Have you ever wondered about creating your own sound library? The only thing you have to do to make a little bit of money is open up your FL Studio’s, Ableton Live, or Logic; grab any sound from the library and a few tweaks and plugins and it’s your very own sound file for sale… WRONG!!!
I will tell you how to create a sound library of your very own and redistribute it using your favorite DAW.
What Can I Do With the Sounds in My Daw?
I went through a list of a couple of major DAW’s that I have and read the (EULA) End User License Agreements and noticed that they were all pretty much the same.
You can not use any of the sounds in your library for redistribution, you may only use sounds to compose your own original creations that you have the license to.
This means in short that you can’t grab any sound, synthesizer, or software that generates sound and repackage it in any way to call it your own to give to others.
What you can do to create your own sound library for redistribution is create your own sounds and import them into your DAW for post-processing if needed.
If you acquired the sound organically then it is your sound.
For instance, if you record the sound of running water and add compression then you made your own compressed water sound in your favorite DAW. You can even do the same thing with musical hardware.
How Do I Make Money Though?
There are many ways to make money by redistributing your sounds. You can do this by adding your music to one of the many sound libraries out there.
Sound libraries are sites that host user-created sounds for lease and sale by the creator or person that holds the copywrites to the audio.
Places to sell your sounds
You can also add these sounds to a YouTube channel and monetize your YouTube Channel. You can also upload to websites intended for sound uploading and downloading like Sounds.com and Splice.com.
There are many places like the sites listed above so find what works for you.
How Do I Protect My Work?
It is very hard to prove that a sound file is a copy in court but A.I. Is getting better. Today’s success could be your career in the future.
Think of how DNA is used to solve cases from the 60s, the same could happen to sound designers if they aren’t safe.
Before uploading your music, make sure it’s copywritten through BMI or a reputable copywriting company. Also, keep your original copies of your files and put as much detail as the metadata as you can however you can.