Norwegian site about royalty-free music

Hello people,

I just wanted to mention quickly that today I have launched a new website in Norwegian language for Norwegian media production professionals looking for royalty-free music. The site is www.AvgiftsFri.no and it explains the use of partly royalty free and fully royalty free music in Norway, and how it relates to TONO (Norway's composers royalty collection organisation) and Ncb (Nordic Copyright Bureau).

I'm sorry that this is of course completely irrelevant for non-Norwegian people, but it should be a useful resource for people working in film production and other media production in Norway. I hope some of you will find the site valuable and useful.

High Resolution, 24-bit , 48-khz Sound-FX series from Lynne Publishing

Hello everyone,

Over the past several months I have been working on developing a high resolution, high definition sound-fx library. These days most video editing and media editing suites operate at 24-bit, 48-khz resolution, however the vast majority of sound effects available from commercial sound libraries are still at standard CD-resolution, 16-bit, 44.1 khz.

Check out the sounds at Shockwave-Sound.com

In fact, we have nearly all of these sounds in 24-bit 96-khz, but "only" 48-khz files are available to the general public at this time, because this is the resolution at which most professional media editors are now working.

The library contains somewhere around 1,000 sound files so far, spanning several categories of sounds from spacey whooshes, swipes and zooms, to high performance cars and motorcycles, everyday household sounds, footsteps, nature sounds (rivers & streams, ocean, forest), traffic sounds / city noise and more, billiard sounds, horror sounds, office / work sounds, industry & machinery sounds and much more.

The sounds were recorded and edited by myself Bjorn Lynne (in Norway), Christos Panayides (in Cypros) and Ric Viers (in USA) and published by / copyrighted to my company, Lynne Publishing.

We plan to keep adding to this collection of sound effects in 24 bit 48 khz over many years ahead. If you are a sound recordist yourself and you are interested in recording sound effects on-location for us, we may be interested in buying the sounds from you. Please get in touch with Lynne Publishing if you would like to talk about this.

Check the high definition sounds at Shockwave-Sound.com

Why my MIDI music tracks are not free for use on websites or in other projects

From time to time, I get emails from people who want to use my MIDI music tracks on their websites, or in their own developed games. My answer is always the same:

• To use my music on a website, you have to buy a license. The license costs $29.95 and can be purchased from Shockwave-Sound.com. (Specifically, the MIDI music can be found here: http://www.shockwave-sound.com/royalty_free_midi_music/). It doesn't matter if you make a profit on your web site or not. Either way, you need a license.
  
  
• As for home-developed amateur games: If your game will only ever be seen and played by yourself and your immediate friends and family, then you can use my music for free, without paying for a license. However, if the game is going to be included on a web site, available for download, or distributed in any other way beyond your immediate friends and family, then you will need to buy a license. Again, it doesn't matter if you make a profit on your game, or if you sell the game for money or give it away free. If my music is in there, you need a license.
  

There used to be a time in the past when I allowed people to use my music on web sites for free, only in return for a link back to my site. But. about 3 years ago, I took the decision that everybody who wants to use my music for anything (other than personal listening) have to buy a license for it.

The reason is that I had already for many years before that tried the idea that I let some people use the music for free, in return for credits/links, which would in turn lead to more people getting interested in my music, and then some people paying for it. Unfortunately, after years of trying this, I realized that it just doesn’t work like that. The only thing it leads to is even more people who want to use the music for free, and nobody who wants to pay for it. The more people who got it for free, the less reason there seemed to be for anybody to pay for it. And this is my work and my living. It's not a hobby for me. It's serious. It's what feeds myself and my family. I can't afford to take it lightly.

It also started to get difficult to determine what was really a “free” project and what was a commercial project? Some people had “free” projects that they didn’t charge money for, but they had lots of Google Adwords advertising on their page. This means that my music was part of their project, which drew lots of traffic to their web site, which in turn generated a profit for them. Is this a free project or now? And how about if somebody made a free demo, and the super quality of their demo resulted in the fact that those people were then able to get a paid project? My music was then part of the free demo which, in turn, led to the team earning money from it, although not directly. It was starting to get very difficult to determine what was free and what wasn’t...

So in the end I took the decision that everybody who uses my music will now need a license, it doesn’t matter if the project is a free project or a paid-for project. This has worked better for me. There is more real interest in my music, and I am now able to make a living as a musician. My music has more value, both to myself and to other people.

