Viewers often ask about the music in our videos. That’s kind of a vague statement isn’t it? “What do they ask, Eddy?”. Funny you should ask. There are many things viewers are curious about and I’ve answered them several times in comment responses. however, I’m often not sure exactly what they are asking by the way they word their question. To make things easier, I thought I would put together this post and answer all the questions about the music in the videos. Here goes!
Why don’t you just use the music that was playing in the rink?
This is a multi part answer:
Bad sound quality
While the equipment we use is not really “professional” level, it’s still pretty decent. Even, so, it’s made more for video than for sound. So the audio that’s recorded can have lots of problems. Because, skaters are usually moving at a good clip, the camera must be as well to keep up. That results in a lot of wind noise in the native audio, which sounds awful. Also the sound systems in rink are rarely able to create music at the same level at every part of the rink. Some areas are really soft some are really loud. That makes the audio really uneven. Peripheral noise is also a problem. Often people are talking or singing ( or yelling ) the lyrics to the song that’s playing. All of these reasons create quality issues that make using the original audio undesirable.
Editing
One of the reasons we think our videos are interesting to people is that they are intentionally edited to make them interesting. This means that each video is actually made up of several clips that are cut up and arranged to create the final product. So even if every skater in the video was skating to the same song. After we cut it up and rearrange all the parts. The music would be a big mess! Also often the clips in the videos were NOT recorded during the same song, and in those cases the music wouldn’t even match.
Licensing
So, even though the fist 2 answers are true, in the end the answer is it’s really about licensing. If you upload content to a social platform, which contains music licensed by someone else ( pretty much everything that gets played in a skating rink ) you are likely to get harassed about it by the social media platform, and have to take the video down, or they just take it down without warning you. Also you could get “strikes” against you and too many strikes could cause your channel to be removed. Luckily music companies and social media platforms have made a deal allowing you to use licensed versions of songs in videos on their platform. I think TikTok was the first, and the rest soon followed. That means that content creators like us get to use high quality music with our videos without having to worry about getting in trouble with the people who own the rights to the music.
Why didn’t you use the specific song that was playing when the video was recorded
Ok, this is a multi part answer, too… I see a pattern developing.
Mostly we do
Generally speaking, each song has its own vibe and it really connects with the skaters in the videos. Also, often, skaters are either singing out loud or mouthing the song lyrics, so using the exact song just looks cool! For those reasons we usually use the same song.
Sometimes the song isn’t available
Remember that licensing deal we mentioned earlier? Well every music rights owner does not participate. That means that sometimes that actual song just isn’t an option.
To keep things tame
Sometimes the songs played in rinks contain explicit lyrics. To try to keep things relatively clean and friendly, we prefer to use the “radio” versions of songs. Most artists create those versions that have had the explicit lyrics changed or obscured in some way, and the non-explicit versions are available most of the time. Unfortunately sometimes they aren’t so in those cases we choose something else.
We’ve just used a song too many times
Most rink sessions are only a few hours long, and there are just certain songs that people like to skate to. For those reasons, a lot of the same music appears over and over and over and over in the recordings. If you’re a skater you have probably noticed that most sessions you are going to hear the same music that you’ve heard a previous sessions. It makes sense, right? Skaters like certain songs, so when they go skate they request them, or the DJ’s just know what skaters like so they just play them even without the song having been requested. For those reasons, we try to find less used songs to avoid reusing the same songs over and over. Or at least not back to back to back…
Just to keep things interesting
This is related to the previous answer. When we decide we are going to replace a song, most times we’ll pick another song that you are likely to hear in the rink. Basically we figure out the BPM ( beats per minute ) of the song that was playing and find another skate song that’s at that same tempo. To facilitate that we rely on google searches of music databases. Sometimes.. the songs we find our not what might be considered a skate song, but we just like the way the music goes with the video, so we get creative! We really like the way some of those turn out.
Still confused?
It’s possible this post didn’t address what you were curious about that. In that case please reach out to us and let us know what you wanted to know. We’d love to update this article to address your question so that others with the same question can find an answer, too.
PS: The video below is one of those cases where we needed to replace a song and decided to go with a non-traditional skate song. It’s one of our favorites! It’s a TikTok embed and the sound will probably be muted so if you want to hear it be sure to unmute the sound.
@skatetakesliz @sk8grant.06 @marshallfeather @billymisfitskatfam Andy B. @stephaniesemasky @joshuasuarez381 Danny, Shane at @juicysk8’s event 2.19.23 🤩 #skatetakes 🎞️by @skatetakeseddy #skatefam #rollerskating #rollerrink #rollerskaters #rollerskater #quadskates #rollerskatetok #skatefamily #rollerskate #rollerskatingtiktok #shuffleskate #shuffleskaters ♬ Under Pressure Remastered 2011
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