Focus on classical music this week4 min read

Good quality, royalty free classical music, is hard to come by. That’s just a fact.

Why? Because hiring an orchestra, with studio time and engineer, is extremely costly and time consuming. It’s a process that requires meticulous planning and preparation and costs “a small fortune” to get it done.

In the “stock music scene” there have been various sources of so-called royalty free classical music, of dubious origin. On some “free for all, self-uploading” websites, you can find classical music recordings that almost certainly don’t actually belong to the person who uploaded them, but rather sourced from some published CD, and belonging to another company.

If “some guy” is uploading fully orchestrated recordings of classical masterpieces, you need to ask yourself if that guy really spent the time, effort and money (possibly several hundreds of thousands of dollars) on getting that music recorded, so that he could sell it for $15 at a stock media site that allows a free-for-all self-uploading of content for sale. It goes without saying, that recording is not going to be safe, copyright wise.

Here at Shockwave-Sound.com we have also been exposed to these “unsafe” recordings, likely to be copyrighted to some company who doesn’t know that their recordings are being uploaded to stock music sites.

Instead, we focus on getting a smaller volume of recordings done, but to have them done from scratch, exclusively for our company. At the time of writing, we have 74 such exclusive classical recordings that we ourselves have organized and got recorded for us on a work-for-hire basis. We are adding to that regularly, so by the time you read this, we may have many more. These recordings are not for sale through any other stock music / royalty-free music website.

This week we decided to put some of these tracks together onto CD-collections. We have released 4 new Royalty-Free Classical Music albums this week, with the following track listings:

Classical Favorites Vol 1:

Classical Favorites Vol 2:

• Satie: Gnossiene No 1
• Satie: Gymnopedie No 1
• Sousa: Semper Fidelis
• Tchaikovsky: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from the Nutcracker
• Tchaikovsky: Nutcracker Chinese Tea Dance
• Tchaikovsky: Nutcracker Dance of the Mirlitons
• Tchaikovsky: Nutcracker March
• Händel: Sarabande
• Purcell: Trumpet Tune
• Schubert: Ave Maria

Classical Favorites Vol 3:

• Vivaldi: Four Seasons Spring RV269 Movement 1 Allegro
• Vivaldi: Four Seasons Spring RV269 Movement 3 Allegro pastorale
• Vivaldi: Four Seasons Winter RV297 Movement 1 Allegro non molto
• Vivaldi: Four Seasons Winter RV297 Movement 2 Largo
• Chopin: Minute Waltz
• Holst: Saturn from The Planets Suite
• Sousa: Liberty Bell
• Sousa: The Thunderer
• Scott Joplin: The Entertainer
• Saint-Saens: Aquarium from Carnival of the Animals

Classical Favorites Vol 4:

• Strauss: The Blue Danube
• Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake Act 1 Finale
• Bach: Air On the G String
• Bach: Jesu Joy of Mans Desiring
• Bach: Wachet Auf aka Sleepers Awake BWV 140
• Beethoven: Symphony 5 Movement 1
• Elgar: Pomp and Circumstance March 1
• Händel: Entrance of The Queen of Sheba
• Händel: Hornpipe from Water Music
• Holst: Jupiter from the Planets suite

Those were the 4 new releases we’ve put together this week. We already had the individual tracks in our catalog and have been acquiring them over a longer period of time, but it was only this week that we put them together into “CD-collections”.

From previously, we also have these two:

Classical Strauss & Lanner:

• Lanner Steyrische Tanze
• Strauss An Der Schonen Blauen Donau
• Strauss Annen Polka
• Strauss Der Zigeunerbaron Overture
• Strauss Die Fledermaus Overture
• Strauss Dorfschwalben aus Osterreich
• Strauss Gschichten aus dem Wienerwald
• Strauss Kaiser Waltzer
• Strauss Pizzicato Polka
• Strauss Radetzky Marsch
• Strauss Tritsch-Tratsch Polka
• Strauss Unter Donner und Blitz

Classical Piano Favorites, Vol. 1:

• Bach Prelude in C major BWV846
• Beethoven Pathetique Sonata 2nd movement Adagio cantabile
• Chopin Mazurka in A minor op. 17 no. 4
• Chopin Mazurka in C sharp minor op. 63 no. 3
• Chopin Nocturne in E flat major op. 9 no. 2
• Chopin Nocturne no. 20 in C sharp minor op posth
• Chopin Prelude in E minor op. 28 no. 4
• Chopin Raindrops Prelude op. 28 no. 15
• Liszt Consolation no. 3 in D flat major S.172
• Mendelssohn Song Without Words in E major op. 19 no. 1
• Mozart Piano Sonata no. 12 K332 2nd movement Adagio
• Schubert Impromptu in G-flat major op. 90 no. 3 D899
• Schubert Moment musicaux in F minor no. 3 op. 94 D780
• Schumann Dreaming from Scenes from Childhood op. 15 no. 7
• Scriabin Etude in C sharp minor op. 2 no. 1
• Tchaikovsky June (Barcarolle) from The Seasons op. 37a no. 6

We hope you enjoy the music, safe in the knowledge that they can be licensed for use in media and in public, without fear of copyright infringement.