If you feel that my music really adds something of value to your website, your game or any other project, then you should buy a license. If you don't think my music is worth anything, then you also won't be losing anything when you can't use my music in your project.

I hope this all makes sense, and I hope that this puts a rest to the endless questions of whether you can use my music for free in your project. :-)

Thanks for reading!

- Bjorn Lynne

Irish & Music Instrumentals now available from iTunes

Dear friends,

I just wanted to mention that my latest album "Irish & Celtic Instrumentals" is now available to buy from iTunes and PayPlay.fm. It's also making it's way to many other download shops as we speak, including MSN Music, Amazon.com, Coke Music, RealRhapsody and many more.

Here's a link to this album on iTunes
And here's a link to this album on PayPlay.fm

More music news to follow soon...

New Bjorn Lynne CD: "Irish & Celtic Instrumentals"

Dear friends,

I'm very happy and excited to announce the release of my new CD, "Irish & Celtic Instrumentals", today. The CD features 12 tracks of Irish & Celtic tracks that I have arranged, produced and recorded with a little help from some musician friends.

The origins of this CD goes back to the late summer of 2007 when I was lucky enough to spend some quality time along the southern shores of Ireland, a truly beautiful and inspiring place. I came back to my home in Norway full of ideas and inspiration, and I set to work on producing this collection of traditional Irish/Celtic music, arranged produced in the way that I would want these tracks to sound like. :-)

It's not the first time I've used Irish & Celtic influences in my music of course. Many of my previous albums, such as "Witchwood", "Return to Witchwood", "Wolves of the Gods", and others all feature more or less obvious Celtic influences here and there. So for me it felt right to do a sort of "homeage" to some traditional Celtic / Irish music, recorded and produced with "The Bjørn Lynne sound".

When I started working on this project, I decided early on that there would be no shortcuts, no easy outs. No "half-arsed" solutions using a computer plug-in when I could be using the real live instrument etc. So as it ended up, this album is actually my most "acoustic" album ever. There isn't a single "electronic" sound on the entire CD which, I guess, is pretty weird since I started my carreer very much as what I would call an "electronic music composer".

I still very much love electronic music and I will definitely return once more to my electronic music heartland for my next album release. But I have to say, for this album, that it really did pay off to use all live instruments and leave all electronics out of this project. When the temptation was to just use a plug-in and get it done quickly and cheaply, I thought, no, not this time. No shortcuts! The real thing, or nothing. :-)

I don't mean to suggest that no computer was used for producing this album because, as always, I used Cakewalk SONAR Studio Edition v6 to produce this music and everything was recorded directly to hard disk in 24-bit 48-khz. I also used some samples, including "spoons", some drums, Irish Bodhran and electric piano. What I meant to say is that there are no real electronic sounds (synth sounds) used on this album.

Besides various acoustic type samples, I myself played guitars (acoustic & electric), piano (acoustic & electric), tambourine, shakers, djembe drums, and sang live various "vocal pads" (not sung words or lyrics, only "ahh" style vocal instrumentation). My friend Steinar Borvik played various flutes (Irish flute, penny whistle, tin whistle, orchestral flute, recorder), Nicolae Bogdan played live accordion and violin and Jeremy Sherman played dobro and slide guitar.


When it was time to put together the final CD master of this album, I got the idea to include -- as a bonus -- an "underscore version" of each track. An "underscore version" is simply a version where the main/lead instruments are removed, leaving only the background music. This can be an interesting thing to listen to in it's own right. Once you remove the main/lead instruments from a piece of music, you're left with a whole new perspective on the music -- in fact, a whole new "insight" into how it was all put together. So these bonus tracks were included especially for those of you who would like to hear these tracks "from another angle", and get a little glimpse of what goes on "under the lid" of each track. So, tracks 1-12 are the actual main tracks on the CD; whereas tracks 13-24 are all the same tracks again, without the lead instruments. This pressed the CD right up to the very technical limit of how much music you can put on a CD -- about 1 hour and 20 minutes.

CD track listing:

1. Lovely Leitrim
2. The Bonny Boy
3. Scarborough Fair
4. The Jolly Beggar
5. Danny Boy
6. The Rose of Tralee
7. Paddy's Green Shamrock Shore
8. Whiskey in the Jar
9. In Dublin's Fair City (aka Cockles and Mussels)
10. Amazing Grace
11. The Riddle Song
12. Greensleeves

13-24: All tracks again, underscore versions.

You can hear about the first 1 1/2 minutes of each track, on the official page for this CD: Irish & Celtic Instrumentals.

