Don’t Wanna Be Sued

Hello all, I’ve come to get recommendations before I make changes to my blog. I’m at the moment making a monetized blog that focuses on video game music. I’ll sometimes write reviews of indie games, write reviews on indie game soundtracks or upcoming composers, or do a musical analysis on certain songs. It’d be much easier to draw in a crowd if I could actually have the music itself embedded in the blog post. However, I can’t use the ever popular Youtube as that would be seen as copyright infringement from what I’ve researched. That’s totally understandable. It wouldn’t be copyright infringement to post a link leading to the site that has the actual music. I actually don’t have a problem with that. However, if the user uploading the music isn’t the sole owner of said music, then I can still possibly get into trouble. So, I’m at a loss. I could very well message every video game company or composer and ask for permission to embed their music in my blog. That would be a ton of companies. Yet, with their busy schedules I don’t see myself getting a reply soon if at all. And now we’ve arrived at the big, hard question that I’ve harassed Google with….

Does anybody know of a website that legally stores a large supply of video game music that has embeddable features on the individual song so that my linking to the music would be possible? It could be a site like Bandcamp, Youtube, Last.fm. Just any site that you’ve heard about through the grapevine or anything really.

I don’t see much hope for this, but I figure it never hurts to ask just in case.

Basically if a copyright holder cares about someone uploading their music, they will not care which site it has been uploaded to, so the answer is simply no, there is no such place. You need to accept that as widely practiced as it is file sharing of copyrighted music is still fundamentally illegal and there is no way around it.

I suggest not trying to monetize your blog. You won’t make enough money for it to be worth it anyway and your time could be spent more productively. Do it for fun or don’t do it at all.

Just use the songs that are already on youtube.

I wish I could do that, but the people who upload the music on Youtube don’t own the music. If I use those on my site there’s still a chance I could get in trouble. I’ve already contacted a couple of lawyers about it. If there’s no legal way to do it, then I’ll go down a different route with my monetized blog. It’s not the end of the world.

Thank you.