Video blogging, video reviews, and other uses of online video are more popular than ever. If a picture is worth a thousand words and the standard video is 30 frames a second, you are effectively getting 1.8 million words a minute. (I’ll pause for a moment as you confirm my calculations.) That’s all well and good, but many of us want to have some music playing in the background of the videos that we upload onto the Internet.
While you could use any number of MP3 music files on your computer, these run the risk of running into allegations of copyright infringement. YouTube has an AudioSwap feature that you can use after the fact, swapping out the audio track from your video to something that has been pre-licensed for use on YouTube, but this also strips your video of any other audio you may have as part of your clip. If you’re mixing music with the “real” audio track from your video clip, AudioSwap is far from ideal.
In this way, how can you go about having some decent music playing in the background of your videos while avoiding copyright infringement and the less than desirable AudioSwap feature? Well, you’ll need to get some royalty-free music or free license music. Where can you find that?
With a little bit of research on my part, I found Free Music Archive. Let me preface this by saying that this post is in no way sponsored by that website and I am truly speaking from my own experience. I just think that it’s a great (free) online resource.
Hosted on the Free Music Archive is a huge library of royalty-free music spanning just about every musical genre that you would want. For the purposes of my Calgary Stampede highlights video, I looked up a track from the country music collection. Searchable by genre, the library also includes electronic, hip hop, jazz, historic, rock, soul, and spoken word, among others.
You won’t find anything by Kanye West or U2 on the site, of course, but there is still quite a range of tunes for you to consider.
Navigating through the site, you can preview the song from within your web browser and, if you like it, you can hit the download button along the right side of the table. The lists can be sorted by artist, track name, album, or genre, though you probably won’t be familiar with any of the artists.
It’ll take some trial and error to find the kind of music you want, but the price is right. Free music is free music and it’s all 100% legal. There are no worries about the DMCA or copyright violations.
The Free Music Archive may not be completely necessary if you’re looking for some tunes to improve productivity, but it’s a fantastic resource for podcasters, videographers, and other people who need royalty-free music.
A nice resource, but note that use appears to be restricted to non-commercial use. So, that rules out a lot of potential uses. If you’re just uploading a video of your vacation to YouTube, you’ll probably be okay. But, if you’re doing a video to promote your blog or website or whatnot, you’re out of luck.
Depending on what your blog or website does would determine commercial or not. Granted most folks have adsense or some form of advertising on their blog, but I wouldn’t consider my Education blog as commercial. While I run adsense and the MaxBlog Press banner, I’m not generating any money from the blog because I don’t promote it to be commercial.
Maybe I need to spend more time on it and make it commercial so that I can’t use the music… :-)but I don’t think that they would come after me for using a clip with a video of some technology that the students are in the classroom.
But would that depend upon how narrowly the licensor decides to interpret commercial and non-commercial use? Some commercial uses are obvious, but others may not be, and, in my mind, it leaves a lot of things in a general gray area. And, with things in the gray, I’d prefer to error on the side of caution.
If they want my last dime and really want to go after me or the little guy then they have too much time on their hands and not enough real business.
I think you’ve described the RIAA with that last comment. 😉
LOL, ya know after reading it I thought the same thing.
Hi,
I hope you don’t mind if I add my site as a place where you can find royalty free music using a commercial allowed creative commons license.
I have allot of instrumental pieces you can use:
http://www.danosongs.com
Dan-O
That is cool I will have to check it out. I wonder what new stuff i can find!