I truly hope many of you will enjoy this CD. You can buy the album now either as a physical CD from my own personal CD shop , or from CDBaby, or you can buy it as a download (320-kbps MP3 files, with high-res cover artwork files included for printing your own cover), from my own personal download-shop.

To encourage you to order this CD early, I will personally autograph - in Gold ink - all copies of this CD ordered from my own personal CD-shop, in the first two weeks of release (that means, within April 15, 2007).

The album will also soon be avaiable from iTunes, PayPlay.fm and many other music download shops. (Takes a few weeks to make it up on those sites).


One last note... the photos in the CD-cover are from my own trip to Ireland; although the actual photos were taken by my friend Kent Fonager -- he had a better camera than me. Kent is one of the guys whom I visited these places with.

Thanks for reading!

- Bjørn Lynne, March 31, 2008

Some rare and deleted items for sale

Some limited CD’s for sale:

There are some CD’s that are noted on my site as being “sold out” and have been so for ages. But after some serious tidying and some returns of unsold stock from some people who aren’t distributing my CD’s any more, I have the following for sale. These aren’t actually available to buy through my web shop, because I have such limited quantities of them. If you want to buy any of these, email me. First come, first served. These are all rare, limited products...

Amiga: Immortal 3 double-CD – I have two copies. Both are brand new, but one of them has had the plastic wrapping removed for scanning. Never played. Price: $20 each plus actual shipping cost.

Bjorn Lynne: Witchwood – These were completely sold out, but three copies were returned from Soundoo in Belgium when they closed down. So I have those three copies only. Price: $15 each plus actual shipping cost.

DesertPlanet: Asteroid Hopper (See http://www.lynnemusic.com/desertplanet-asteroid_hopper.html)
I have ONE copy. The cover/case is slightly damaged. Price $10 plus actual shipping cost.

CyberLogic 1, 2, and 3: See:

http://www.fusecon.com/products/scenecds/clogik1.shtml
http://www.discogs.com/release/15122
http://www.discogs.com/release/15123

These three are HIGHLY sought-after very limited edition rare items. I have ONE of each. They are used, but handled carefully and in great shape. Price: $15 each plus actual postage.

Opportunity Vol. 1: Various artists from the demo-scene (including myself). See: http://www.synsoniq.de/productdetails.php?pid=76&searchtext=opportunity
I have ONE copy, again, used but in very good condition. Price: $15 plus actual postage.

Bjorn Lynne & Seppo Hurme – Hobbits & Spaceships ORIGINAL PRESSING 1992:
The very first CD to come out of the demo-scene. 2000 copies were pressed. For years, I thought they were all gone, but lo and behold, I found TWO at the bottom of a box. They are brand new, never been played. These are quite rare, so: $30 each, plus actual postage.

Bjorn Lynne (as. Dr.Awesome): X2 – Original pressing 1996

Pretty much the same situation with these. They have been sold out for years, but I found TWO copies. They are brand new, never been played. $15 each, plus actual postage.

Divinorum: “Talisman” – limited Oriental release

In 1998 I got a deal with an Indian music company to release and distribute my CD “Talisman” (done under my electronica pseudonym ‘Divinorum’). These CD’s were ONLY sold in India and Malaysia, no other countries. I have FOUR copies, brand new, in plastic wrapping. These are very rare, so: $30 each, plus actual postage.

Jesper Kyd – Hitman 2 Soundtrack

I have ONE copy of this limited release. It’s brand new and still in it’s shrink-wrapping, but the jewel case is slightly busted in one corner. You can just replace the jewel case and it’s as new. This is pretty limited and much asked for, so: $30 plus actual shipping cost. I have only ONE.

Bjorn Lynne – The Void, original 1997 pressing

The original mastered pressing of this CD has been sold out for many years, although I have still been selling a “re-issue” with slightly different cover etc. and I’m still selling that re-issue. However, I have THREE copies of the original first pressing from 1997, released on the UK record label Cyclops. One is brand new and still in its plastic wrapping. The other two are used, but they are nicely kept and in good shape. Price: $15 each plus actual shipping cost.

Bjorn Lynne – Revive, original 2000 pressing

It’s pretty much the same situation with this. The original version of this CD has been sold out for many years, although I have still been selling a “re-issue” with slightly different cover etc. and I’m still selling that re-issue. However, I have TWO copies of the original first pressing from 2000, released on the UK record label Cyclops. They are opened, but they are nicely kept and in good shape. Price: $15 each plus actual shipping cost.

