Using my music for a school, hobby or non-profit project?

Today I received a message from a guy who wanted to know if he could use one of my free MP3 download tracks in his school video project. It's completely non-profit and he was going to give me proper credits for the music etc. of course. And when the video was finished, he was going to upload it to YouTube so that I, and everybody else, could see the finished video there. So he wanted to know if he could use my music for free, for this purpose.

I get this type of questions quite regularly, so I wanted to share the answer here, in case somebody else are interested in knowing how I look at this issue:

Answer from Bjorn:

Hi, thanks for your email.

I'm totally okay with you using my music (for free) for a school project. That's no problem. But when you start talking about distributing the video via YouTube, it's not so simple any more. YouTube use may seem "non commercial" to you, but YouTube use is in fact highly commercial and very widely distributed. When you upload a video to YouTube, you are giving YouTube all rights to all content in that video, and that includes the music. It will be distributed on the world's most visited website, and YouTube can do anything else they like with the video, and with the music that's used in it. And basically I'm not willing to allow that to happen without me getting a license payment. The music can be licensed for YouTube use for $29.95 (even less for shorter versions of the track), from Shockwave-Sound.com. I hope this sounds reasonable.

If you take away the YouTube distribution and use the music only for your actual school project, you can do that free of charge. No problem.

- Bjorn Lynne