Welcome to this blog, where we’re talking about the differing costs of music for a video.
We actually have another blog and video where we delve into the best way to source music for a video, please feel free to read (or watch) it at your leisure.
This blog is all about cold hard cash.
Music, especially music for a video, is overall a bit of a minefield, as mentioned in our previous blog on the topic, especially when it comes to content creation.
Royalty Free and Free Music
If you’re looking for free music for a video, YouTube is your friend.
YouTube has a great audio library, in which music producers and artists have taken the time to make this music and then submit it to YouTube, meeting their terms and conditions.
By doing that, they are saying ‘I’m happy for this music to live on YouTube’. However, in most cases, you do need to credit them by putting a link in the description, or things of this nature.
Licenced tracks (think what you’d hear on the radio) – expensive!
If you want to use a licenced track, it’s always dependent on the artist, on the record label. We don’t really go down this route for what we create.
We create corporate videos and animations. When we have dabbled into the area of licenced music, the cost has gone up into four and five figure numbers for using a track for six months on the internet.
Now, if you use that music track in a cinema advert, on an advert which pops up on demand or if you use that track for an advert that goes onto broadcast, then the cost just keeps going up and up and up. With this in mind, you can only use it for a certain amount of time.
For internet use, it tends to be cheaper. So if you want to use licenced music for a video, be prepared to pay around the £4-5k mark. The more popular the track is, the more expensive it’ll be.
The best option, in our opinion…
If you’d like lots of high quality variety and don’t mind paying a little bit, then Audio Network is a fantastic resource. For corporate videos or broadcasting adverts that use music tracks, then usually it costs around anywhere between $99 to $400 for internet usage. Again, this can vary on the artist and the usage.
So, to conclude.
The free option is YouTube libraries.
The next tier up, so to speak, is using a website like Audio Network, but terms and conditions are important to consider when using something like this. For internet usage it can be around $99-400.
Or, you can pay through the nose for using a licenced track running into thousand of dollars or pounds!
The likes of Audio Network are reasonably priced, have huge variety and are our go-to, so give it a go! We hope that answers that question. You could always call us for a chat, or drop us an email if you’d like to know any more on the topic.
Check out our other blog on using music in videos here, or visit our knowledge centre to find out the answers to any other questions you may have.