Copyright law is hard. Even our own video production guru has admitted that this is one of the murkiest issues for him - it's a complication that often causes people to either err on the overly cautious side or throw caution to the wind and hope for the best. Well, we don't like limitations, so we wanted to make a blog post explaining the basics of music licensing for business video in a way that everyone can understand. We're not lawyers, but Shannon Jamieson and Dan Crocker, entertainment attorneys at New Leaf Legal (@NewLeafLegal), are, and they were kind enough to share the basic breakdown of how music licensing works with us.

According to Shannon and Dan, one of the biggest troubles that businesses encounter when trying to use music is that they didn't realize they had to do anything. Unfortunately ignorance doesn't hold up as an excuse in court.

If you still don't feel totally comfortable, you can also consider contacting a lawyer for a brief consultation on what you need to do to make sure you're not stepping on any toes.