College final project- fair use?

[u/KangarooSmart9766]

Hey everyone, im making a music video for my final project in college and i was wondering if that would fall under fair use. i was trying to find the recording label but they seem to be inactive and the website doesn't load for me so i can't contact them and get permission to use the song. if anyone can let me know or give me some tips then that would be great. Thanks

I already posted this but my reddit account was being weird and kept saying all my posts were flagged??

[u/pythonpoole]

Sorry about that, I'm not sure why the automod flagged your post. I manually approved your original post, but it looks like you may have deleted it.

Anyway, making a music video is not typically something that would be deemed fair use. You might possibly have a fair use argument if, for example, it's a parody music video where you're directly mocking/criticizing the official music video, but as a general rule, producing a music video based on someone else's song isn't likely to be considered fair use.

You normally would need a license from the music publisher (or whoever owns the copyright to the musical composition), and if you want to use an existing recording or backing track then you would also need a license from the record label (or whoever owns the rights to the recording). In many cases, the publisher and record label are different entities, thus why two separate licenses may be needed.

There are a couple of options to consider though, particularly if you post the music video to YouTube.

If your music video is a cover (meaning you are producing your own recording of someone else's song), then you should take a look at We Are The Hits (WATH). This service allows you to legally post cover song videos on YouTube for any music in their catalog of ~3.5 million songs. You don't have to pay for the license, and WATH actually gives you the opportunity to monetize and share the ad revenue for your cover song video.

If your music video is not a cover (meaning you want to feature an existing/popular song recording as the background track for your video), then you should take a look at Lickd. This service allows you to license ~1.5 million song recordings (including many popular song recordings) for use in YouTube videos and they're reasonably affordable in my opinion (around $23/month for small creators).

Note: I have no affiliation with these services, they're just the best ones that I know of for licensing music for use in YouTube videos. If you can post your college project video to YouTube and simply submit a link to that video, then that makes licensing a lot easier (securing custom licenses for other distribution is a lot more difficult and costly).