I have recently asked a question about music in games like Guitar Hero.

I have found that that in Europe (at least) if I do want to use a track composed by a musician member of a royalty collecting society I need to pay a flat fee to the society and not only to the member.

So a "one-to-one" agreement is not valid and the society can come up to me and ask me for money for each download. Even if for FREE!

This is a fee sheet list of the UK agency: for fee, see "Permanent download services"

It is about 1,200 GBP for less than 22,000 copies and they DON'T specify anything more and they said me on the phone that I need to wait and see how many downloads I get before knowing the price.

This is kind of crazy as If I give away the App for free I will have to PAY 1,200 GBP!!

I am shocked and I feel very bad.

One agency suggested me to use a fake name of the artist, but in this way is not fair to my collaborators as what they hope is that the App gets lots of downloads and in this way that other people will get to know about them and hopefully commission them more work.

The other solution is to work only with non registered musicians.

The question here to you is:

Has anyone found a legal way to use music from registered authors in a game?