🎬 Where to Get Music
Paid Music Sources
Hiring Custom Composition
• Fiverr.com is (often) a great resource for hiring a freelance composer on the cheap. It’s a marketplace online where you can advertise your skills for hire or be hired by someone else. I’ve recently become quite a fan of peer-to-peer services like this. It utilizes the internet at what it does best, linking a need with a need-provider. That said, you do have to use a bit of caution in vetting the talent pool as you don’t have an agency doing any of that for you.
• Sonicfire Pro isn’t strictly a custom composition tool, but it does have customizable elements worth mentioning. This software takes advantage of the idea that music is highly repetitive and loop-driven and allows you to “compose” on your own in a very simple user interface. You basically pick the song you like from their library and then drag it to the length of your video. You can add cue points for where you want the mood to change and even turn on off different elements like drums, melody, etc. It’s an extremely quick way to get a song to fit the timing you need for your video with no manual editing. One thing to be aware of: you pay upfront for the software then pay additionally for every track you download and use.
Buying Existing Music
- audiojungle.net (One of the better combinations of quality/price for pre-composed music.)
- ArtList
- Pond5
- PremiumBeat
- Epidemic Sound
- AudioBlocks
- SoundCloud: A lot of SoundCloud music is licensed under Creative Commons
- Free Music Archive
Free Music
Note: You get what you pay for with most of it.
- Incompetech.com
- BenSound
- http://freemusicarchive.org
- FreeMusic YT Channel
- ccMixter (Free with attribution)
- YouTube’s generic songs (downloadable so you can customize them to your project) Creator Studio>Create>Audio Library
- Collaborate with others
- Soundcloud as well
“Royalty Free” doesn’t mean you can use the music for free. It simply means you pay for the license once and then don’t have to pay it again for every time someone uses that song. Public domain is work that is not protected by copyright so it is essentially “free music”. “Creative Commons” is a copyright license that enables free distribution of copyrighted work, but different creative commons licenses have different requirements, e.g. “attribution” which means you need to credit where the music came from.
Can I use a pop song in my video?
The short answer is “no”, or that it’s usually difficult enough to not be worth the hassle. That said, check out the link below if you’d like to explore more.