Bill Gates Gets into the Music Business

But don’t worry.  The chances of you, the music consumer, using this new service run by one of the Microsoft billionaire’s other companies is pretty slim.

GreenLight Music is a web-based music licensing company run by Corbis, which has built is business on licensing photographs.  GreenLight’s goal is to let professional producers–TV studios, movie studios, producers of commercials, big websites, theatrical productions, corporate functions, etc.–get fast clearance on songs from EMI, Warner and Sony.

For example, one of their first transactions was to license out the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer” to some kind of corporate function for $1,875 (GreenLight’s fee was between 10 and 20 per cent of that).

I work with a lot of folks for which licensing music takes up a big, big part of their day.  This should be a big help to them, not to mention a huge time-saver.