How do your teams pick music for videos?

FIRST General Forum
1

Hey all, How do your guyses teams pick songs for there videos such as robot reveals

2

Country all day err’day.

3

A lot of thought goes into this for us, actually.

  1. Songs must be clean. Unless someone is skilled enough/willing to go through a song and clean it up, it’s not good for the team image to have any sort of explicit language in the songs.

  2. Songs should reflect the purpose of the video - if we chose a slower moving, inspirational song for our reveal video, and EDM for Chairman’s, it would feel off. See this reveal video.

  3. Chairman’s aside, we pick upbeat videos. We want people to get excited about whatever is it we’re doing - whether it is a reveal video or an outreach recap video. See this outreach video.

4

I would recommend reading through this thread. This has a lot of good tips to both music and the video itself.

5

I go through playlists of pump up trap music on Youtube and just see if something fits the pace of our robot.

6

Note that chairmans videos are supposed to be “copyright clear” meaning you likely cannot use that great song by that great artist. Use music that is “royalty free” or otherwise intended to be used as background tracks for videos.

7

While it’s relatively easy to find good EDM for reveals, it is more difficult in finding music that doesn’t feel generic. Usually, we go “diving” for little-known artists on Spotify or Youtube, or at least music that isn’t known by most people. There’s also sites like noisetrade.com where you can download music from artists for free if you like their Facebook page.

8

Piggybacking on this, I have found some really good bands from other reveal/highlight videos, for example the PNW DCMP highlight video (now removed for copyright issues…) had Saint Motel, which a lot of their music works really will for this type of video and is all around a good band in general.
Expanding your tastes to music will also help a lot. If you stay with just, say, heavy metal, you are really limiting yourself to music that doesnt really work to begin with.
(dont get me wrong, theres bound to be songs that will, but you get my point)

9

Monstercat and NCS put out good royalty free music as well as Machinimasound if you’re looking for something that isn’t edm.

10

When I’m picking out video music, I think about these three guidelines:

  1. Who’s your audience?
    Certain audiences might like certain music, or view it with more nostalgia because it’s from their generation (For instance, a 60 year old executive might not like hardcore rap).

  2. How long is the video?
    Picking music for a 30-second social media teaser is different for picking music for a 5 minute long student spotlight video. The longer the video, the longer you’ll have to have the song be (or have multiple song etc). A shorter video also allows you to “pick and choose” from segments of the song.

  3. What’s the tone you’re going for?
    If you’re creating a reveal video, you might want to go with something more grand and awe-inspiring, while for a recap video you might want to be a little more laid-back. It’s all about the message you want to convey with your video.

11

Briefly mentioned but you need to be cognisant of copyright.

YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and others all check for copyrighted content. Most of the time, your content can stay up but they will place an ad on it.

YouTube has a handy tool that lets you look up virtually every song (everything they check against in their database) and tells you your rights. It gives you:

If you use this song...
Playback: <<Where it can be viewed, where it is blocked>>
Advertising: <<Will ads appear? If so, when?>>
If you perform a cover...
Playback:
Advertising:

Generally popular songs have the same rights across platforms - if YouTube doesn’t allow a song, Instagram probably won’t either.

If you don’t care about a specific (or mainstream) song and are just trying to find something that will sound good, you can try SoundCloud (search by usage) and Creative Commons. Creative Commons lets you search the web for a specific file type with certain usage rights.

12

There are a few sources:

  1. Justin Ridley Videos
  2. F1 Racing Recaps
  3. Places that are not necessarily regionals or districts
13

Here’s how we do it:

  1. Argue about whether AC/DC or Guns and Roses is better.
  2. Video editor decides that they like ukulele.