning wedding pictures and hearing the exact same music as a friend of yours that just got married?!? You wouldn't want that to happen, would you? That would not be cool. That would be sad :(

What if I simply want to use a couple's favorite tune?? Why should that be an in incomprehenisble mess of legal BS?

Another issue is that since I love music, I have a mental jukebox. I'll often think of music or song lyrics spontaneously, both in and out of context. Do you ever have moments where it's hard to find the words to express your thought or feelings, but a song puts it perfectly? That's sorta what I mean, except it comes to me frequently and unexpectedly. Kinda weird, but that just seems to be how I'm wired. That being the case, I want to use my music knowledge to fit what I'm shooting. That's hugely important! I want words + music to = more than the the sum of it's parts. Ya' know, like 1+1+3. That's what I'm going for anyway ;)

And yet, I still feel a little ambivalent. Why? As a creative professional, I value protecting my own copyright, so it does feel a little odd “stealing” music. Hypocritical? Well, I don't think so, but I could understand someone feeling that way.
The way I look at it, I like to think that I'm helping an artist in a very small by promoting their work.
I guess I draw the line at selling DVD's of my slideshows. I don't.

I use music for showcasing my work and to help tell the story, much like I would if I was doing a “traditional” slideshow. In fact, I guess that's one the very few traditional things I do at all ;)  

Michael