How to Build the Perfect Music Library for Your Wedding Highlight Video

Love may be priceless, but the wedding industry is a big business. In fact, it’s worth a reported $72 billion, which means that if you’re a filmmaker, it might be time to make your own commitment to offering services in this lucrative field. (And you’ll get to eat some tasty cake, so there’s also that!)

One of the most popular new video services in the wedding industry is the wedding highlight video. Brides and grooms love to share these short, snazzy videos with friend and family who didn’t get to make the wedding, while video editors love the premium wedding price tag they can charge.

Making a great wedding highlight video isn’t easy, but there are things you can do to make the process more efficient to increase your ROI. One powerful secret that the best video editors use is to create a music library of royalty free stock music for weddings.

Introducing the Wedding Highlight Video

If you are just getting started in the wedding video market, you may be in for a surprise. Gone are the days when the filmmaker just passively recorded the vows, toasts, first dance, and reception party (while editing out the footage of Uncle Greg shoveling twenty shrimp in his mouth).

Today’s brides and grooms are all about the wedding highlight video. This is the generation that grew up imbibing slickly edited reality television, and now they want to be the stars of their own special day.

Wedding highlight videos come in all shapes and sizes, but a majority are roughly 5 minutes to 10 minutes long and include the main highlights of the events, including:

Bride and groom prep
Walking down the aisle
Reading of the vows
The magical kiss
Toasts
First dances
Reception Party

Many of them also include artistic cutaways and almost all incorporate music to deepen the emotional impact of the occasion. Take a look at a few well-designed videos. We give you:

Note: As you watch these videos, notice how strong a role the music plays in conveying the beauty of the moment and the joy that comes in celebrating love. Each moment of the special day can be expressed with its own special music or song selection.

How to Create a Wedding Highlight Music Library in Three Easy Steps

As a savvy video editor, you know that it doesn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel for every new product. While each wedding and each couple is different and special in their own way, most weddings follow a typical pattern. The themes of most weddings are also the same, revolving around concepts of love, unity, connection, family, passion, joy, and celebration.

These similarities allow you to design a system for creating wedding highlight videos that will save you time and effort and help you increase your ROI for this product. A key part of that system is developing a music library that includes just the right background music for your video.

Step One: Create Standard Video Outlines

Each wedding is a story. As a filmmaker, you have to choose how to tell that story. Jacob and Jessica’s wedding video is relatively linear, while Marcus and Kristin’s story starts at the vows and then jumps to later moments in the wedding before rewinding back to the preparation.

To add efficiency to your business, consider developing a standard set of story outlines or patterns that you can apply again and again. This doesn’t mean making the same video over and over again; rather it means keeping a few of the most effective patterns on hand to help you build each unique wedding story.

For example, Chaz and Ashleigh’s video pattern could look like this:

Venue sweep with officiant voiceover
Prep shots with toast voiceovers
Walking down the aisle (music transition)
Reading of the vows (music transition)
Reception, dancing, party (multiple music transitions)
Father-daughter dance (music transition)
First dance (music transition)
Final shots and fade out

Step Two: Pair Music Themes with Story Segments

You’ll notice that Chaz and Ashleigh’s video includes a handful of different music transitions. Most wedding highlight videos incorporate at least a few music transitions. Once you’ve developed your video story patterns, step two is to break those patterns into segments and then to attach music themes to the patterns when you want to transition the music.

For example, one of the most common music themes we see in wedding videos is music that builds and tells a story. This type of music starts off soft and slow and then increases in volume and intensity. It works really well for the beginning of the video as a way to set the scene, showcase bride and groom prep, and allow for powerful voice overs. Build the action as the music builds to create a beautiful pairing that will grab the hearts of viewers.

Other music themes that would be perfect for your wedding music library include:

Beautiful
Bouncy
Cheerful
Comforting
Delightful
Fun
Happy
Heart Warming
Hopeful
Inspiring
Joyful
Playful
Romantic
Soaring
Soulful
Upbeat

Step Three: Find the Music and Build Your Music Library

At this point, you’ve developed video story outlines and paired each part of the pattern with the appropriate music theme. The last step is to roll up your sleeves and actually find royalty free stock music that matches the themes and then to assemble them into your own wedding music library.

This step will take some work, but you’ll be well rewarded for the effort you put in now. Once your wedding song library is complete, it will be super simple to assemble your videos. Once you get the footage, just apply your pattern, search your existing list of music, and choose the right samples within each list.

At Soundstripe, we can help you become a wedding highlight magician. For a low monthly or yearly subscription, you can access our entire music library, which is growing all the time. Sort by theme so you only listen to the music samples you need. Like a sample? Create a personalized playlist.

Let’s say you develop five different wedding highlight video outlines. At Soundstripe, you can create five different playlists, each filled with the music samples that match perfectly with that outline. With these prepared playlists in your back pocket, you can start putting together your wedding montage video before Uncle Greg has recovered from that massive bout of indigestion.

Check out our music library today to see all the different genres of background music for video that we offer. Then it’s time to take that next big leap with your wedding video business and say “I do!”