www.musicpictures.com is a living digital archive updated daily with new images from across the globe. Our international team lead by Simon Redfern in Berlin provides advertisers, editors, publishers and marketers with not just the best of music photography, but also with the services that makes them easy to source, locate, and license. With more than 120,000 fantastic pictures covering all aspects of popular, great and cutting edge music we are the premier source of music related imagery on the web! From Soul to Zydeco, Gospel to Punk, we cover thousands of bands, singers, musicians and musical subjects including studio equipment, crowds, dancers, fashions and atmospheric lighting. Initially based on the famous Redferns collection (founded by photographer David Redfern in the early 1960’s) we also represent selected music related images from PYMCA in London, Jazz Archive in Germany and many individual music photographers. Why not visit us? See our address below.

You are a professional music photographer / agent? You have exciting and high quality music pictures we don't have and you are interested in a cooperation with our agency? Then we would kindly ask you to use this application form to register for our website and provide us with a few details about you and your work. After a quality check from our side you will be asked to sign our terms and conditions. If you have any questions you can’t find answers to in this FAQ please get in touch through imagesupply@musicpictures.com

Once you have registered, gone through the application process and signed the terms and conditions you will receive a login and password to our upload tool HORIZON, which is accessible through upload.musicpictures.com. Here you can also download a STEP-BY-STEP-MANUAL. HORIZON has been especially designed to allow our photographers a quick and easy keywording and uploading process. With this software the images can be submitted directly into our database anytime from anywhere. A semiautomized mode to read existing IPTC-Data is available.

We are always looking for new, exciting photography but we are also very selective with the images that we accept. Music photography is an extremely competitive field in which we must maintain very high standards. The quality of scanned or well processed digital images from a digital camera are essential as well as the basic factors of photography such as sharpness, correct exposure and good use of lighting. We are also looking for pictures with an impact - a portrait, which makes an interesting point or has been taken on a special occasion is nearly always preferred to a straight live-picture. On a first submission, we would like to see a selection of your very best or most unusual images covering a wide range of subject matters, preferably of artists that are not yet or hardly present in our database.

We are always looking for new, exciting photography but we usually don't buy images from photographers. We offer professional music photographers the possibility to put their images on our website. We run sales and marketing procedures to represent photographers and their pictures. When a client is interested in licensing an image we handle the price negotiation and administration and share the revenues with our photographers.

We license pictures all over the world and for all possible uses. The type of license depends on the quality of the image and the agreement with the individual photographer. Although our main market is editorial use, we are currently developing and entering new fields like the private and the web sector. In your contract you state your preference regarding editorial, commercial and advertising use. For each type you can choose yes, no or refer (the latter meaning that we get in touch if a request needs your permission). At the moment your permissions will be valid for all the pictures you upload, but in future it will be possible to state different license permissions for each single picture while uploading.

We offer two licensing models, the choice is yours. You can either set a simple price grid for each small, medium and large image according to editorial, commercial or advertising use. These prices will show on our website and can be changed by you whenever necessary. Alternatively you can choose the "price on application" option. We will then calculate an individual price depending on the nature and period of use of an image. The price is based on prevailing European stock agencies rates. In the private sector we currently offer A4 prints for 90,- EUR, which is shared between the photographer and the agency.

In general all revenue made through the licensing of your images is equally shared between you as a photographer and our agency. This means a neat split of 50%. You do the photography, keywording and uploading; we take care of representing you and your images through our website and our marketing and sales systems.

We do not license any pictures exclusively. All our photographers and all the collections we represent have the right to license their images through other agents as well. Copyright itself stays with the photographer at all times.

Our website is designed to make your pictures easy to source and locate. The more precision and details your keywords offer, the more differentiated our clients' search can be. Our upload tool HORIZON offers both the possibility to use our keywording system as well as to read and automatically insert your IPTC data. To be able to upload a picture a minumum amount of keywording is required: You will be asked to state at least one subject/artist for each picture, the date when the picture was taken, the location where it was shot and one keyword (music style or any detail). Missing or incorrect keywords can be edited at a later date through the website.

We accept any size images as .jpg files. Our upload tool HORIZON allows you to submit files up to the size of 40 MB. The larger your file is the more uses we can license the image for. On the other hand we encourage you to send a small version of a picture rather than not supply the picture at all. For more detailed information please refer to our submission guidelines.

PLEASE FOLLOW THESE GUIDELINES CAREFULLY TO ENSURE YOUR PICTURES WILL ENTER OUR DATABASE AND WEB SITE QUICKLY AND EFFECTIVELY

* Quality, rather than quantity, is sought. Please, upload only your very best, or most unusual images.
* On your first submission, we would like to see a representative selection of your very best pictures covering a wide range of subject matters.
* Please search through our web database to find out which subjects are well covered and which are not, and then edit your selection tightly. PLEASE DO NOT SEND SIMILAR IMAGES OF THE SAME SUBJECT.
* We request high resolution files processed scanned from your original color transparencies, negatives or original digital camera files. We welcome any music related digital imagery generated by high-end professional digital SLR cameras (at least 6 mega pixels) with high quality interchangeable lenses. Please submit them with detailed captions (*artist, date, location, city, country, music style, details*) implemented as IPTC info or stated through our upload tool HORIZON.

Please, note that we expect your high resolution JPEG files to be:
* cleaned thoroughly (no dust, no scratches, please)
* color/ exposure/ contrast adjusted and corrected
* cropped properly so that your scanned images do not have a black mount
* supplied with sufficient caption information embedded in Adobe® Photoshop® File Info or as other metadata or stated through our upload tool HORIZON
* JPEG with Photoshop® File Info - Quality @ 12 Maximum - Baseline "Standard" - 8 bit RGB - Color Profile: Adobe RGB only, no CMYK, please!
* No unsharp masking (USM)!