Bjorn Lynne – Accelerator

I don’t actually have any copies at all of this CD, but I would like to say that the LAST 10 COPIES of this are now for sale at CDbaby.com – on this page: http://cdbaby.com/cd/bjornlynne01 . When CDBaby have sold these last 10 copies, this disc will not be available any more, and will be a collectors item like the others, so... maybe it’s a good time to hurry up and get one. :-)

Well... I hope this little garage sale of rare treasures will be of interest to some of you. :-) Should you wish to buy any of these CD’s, please email me and I will put the CD’s aside for you.

Add me as a friend on Facebook and MySpace

If anybody reading this would like to add Bjorn Lynne to your friend on Facebook or MySpace, please follow these links:

Bjorn Lynne on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=503781394
Bjorn Lynne on MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/bjornlynne

It may take some days before I respond to the friend request, but that's just because I don't have enough time to log in there every day. So don't take that personally. :-)

- Bjorn

A photo I took today from my balcony

I'm really not going to turn this into a "photo blog" (I promise!) but I took this photo today and I thought I'd post it here, just this once. I took the photo from the balcony on my house here in Stavern, looking out at the "Larvik Fjord" where, twice a day, the boat "Petter Wessel" comes in. This boat travels daily between Larvik, Norway and Hirtshals, Denmark. The sun is setting, giving the ship a red-ish ting, and the dramatic skies in the background work as a kind of nice frame. I hope you'll like this photo. :-)

New Bjorn Lynne album, "Quiet Places"

Dear friends,

I hope you are all well and ready for some new music from this northern corner of the world.

I mentioned a while ago that I would probably be releasing two new albums this year; one with quiet, reflective, ambient music -- and another one with more upbeat, melodic electronica.

My ambient CD, "Quiet Places" is now available to purchase as a downloadable album from my own download shop and will soon also be available to buy as a physical CD, through my own personal CD-shop as well as through CDBaby. (The CD's are being produced at the time of writing this).

This album, Quiet Places, has been composed and produced over a period of more than 2 years. I didn't want to hurry it or push it. I worked on it only when the feeling came over me and I really felt like I wanted to work on it. The music on this CD is made for quiet reflection, maybe for some personal time. The inspiration for the music has come from taking some quiet walks in the beautiful and rather desolate nature which is available to me, here in my home in Norway. Far from being "all pretty", the album also has it's odd, bittersweet, and introspective moments.

The CD contains a number of photos, all taken from the area around where I live (max. 1 km from my house), in Stavern, Norway, where all of this music was "born". I wanted to include the photos because I felt that they somehow represent the source of the music. I also took all the photos myself.

I have made low-fi previews of the entire album, start to finish, available to listen online on my site. Just go to the dedicated page for this CD: http://www.lynnemusic.com/quietplaces.html and you can listen as much as you want (low sound quality, though).

I will write again when the actual physical CD is available to purchase. For now, it's only available as a purchased download in 320-kbps MP3-files (no protection/DRM) from my own download shop, and this purchase also includes high-res image files of all the cover artwork, so that you can print the cover yourself and burn a CD.

The actual physical CD will be available to purchase from my shop within a week or so. This time I have ordered only 150 physical CD's to be stocked here at my home in Norway, and all the rest to be stocked at CDBaby in USA. The reason is that the physical CD's cost SO much to ship. It's almost pointless to sell my physical CD's from here, due to the shipping cost. I pay about $2 per CD to have them shipped from the factory to my home in Norway, and then it costs me about $12 in stamps to send a single CD to USA. Plus about $1 for a padded envelope. So for each physical CD sold from my personal CD-shop here in Norway, I have shipping costs of about $15. I charge $7.90 in shipping when someody orders a CD on my web site -- which means I take a loss of about $7 in shipping when I sell a CD from here.

This is why, this time I will have only 150 copies here at my own personal shop, and all of these will be autographed. After these 150 are sold out, the physical CD will be available from CDBaby in USA, and from many different music download services such as iTunes, PayPlay and many more.

But at the time of writing this, "Quiet Places" is only available from my download shop: http://www.lynnemusic.com/downloadshop.html

I hope that (some of you at least) will enjoy this little outing into "quiet music for reflection and personal time" which I have made for you all. Some of you may have heard some of the tracks before, as I've had them posted on my web site -- such as Kaleidoscope, Solnatt, and Waiting.

