WW2 Music

Hello Everyone

Our film edit of our group project about memories of WW2 is progressing very well. We recently have been importing tracks from CD’s that I have traced from a public library containing WW2 songs. We intend to use these songs as background music to help uplift the interviews and montages when watching them.

The CD’s that I had got from the library were:

1) Spirit of Victory (Hits from the 40’s)

2) Songs That Won The War (Celebrating the 60th Anniversary of VE Day)

The songs that we intend to use are:

1) We’ll Meet Again (Vera Lynn)

2) Thanks For The Memory (Bing Crosby)

3) White Cliffs of Dover (Vera Lynn)

4) In The Mood (Glenn Miller & His Orchestra)

5) Saturday Night is the Lonely Night of the Week (Frank Sinatra)

Our massive constraint about using these songs if we would like to show this film to a public gathering is that we would need to ask permission from the publishers of these songs other wise we would be breaking the copyright laws.

The way to go about it asking permission would be to trace down the publishers of the songs by looking through the booklet that comes with the CD and email them permission through a website that specialise in this called the MCPS (PRS).

In this e-mail I would tell them the song that I want to use along with the duration. In their reply they would give me a quote about how much it would all cost to use this particular song.

As we are using this film for strictly educational purposes this matter isn’t a great deal of worry to us. If we were going to show it to an audience then the copyright laws would then come into place.

An alternative way around this to avoid copyright infringement would be to compose our own music. This unfortunately wouldn’t be the same though as wouldn’t work well as background music to the interviews as original songs from WW2.