It’s our vision to help creators tell their stories by providing a broad spectrum of creative building blocks, along with clever search tools to discover them. We have seen tremendous growth in the adoption of video, and we’ve heard over and over from creators, loud and clear, that there was something we could offer to help their productions come to life. Enter Shutterstock Music: a new product from Shutterstock that expands our content offerings for customers and generates earnings for musicians looking for new ways to monetize their craft.
The Music
When choosing the name for this new offering, we decided against the word “audio,” which didn’t reflect the palette of emotion that we wanted to offer to creators — hence Shutterstock Music. When searching the site, you’ll find awesome, high-quality music to add to your project, be it something serene to represent nature, something bluesy to signal playfulness, or maybe a classical track by Vivaldi that will flow perfectly in your story. There’s a wide range of amazing options for whatever you’re working on.
The Experience
Discovering music is fundamentally different from discovering images, because you have to listen to one thing at a time. We have crafted a music-specific search and discovery experience that is easy to use and respects your time. You’ll see a waveform, descriptive moods, genres, and artwork that will all help you make a preview decision before hitting play (and you can use filters on them, as well). We’ve also got an awesome persistent audio player that won’t interrupt your listening experience as you leave the page. We even have curated playlists to help you get started. Today you can find our music site at shutterstock.com/music. Soon we’ll be adding navigation to Music from our Images and Footage areas.
The License
As you would expect, we have one of the simplest licenses in the market, with only two price points: $79 for a standard license and $499 for an enhanced license. Both of these prices are discounted for launch, so you can come try it out at up to 30% off. Our goal is to make music licensing easy for online video producers, creative directors, music supervisors, broadcasters, and anyone else who wants to create a story with music.
A Marketplace
We are creating a new revenue stream for musicians by using the broad reach of Shutterstock to get music in the hands of creators all over the globe. We’ve started our collection with the help of our content partners, but as with our other asset types, we’ll be giving musicians the opportunity to take part in the marketplace directly in the near future. If you are interested in licensing your music on Shutterstock, let us know!