What is sync licensing, and how does it actually work?

Sync is short for synchronisation: putting music together with moving picture. A sync licence is simply the permission to do that. Everything else people find confusing about it comes from one detail — a piece of recorded music is two things at once, and both of them have to say yes.

The two rights behind every track

The composition is the written work: melody, harmony, lyrics. It belongs to whoever wrote it, usually shared with a publisher.

The recording is one particular performance of that composition, committed to audio. It belongs to whoever paid for or made that recording.

To place music under picture you need permission for both. With a commercial release that means two negotiations, two sets of lawyers and, often, two answers that arrive weeks apart. It is why a famous song in a small campaign can take longer to clear than the campaign took to shoot.

Library music exists to collapse that into one step. When you licence a track here, the composition and the recording are cleared together, in a single document, at a price you can see before you commit.

What a sync licence actually defines

A licence is not a yes or no — it is a scope. Four things describe it:

• Media: online, broadcast, cinema, in-store, paid social, events.
• Territory: one country, a region, or worldwide.
• Term: a campaign flight, a number of years, or in perpetuity.
• Project: which film, which edit, which client.

Price follows scope, because scope is reach. A founder-led company reel and a national product launch can use the identical track and represent very different uses of it. Our tiers are built around exactly those four questions — you can compare them on the licensing page.

What sync is not

It is not a performance licence. Broadcasters and venues pay performing rights organisations separately for the act of transmitting music. That sits alongside your sync licence, not instead of it. We explain that side in what a PRO does.

It is not covered by a subscription, permanently. Most subscription models licence the content you publish while you subscribe. Stop paying and the status of older work becomes a conversation. Project-based licences don't expire with your billing.

It is not the same as "royalty-free". Royalty-free means no recurring per-use royalty; it says nothing about whether you may use the track in a paid TV campaign. The distinction is worth ten minutes: royalty-free, subscription, sync.

The practical sequence

1. Write down media, territory, term and project before you listen to anything.
2. Shortlist three tracks, not one, so the edit has options.
3. Licence at the scope the project might reach, not the scope it starts at.
4. Keep the certificate with the delivery files — it is the document a platform or broadcaster will ask for.

Do those four in order and sync licensing stops being a legal topic. It becomes what it should be: choosing the right music, and being able to prove you may use it.

Hear it in practice

Two of our curated playlists that show this in the music itself:

• Corporate Inspiration — for corporate films, explainers and brand content that need measured optimism and clear forward motion.
• Timeless Hollywood Scores — for crime, drama, documentary and luxury campaigns needing mystery, romance and tension.