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o you’ve made a short film. You’ve got it written, shot, and cut, ready to go. Except for the music. That perfect piece of music you used during filming, the song that gets the mood you want exactly right—you can’t use that, because you can’t afford it.

Enter audisocket.

Audiosocket is a lot like IndieFlix—in fact, we’ve formed kind of a partnership with them. Like us, their goal is to deliver independent artists’ work across that gap between the artist and the audience. But where we at IndieFlix concern ourselves with independent filmmakers, audiosocket provides a platform for independent musicians. That’s kind of their whole thing. From their website:

Audiosocket is a music licensing and technology company that gets music to whoever needs it. Stock music is crap and we don’t represent it.

The partnership idea came about because finding affordable music for the soundtrack is one of those problems that you never really think about, but pretty much every filmmaker faces at some point. And because audiosocket seems to be paying attention to the right things: support for the independent artist community, and helping to break down barriers and obstacles between artists, other artists, and ultimately, of course, audiences.

When I first heard about this, my first thought, of course, was, well, how good could this music possibly be? So I spent some time rooting around in audiosocket’s wares, and you know what? I found some pretty cool tracks. There’s a lot of what you’d call songs, but there’s also some  pretty cool ambient stuff; the kind of musical textures that really help focus what a particular movie scene is about.

That’s one of the other cool things about audiosocket. You’re a filmmaker, you need some music, where do you start looking? How do you find the track that’s going to be perfect for that one scene? For as many choices as audiosocket makes available—they claim a library of 30,000 songs—where do you start digging? During the time I spent there on my first visit, I was able to find pretty much exactly the kind of music I envisioned with each search. Their advanced search option is a bit awkward (you have to refresh your browser to do a new search), but once I figured that out I was impressed with the results of each search.

Our local VJ Ryan has been cutting together some trailers for our Film Festival in a Box series, and for music he’s been using audiosocket. So far, he’s managed to find what seems to be the perfect track to fit each of the trailers he’s done, from love stories to zombie gore.

It’s a unique idea, as far as I can tell, but it strikes me as kind of genius: audiosocket has taken what is traditionally a huge pain in the ass—you either have to negotiate a royalty agreement with an artist if you want to use their music, or you have to somehow talk a musician into creating new music for your film—into an almost entirely pain free (most tracks cost a whopping $5) process.

Now I just need to go make a movie.