If you buy the album, whether it be as a download or as a CD, I would very much appreciate it if you could go to the dedicated page for "Quiet Places" and write your own review of it. The review doesn't have to be so artistic, long, or well written. Just a few words about whether you enjoyed it or not, and why. This helps other people to make up their minds on whether to buy the album.

Letter from Alastair Jamieson-lane - use of MIDI files for project

Hey Bjorn

I am amateur Java program just fooling around with a little Platform game. I'd really like to use a couple of your midi tunes for background music, but am not sure if the game would be considered "at home listening" or "any kind of project" and am not sure if I'd have to buy a liscense. Thought I'd ask your permission and see what you say about it. Great music man, keep it up!

- Alastair

---

Hi Alastair,

Thanks for your email. So long as the game is just for fooling around between yourself and your friends/family, you may use my MIDI’s for free.

If the game is going to be distributed in any way, i.e. available for download (even free download), then you need a license to use my MIDI’s. (License costs $29.95 per track and can be purchased from http://www.shockwave-sound.com).

I hope this helps.

- Bjorn

A sign of life from the depths....

Dear friends around the world,

* Hello and little update
* $10 for all Bjorn Lynne CD's until Christmas


Hello and little update
-----------------------

I'm very sorry that it's been so long since I wrote anything to this list. I think, the last time I wrote, I was about to set off for my first ever visit to the US. Since then, so much has happened, unfortunately not a whole lot of it has been about my "Bjorn Lynne CD's" in the traditional sense.

It's been two years now, since I quit my day-job as a musician/sound guy for the video game company Team17, and set out trying to make a living "on my own" as a one-man music provider and music company. I'm happy to be able to say that things have gone really well for me. My company Lynne Publishing is now a fully-fledged record company with 4 artists signed (myself included) plus several more artists "co-operating" non-exclusively. I don't really concentrate on selling CD's to consumers in the traditional record company way -- instead, I concentrate on licensing our music to companies, for use within their projects such as games, film, TV/broadcast, etc. Not only are we making a lot of money from direct sales of licenses, but as a secondary effect we are also getting our music used a lot in TV, film, games, broadcasts, websites, etc -- which is a lot of fun.

To have taken a chance, jumped off my day-job and "made it" on my own, now making 4-5 times as much as I did as an employee, feels extremely satisfying. :-)

As you can imagine, in the midsts of this success with the music licensing business, other things have unfortunately suffered, and one of those things is the composing and recording of my own "personal" music which is just made for releasing Bjorn Lynne CD's and selling them to a few hundred fans.

I still do plan to release another CD -- hopefully in 2008. I have written 3 tracks for my next album (one of them being over 14 minutes long), and I will return to this project at some point in the near future. So let's just see what happens.

My visit to New York and New Jersey this summer was wonderful, although too short. Of course I couldn't leave my "work head" completely behind, so I brought with me a portable recorder, and I recorded a collection of "Sounds of New York City", which can now be seen on my music/sound licensing web site Shockwave-Sound.com, more specifically on this page, in case you want to have a quick listen to them. :-): http://www.shockwave-sound.com/genre/95.html

Only a few weeks after returning from the U.S. I also went on a trip to Ireland -- to the very south end of the country, a small place called Skibbereen, where I spent a week relaxing and doing fun stuff with a group of friends (including Andrew "Nightshade/Crusaders" Barnabas and Adam "Skorpic" Skorupa). As you can see from this photo, among other things, we went fishing. :-)



$10 for all Bjorn Lynne CD's until Christmas
---------------------------------------------

I want to give a little extra boost to my CD sales before Christmas (the idea being that some of you might buy them as Christmas gifts for yourselves or friends/family), so I'm happy to announce that all my CD's are only $10 each from my personal CD-shop: http://www.lynnemusic.com/cdshop.html between now and Christmas.

(Normal price is $16.99 per CD)

CD's ordered from this page are packed and sent out by me personally, so if you would like to have your CD's autographed, just send me an email about it, at the same time as placing your order.

I guess that's it for now. Thanks very much for reading and have a wonderful weekend.

All the best,
--
Bjorn Lynne

www.lynnemusic.com
www.shockwave-sound.com

Older Bjorn Lynne CD goes for $200 on eBay

Hi folks,

This month, my old CD "Alien Breed 3D Soundtrack" went for EUR 145.00 (That's about 200 US$) on the German eBay site -- check it out here.

I found this to be quite interesting and of course, very satisfying for me as a musician. :-)

Maybe some of the CD's that I'm currently selling in my CDshop will also be able to get such collectible prices, some time in the future. :-)

- Bjorn