Find Royalty-Free Background Music

Video marketing should be an essential part of your marketing strategy in the future, if it isn’t already. 72 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. And according to Cisco, by 2021, 82% of all Internet traffic will be video! Click here.

You’ll want to get in on the action. But the question is: how do you do that when you don’t have a big budget for it?

There are a lot of costs involved in making a video, from equipment to post-production. Thus, you’re going to have to find areas where you can cut costs.

Thankfully, background music is an area where you can save your precious budget. Reducing costs doesn’t mean cutting quality in this case. There are lots of great resources for free or cheap music to choose from.

What Are the Costs for Background Music?

Before we begin, let’s quickly review the costs involved in acquiring background music for marketing videos. SSM royalty music doesn’t mean that the Free Piano Sheet Music is free; it merely means that you spend a one-time licensing fee and you can use the music however and whenever you want to, for infinity and beyond. Public domain and Creative Commons works, on the other hand, are free. The difference between the two is that public domain doesn’t require permission from whoever created the work, while Creative Commons often involves permission or attribution.

YouTube Audio Library

In the “Create” section of YouTube, you’ll find their Audio Library. It contains a bunch of music from different genres, from Dance & Electronic to Country & Folk. You can use any track for free in your video content. The music is a mix of public domain works and Creative Commons. All you have to do is to attribute the owner of the track. To get the most out of the library, make use of its search functions. For instance, you can search according to mood such as “calm,” “dramatic,” or funky.” Or you can search according to the duration of the track, which is a good idea to make sure it fits the length of your content. Another area that’s interesting to check out on YouTube is their Music Policies section. Here you’ll find a list of popular tracks and details on whether you’re allowed to use them in YouTube videos or not, as well as how you can use them.

Free Music Archive

The U.S. radio station WFMU runs the Free Music Archive. In the Music for Video section, there are various tracks which carry different licenses.

These are mostly different types of Creative Commons licenses. Some are for non-commercial use only, others require attribution, and so on. For more info on the particular licenses, you can visit their FAQ section.

The good thing is that you can filter search results by license. So, because you want the music for marketing purposes, you would go ahead and uncheck the “non-commercial use” box.

As you’ll see with most of these sites, you’re not going to find a Beyoncé-level track or anything. But the music at FMA is very pleasant and certainly suits the purpose. At the end of the day, it’s free to download.

You should also check out the site’s Music for Video blog, which showcases the music and where it might fit into different types of content.