Royalty-free music typically requires paying for the music once. Then, you can use the song in any manner you want.
Originally, sites offering royalty-free music allowed you to purchase one song at a time, but you had to discover the artists yourself and build your own playlists. Now, subscription-based royalty-free music sites often have recommended artists and curated playlists, so you can more easily find something you will love. However, the music on these sites may not be exactly what you are looking for.
Consider a subscription to a commercial streaming music service like Cloud Cover Music instead. You can get the latest trendy, high-quality recordings without worrying about music licensing fees.
What Is Royalty-Free Music?
Royalty free music is a composition or musical recording that you pay for once, but can then use in any scenario you want.
Often, royalty free music is available for cheap or free, although you may not get the best quality tracks or the genre you want when you focus on paying less. Still, having this as an option for your business can be very helpful, especially if you are a small business owner.
How Do People Use It?
When you get royalty-free music, you can use it in association with your business in whatever way you want.
For example, you can use it as background music to keep your customers entertained. You can use it for commercials about your business. Or, you can use it along with visual displays in your store. Small production companies that make films, podcasts, or similar entertainment might use royalty-free music for their shows.
It can take some effort to find good quality royalty-free music, but this guide can help you get started.
Finding the Best Royalty Free Music Is Becoming Easier
An artist who creates a piece of music owns the rights to this work as their intellectual property, regardless of whether this work has been published or not. However, many musicians and composers may choose to create some work and give up part of this right to a purchaser in a royalty-free context. It is one way to make more money while reaching a larger audience, who might come back to purchase more music.
One of the biggest benefits of royalty-free music is having access to songs that your customers have not heard before. This can give your business a unique ambiance.
You can easily find lyric-free music, too, from instrumental to electronica.
Many of the best royalty-free music services provide curated playlists, so you can listen to their site’s popular artists and decide if their music is for you.
Top 5 Royalty-Free Music Sites
Now that you know what you are looking for with royalty-free music, here are the top five websites where you can find these tunes:
- AudioJungle: With a simple monthly subscription at this royalty-free music site, you have unlimited access to a wide range of songs. You can also purchase individual tracks, which you can keep in your personal library or download to your computer. There are nearly 2 million tracks, starting at just $1.
- Audiio: This royalty-free music service has no subscription option, but it does have a large music and sound effects library, with more than 450 musical artists and over 30,000 SFX tracks. A lifetime membership with music licenses allowing any kind of video project is a one-time payment of $299. Adding SFX is an additional $199. This means for a one-time payment, you can use this service whenever, forever.
- Epidemic Sound: One of the largest and most popular royalty-free music sites, Epidemic Sound also helps you gather music you are interested in to make “channels” to stream. It allows you to pick different subscription levels and gives a free 30-day trial period so you can decide if the service is right for you.
- Premium Beat: This royalty-free music service branched out of the popular Shutterstock stock photo service. Seeing a need for higher quality music with different copyright options, Premium Beat offers subscription levels similar to Audible. You pay $12.99 per month and can download up to five royalty-free songs.
- Pond5: While AudioJungle focuses on music and offers some additional sound effects tracks, Pond5 specializes in a wider range of audio tracks, including sound effects, video, templates, and more. This is predominantly a stock media site, but you can find royalty-free music along with other options.
Consider Commercial Music Streaming Instead
There are some downsides to using royalty-free music in your business. For example, the quality of these tracks may not meet your expectations, even if they are professionally recorded. No matter how much you pay for these songs — from free to more expensive — you do not own the copyright to the song, you just have permission to use it. However, this means other people can use it, too. Even if another business owner uses the music you use, more customers may prefer music they recognize, like popular tunes.
Rather than spending money to get songs that do not meet your needs, you can pay a cost-effective monthly subscription fee to Pandora CloudCover and get appropriate commercial licenses to play popular, trending, high-quality music in your store.
You do not have to pay monthly fees to multiple performing rights organizations to access their catalogues. Instead, you have access to millions of songs with one subscription.
References
What Is Royalty Free Music? What Does It Mean Exactly? (April 2011). Premium Beat by Shutterstock.