Recently I created an animated ad for a local group-buying website. My company built the website in partnership with a local yellow page publisher.

As I finished the rough draft of the animation, I didn’t worry too much about the soundtrack. I figured our partners would want to make some changes to the voiceover copy. I went through my iTunes library, popping various jazz tunes into the background, and settled on a 1944 instrumental version by the King Cole Trio of Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love”:

I put the ad up on YouTube and sent the link to our partners for feedback. We heard back that they liked it just as it was. They instructed us to make the video publicly available on the website.

Now I had a conundrum. Because this version of the ad wasn’t really intended for public consumption, I hadn’t bothered to purchase the rights to the song. In order to fix the situation, I had to figure out how to license this piece of music.

You’d think that, with all these little companies (like us) churning out low-budget ads for YouTube, there would be lots of how-to guides available online to explain the process for licensing music. There are a few, but none of them answer the two most obvious questions:

How much is this going to cost me, and how long is it going to take?

First, some terminology. If you want to use a recording of a song in an online ad, you need to acquire two separate kinds of rights.

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