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Content is king. This is true for your online course as well. And while it may be obvious that your course should offer highly educational and engaging content with a balance between video and text, what about the audio?
We’re talking about adding some flair to your videos with audio. You probably put most of your effort into getting the lighting right, but have you ever thought how much better your learners will enjoy them when there’s some background music to enrich the experience?
From video games and animations to Hollywood productions, music is always there to heighten emotions and create a more intense, memorable experience for viewers.
So, what are the options for adding music to your videos?
Royalty-free music is the most budget-friendly and realistic option – unless you’re a talented musician, of course, and want to take on this project yourself.
In this post, we’re sharing the best royalty-free music sites, including both paid and free options.
Here’s what we will be covering:
What is Royalty-Free Music?
Royalty-free music is music available for commercial purposes. You can buy and use the music for commercial projects (in this case, in your online videos) without paying royalties every time the music is played.
💁 For example:
Whether you’ll pay a one-off amount or a monthly subscription depends on the pricing plans of the website you choose to download your music from.
Royalty-free music, also referred to as stock music, is a convenient solution to use music in your video productions. It’s not limited to a specific type of music or broadcast length.
Imagine an online music library where you can find everything from cinematic sound effects to indie and spiritual music and from jingles to entire playlists.
Royalty-free music promotes the use of legal music downloads. All video producers and content creators should be aware that using music illegally could lead to the banning of the content and even legal actions.
A license to use royalty-free music usually determines:
Consequently, it is vital for someone to read carefully the terms of use and become familiar with the different kinds of licenses on the marketplace they’re purchasing the music.
Other advantages of royalty-free music are:
Misconceptions About Royalty-Free Music
Let’s see now what royalty-free music is not.
The most common misconception is that royalty-free music is copyright-free music. But we already explained the actual royalty-free meaning. In fact, there is no such thing as copyright-free music.
Any person who creates music is the automatic copyright owner. In cases where the owner of the copyrighted music allows it to be used for any purpose, the music might be free, but it is not devoid of copyright.
The second misconception is that free, stock music is poor quality and cheap music. And while a prestigious Hollywood filmmaker wouldn’t pick a music licensing or stock site for their soundtrack, the truth is that the quality of music available for royalty-free music composers is top-notch and definitely good enough for your video project. Ultimately, the quality of royalty-free music is determined by the musician.
One last thing people get wrong is that the term royalty-free means that no license or fee should be paid to the music copyright owner. In reality, royalty-free music can be licensed at any price. You can find royalty-free music for $30 or $600, depending on the licensing model and quality.
What is the Best Music for Educational Videos?
Instructional video music is important. Just like you choose the top training video software for a professional and eye-pleasing result, you should make sure to choose the right type of music for your videos, always ensuring it’s high quality.
Here are 3 quick tips from us:
Royalty-Free Music: Paid Options
To help save you time, we’ve put together a hand-picked list of places that we use to get stock music. You can find and download royalty-free music for videos, intro videos, marketing purposes, or audio lessons without any worries about copyright violations.
Some of those places also provide a marketplace where you can request the kind of music you need if you’re tired of searching for music and want music delivered to you.
Audio Jungle
AudioJungle is part of the Envato Market, where you can find top-quality music starting from $1. The site currently hosts more than 600,000 tracks and sounds, all of which you can find by browsing through more than 40 categories of music and sounds.
The site supports a keyword search, weekly summaries of the most popular items, user-compiled collections, looking through portfolios of top authors, and also a community of audio composers and producers.
Artlist
Artlist offers more than 400K premium assets, including unlimited music, SFX, footage, templates, editing software, and more. You can browse and select assets based on your preferred genre or instrument, mood, or video theme.
Artlist has a free version that allows you to download unlimited watermarked music and footage to use in your explainer videos. To explore its full library and assets, it has pricing plans starting from €9,99/mo.
Bensound
Under a Creative Commons License, Bensound gives you the option to use its music for free as long as you credit the website with any music you use. Although the collection of tracks is not as extensive as on similar websites, it still offers plenty of options.
If you want more options or to skip the credits, you can go for one of the subscription-based plans starting at €9,99/month or pay per track, starting at €34 per track.
You can also sort music by duration, date of upload, artist, number of sales, page views, and price. When you find a track, you can download a watermarked preview.
Epidemic Sound
Epidemic Sound prides itself on bringing you exclusive, authentic tracks from leading music creators around the world, renewing its library daily. Its soundtracks (over 40,000 tracks and 90,000 sound effects) can cover different needs, from Twitch live streams to films and advertisements.
Epidemic Sound offers a generous 30-day free trial during which you can download and publish unlimited tracks on your videos and podcasts. You can also connect your social media accounts, and any music you use in your social media content is automatically cleared. Subscription plans start from €17,99 per month. A mobile app is also available.
Soundstripe
Soundstripe offers over 200K premium music, sound effects, and video assets, including songs by Grammy-winning artists. Soundstripe is addressed to professional content creators who take this seriously, as it’s obvious from its advanced features: workflow extensions, intuitive search with advanced filters, stem music files, and mobile app.
Soundstripe automatically clears copyright claims once you connect your YouTube channel. We also love how you can create playlists and follow artists you like, so you don’t miss anything. It’s slightly more expensive than other options, with pricing plans starting from $14.99 billed monthly.
Jamendo
Jamendo is another platform worth checking out. The music available in Jamendo’s library covers most music genres, so there’s something for everyone. The quality of the music is impressive.
It hosts more than 250,000 tracks from music artists. Artists and listeners can network through the platform. The free service includes social networking functionalities, like:
Pond5
Pond5 is a platform where apart from music, you can also find video footages, After Effects, pictures, illustrations, and 3D models. Concerning music, you can browse through 30 categories of tracks and 36 categories of sound effects, filtered out by certain filters: Uplifting, inspirational, loud, calm, summer, and tension.
You can also sort music by duration, date of upload, artist, number of sales, page views, and price. When you find a track, you can download a watermarked preview.
You can pay per item, with music tracks starting at €6 (a credit pack is also available), or pay for a subscription starting at €30/mo.
The Music Bakery
With Music Bakery you can easily search, listen, and instantly download royalty-free music. The platform hosts tracks from studio musicians and plenty of real acoustic instruments. The user can select tracks from different categories and also choose by mood (suspense, sad, etc.), occasion (holidays, wedding, etc.), and more.
The pricing starts for 15-sec versions at $29 and goes to $59 for all versions. Subscriptions are also available.
Music Vine
Music Vine, although it doesn’t offer as many options as other stock websites in this list (it currently offers 6000 tracks), promises to bring cutting-edge tracks and is trusted by filmmakers and brands all over the world.
It has an intuitive search tool where you can simply “describe in your own words” what you need. It also features an AI music playlist generator, which will suggest the best tracks for your film based on your description.
Subscriptions start from €22.49 per month (€16.24 if you want to give them credit), or you can choose to pay per use. In this case, prices vary depending on the use case and the duration of the tracks.
PremiumBeat
PremiumBeat, a Shutterstock company, provides exclusive, high-quality tracks and sound effects for use in new and traditional media projects, including videos, films, apps, games, and television programming.
The user can choose tracks from a wide variety of genres, moods, and collections, filter them by track length, artists, or instruments, and add them to personalized playlists. Those playlists are easily shared with colleagues and collaborators.
Shockwave Sound
With Shockwave Sound, finding the music you want is effortless as it offers a very friendly user interface and advanced search. In this platform, music tracks are categorized according to the music genre, mood, production types, prominent instruments, and artists.
The user can also discover albums and sound effects.
Shutterstock
Shutterstock, mostly known for its image stock footage and stock videos, has crafted a music-specific search and discovery experience that is easy to use. The user sees a waveform and can filter music, which helps to make a preview decision before hitting play.
In Shutterstock, you can find different genres of music, music moods, handpicked collections, and trending tracks. You can also choose from a variety of themes and tempos for commercial use. They also mention having a persistent audio player that won’t interrupt the listening experience as you leave the page.
Purple Planet
Purple Planet, with their website of the same color, offers a collection of music created by the artists Chris Martin and Geoff Harvey. You can choose not to pay for a license and credit the artists in your video, or you can support them and get access to high-quality WAVs with a standard license at $8 or an unlimited license for $4.
Royalty-Free Music: Free options
These stock music sites offer a nice variety of music and sound effects entirely for free.
YouTube Audio Library
Everyone knows of YouTube videos, but the popular social media platform also has the YouTube Audio Library, offering a good variety of royalty-free music tracks.
You just need to have your own account, which is essentially just a signup. You can search using filters including attribution, since some tracks and sounds require you to credit the source in your description.
It’s the same platform as Pond5 we described above. However, it is a place where users can find and download thousands of historical media files for their projects completely free. The only disadvantage of his platform is that you have to register to get your free track.
Pond5 Public Domain Collection
Pond5 is a free license music site with high-quality music, part of the Pond5 site we described before. It’s a place where users can find and download thousands of historical media files for their projects and free stock music without paying anything. The only requirement of the platform is that you need to register to get your free track.
Free Music Archive
Free Music Archive indeed provides completely free and instant access to original music from independent artists, which you can sort by filters (e.g. Blues, Classical, Country, etc.). On this platform, you can also immediately download music files without the need to register.
Dig.ccMixter
Dig.ccMixter is maybe the best of the free platforms we met, as there are a variety of sounds and tracks, which you can filter by genre, instrument, and style and also download instantly in your computer without registration. The quality of the tracks seems quite good for a free service. While it’s an open-music website, you are also welcome to donate an amount of your choice.
Let the Music Play!
That’s all from us! We hope you enjoyed this article and found its information useful. In this list, we’ve given you plenty of choices for free music websites where you can find awesome sounds to enrich anything from your “meet the instructor” welcome video to your entire video marketing efforts.
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Rosemary is LearnWorlds’ Content Marketing Manager. She has over 2 decades of experience in omnichannel marketing and content writing for the IT and SaaS industry. Her expertise lies in crafting effective content marketing strategies that attract, engage, and nurture customers, enabling LearnWorlds to reach its target audiences with precision.
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