How and where can I find music for a video?

Welcome to this blog, in which we will talk about how and where you can find music for a video. 

This area in itself is a bit of a sticky wicket, as there are a number of licencing issues to consider around music for a video. 

Right off the bat (cricket seems to be an unintentional theme here), as a general rule, avoid licenced music – by this we mean music by artists we may see on Top of The Tops (what do you mean that show doesn’t air any more?) or on the Radio. So the likes of Coldplay, Dua Lipa or anyone like that.  

There are a couple of reasons behind this. It becomes very expensive, very quickly. Not only this, they tend to date quite quickly. As unlikely as it seems now, there was probably a time when we thought ‘Get Lucky’ by Daft Punk and Pharrell Williams (who is seemingly immune to the ageing process ironically) would never get old. How wrong we were.  

What we tend to see quite a lot is people using Google and searching things like ‘licence free music’, ‘royalty free music’ or simply ‘free music for a video’. 

Again, we wouldn’t recommend this as an avenue to explore. Why? Simply because in this world ruled by clicks and website traffic, there will always be people using content with particular key words and there’s no real way to check if it actually is royalty free, or if the music was made by the website owners; it could have been stolen. 

SO WHAT SHOULD I DO?

Sorry, we’re rambling. 

One thing we would suggest is that YouTube is actually a great resource for licence free music. If you have a YouTube account, go into YouTube Studio and then go into the audio library. In there, music tracks are all categorised by mood, genre, or instruments.

If you then check what the usage is, it will tell you very clearly, if you have to link to the artist in the description of the video. So, as long as you’re using these tracks on YouTube, then you’re fine. Also, for the sake of ease, you can just download them straight from YouTube.

WHAT DO STONE’S THROW MEDIA DO TO GET AROUND MUSIC LICENCING?

To be blunt about it, we pay money – but not for famous tracks of course.

We actually pay websites a monthly fee so we have access to libraries of music.

If we use a website like Audio Network (another great resource), we pick suitable music for a video, we put it into the video, and then when we finally know we’re going to go with it, we just pay for that individual solo track.

So, in summary, music is a minefield – avoid licenced tracks, use YouTube audio library as a free resource or pay the cash to the likes of Audio Network.

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