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Episode 85

The Music Show

April 21, 2017 ·

EP85: THE MUSIC SHOW Music Licensing 101 Episode Summary: Online Resources To Get Music for Podcasting & Videos What are my favorite online resources to get music for podcasting and videos?

Episode Summary: Music Licensing 101 — the legal terms every podcaster and video creator needs to know, plus a curated list of paid and free resources for finding usable music.

What You’ll Learn

  • The key legal music terms every creator needs: copyright, public domain, royalty free, Creative Commons, fair use
  • A curated list of paid royalty-free music sources, with real per-song and subscription pricing
  • Free music and sound effect sources worth bookmarking
  • A practical organization system for keeping licensed tracks and their attribution together
  • Copyright — a legal right protecting the original creator of music, photos, art, and books, ensuring they’re compensated for their work. Writing the song or clicking the shutter makes you the copyright owner automatically, protected by law.
  • Public domain — copyright has expired, or the work is old enough to no longer be protected. Plenty of old books and songs fall here, free for anyone to use. Trivia: music produced after 1978 is currently protected for the creator’s life plus 70 years before entering public domain.
  • Royalty free — permission to use copyrighted material with unlimited usage rights and no future royalty payments. Pay once, use on as many projects as needed.
  • Creative Commons — free to use, but the copyright holder can set terms, most commonly requiring attribution (credit, often a link back to the artist’s site).
  • Fair use — a narrow exception to copyright law, granting temporary permission to use material in specific circumstances like news coverage or journalism.

Organizational tip: when a track requires attribution, save a text file with the credit link right alongside the audio file in the same folder.

Download tip: choose .wav (uncompressed) over .mp3 (compressed) whenever the option exists — noticeably higher quality.

  • AudioJungle (Envato) — royalty free, ~$20/song
  • PremiumBeat — royalty free, ~$50/song, with excellent After Effects and video editing tutorials
  • AudioBlocks — subscription, unlimited downloads, royalty free, $99/year
  • VideoBlocks — for video assets
  • Pond5 — royalty free, ~$40/song, plus photos, motion graphics, and video
  • Epidemic Sound — subscription, $15/month for YouTube use, great for vlog-style videos
  • Artlist.io — subscription, $199/year, excellent selection, unlimited royalty-free downloads

Bonus resources:

Casey Neistat–style vlog music: Andrew Applepie (name-your-price), David Cutter Music (~$10–20/track, some of which Neistat himself uses).

Free Music & Sound Effect Resources

Sound effects: Adobe Audition Sound Effects Library, FreeSound.org.

Free music: YouTube Audio Library (in YouTube’s Creator Studio), Incompetech (by Kevin MacLeod), Bensound, Purple Planet, No Copyright Sounds, FreeMusicArchive.org, and JoshWoodward.com.

Organization Tips

Build and keep an organized sound library. Folder structure: a master “Audio & Sounds” folder, with sub-folders organized by source (PremiumBeat, etc.), and inside those, sub-folders by genre or mood. Every track gets stored alongside a text file noting its attribution.

Show Notes & Links