The Stock Photo Company Shutterstock Is Launching Into Music

Shutterstock, the New York City-based stock photography agency founded back in 2003, is launching into a new product category today. The site will now start licensing music.

At launch, it will offer 65,000 songs from a partnership with the music company Rumblefish, but it will eventually open up to independent artists who can submit their songs and make money.

Wyatt Jenkins, head of product at Shutterstock, told Business Insider that the company is launching into the market after getting tons of requests from its video customers to have audio on the site as well.

"There were 28 billion online video ads online in 2013, up 117% from the year before," he says. "And all that video needs audio. An interesting piece of music goes a long way in telling a story."

Shutterstock is by no means the only company offering music licensing. However, Jenkins says that the team went to great lengths to offer a really rich, high-quality selection, beyond the single-synthesizer renditions of Beethoven that you might find on other sites.

"We want to have actual music, by real bands," he says.

People will be able to search by specific mood, like "spicy," "brutal," or "ethereal," or by tempo and genre.

Each song will cost $49, and Shutterstock plans to introduce a program that will allow users to buy packs of songs at discounted rates.

The genesis of the Shutterstock Music team is pretty interesting: Jenkins worked at a startup called Beatport back in 2007. The company sold to SFX Entertainment last year, and SFX decided to cut Beatport's engineering team, Jenkins' old co-workers. Shutterstock re-hired the team to work on its new Music business.

Here are some screenshots of what the new music site looks like:

When you check out Shutterstock Music's homepage, the site will offer a selection of curated music categories. You'll also be able to search by mood, genre, or tempo:

You can then listen to each song, before deciding whether you want to buy it: