How to Find Royalty-Free Music for YouTube Videos

If you are a YouTube content creator, you should be aware of the Herculean task of finding copyright-free music that matches your content. On some bad days, finding the right music track or sound effect to complement your video can take hours. And if you regularly upload videos to YouTube, this process can potentially stress you out.

The problem with music for YouTube videos is that if you don’t pay too much attention to music licenses, you may end up in litigation. If this happens, YouTube may automatically turn off parts of your video, or you may need to share the revenue with the composer. In worse circumstances, your channel may also be subject to a strike for copyright infringement on YouTube.

There have been cases where fake users have copied music from other channels and tried to pass it off as their own. Yes, it happens. And it is not a pleasant experience. Such errors could potentially erase hours of your efforts.

So how do you make sure that the music you buy for your YouTube videos is royalty free? Well, that is what we are going to explore in this article today.

Let’s start.

What is royalty free music

Royalty-free music refers to a music license that allows you to use an audio track as many times as you like, as long as you have paid the composer a one-time license fee. So whether you use it in a video or as a background partition of an application, it entirely depends on you.

However, royalty free music is not the same as royalty free music. The latter is essentially when the artists or composers allow you to use their creations for a monetary gain as long as you agree to assign them the musical score.

So how do you find royalty free music for your YouTube videos? Well, don’t worry, because there are many sources, but only a few are reliable.

1. Search the source – YouTube

YouTube is one of the popular sources for royalty-free music. To be technically correct, the YouTube audio library.

It has a huge library of copyright-free tracks, and if you have time to waste, you can find some amazing tracks there. Music is categorized and you can search by genre, mood or instrument used.

More importantly, you can also view the music by clicking the Attribution required drop-down menu or otherwise.

Although the library is quite large, you don’t always get the right music for your videos. In addition, the interface is a bit bland. Although there are many sorting options available, you cannot sort them by recent or most popular. This limitation can be quite troublesome. Since this library is available to all content creators, popular tracks have already been used several times.

On top of that, there aren’t many options when it comes to format. Music is downloaded in a compressed audio format, and there is no option to download in other lossless formats such as WAV or FLAC.

2. Explore other sources of royalty-free music

If the limitations mentioned above bother you the most, you can check out other trusted sources for royalty-free music such as HookSounds.

One of the strengths of HookSounds is that all the tracks are original and free of rights. When you buy the license for a song or subscribe to a license, it means that you have legal rights to the song or music track. In the worst case scenario, even if you have copyright issues, HookSounds will take care of it.

Apart from that, the media library is diverse. Although all new and recent versions appear on the first page, you can still search for specific types of audio files.

The interface is modern and you can filter your search by type, BPM, duration and genre. There is a nifty option to sort results by release date and popularity. And of course, it makes your job easier and helps you save time finding the right audio for your YouTube videos.

Another positive – when you finalize on a track and download it, the downloaded zip file combines high-quality MP3 and WAV files.

The free version of HookSounds allows you to download songs for home videos, while the Pro version allows YouTube monetization and commercial use.

3. Sourcing from other audio channels

Finally, you can surf some YouTube audio channels. There are a number of channels that provide music to content creators in several genres. Some of them also welcome several new artists to the world of music, which means that you can discover new songs.

The only limitation is that you don’t know for sure the original source of the tracks. Just take the artist’s word for it. And as we mentioned above, this can lead you into a dispute.

Although you can always go ahead and dig a little deeper, you will end up wasting more time, reducing your efficiency.

Here’s for more creativity

Audio is one of the most important pillars for making a good YouTube video. Some creatives say that audio is 50% video. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the background audio track can make or break your videos.

In short, the music track should adapt perfectly to your video. At the same time, you shouldn’t have any problems or be forced to demonetize videos because you didn’t pay attention to your music selection.

Royalty free music sources like HookSounds help your content stand out in the crowd. At the same time, this saves you the headache of licensing issues.