Resources For Royalty-Free Music

Are you having trouble finding royalty-free music for your video project?

With the exception of fair use law, sounds and music that are copyrighted cannot be used without permission; even if it’s just one second of a track. In this post we’ll link you to some resources for royalty-free audio to help you avoid legal complications when wanting to add music to your work. 

FreeMusicArchive.org has thousands of tracks from various genres including Blues, Classical, and Hip-Hop. Although the songs are royalty-free, they do have licensing agreements. Most of the tracks on this site require that you give credit to the artist if you use their music. If you plan to profit from your video, you may want to familiarize yourself with this licensing guide. Some artists will not allow you to use their work commercially.

Another site is Dig. It hosts user created content and they have a section of tracks free for commercial use and a section of instrumentals for film and video. Like Free Music Archive, Dig has similar license stipulations that you should be aware of.

Freesound.org is also a collaborative database with a variety of sound effects and genres of music. Most of their licences are “Attribution”, meaning that you can use and profit from the song as long as you give credit, but they also have some tracks in “Public Domain”. If someone places their work in public domain, there are no rules on how to use the music or in its crediting.

Do you want to use really old music? Anything published before 1922 is in public domain, including scores. However, just because a composition was scored in 1890, it doesn't mean that you can use someone else’s 1990 recording of the piece.

If you want to learn more, the Education Department at MNN holds a free 3-hour workshop called How to be a Successful Producer. In it, we cover fair use and copyright among other topics related to the essential practices of a good producer.