Composers or producers with sound processing software skills can make music from scratch. But not everyone is a composer or producer, and even people with musical education won’t always have the time to write a new song for each project they work on.
You can use several services and platforms to download free and even paid music or audio stocks. But if you dare to use a song or music for which the author did not grant the commercial-use rights, you can get banned from the social network, or even worse, you’ll get sued.
Each musical production has an author and a license, according to that license, the composition can or can’t be used for commercial purposes. Let’s see how licenses work review the top 4 best websites to get free-copyright music and sounds for YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and other social media networks, along with that, we will show you how to avoid getting sanctioned.
Music and copyright
Using music in content is a good way to attract people’s attention, but you need to remember that the rights of the music itself, do not belong to the content creator, it belongs to the author, and using it without the appropriate license is fraught with sanctions and legal prosecution.
Example:
- The Kazaki Bar played several Mikhail Krug’s songs for the guests but they didn’t pay for the commercial use of the copyrighted material. The bar was fined 3,500$.
- A restaurant included songs from Enrique Iglesias. They got a 2,000$ fine.
Let’s say the copyright owners aren’t the ones that caught you, Social networks will do, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and even TikTok have AI-empowered features that allow them to check ads and personal posts for copyright infringement.
Creative Commons Licenses
The right to freely use something for commercial purposes is granted by the following types of CC licenses:
- Attribution or CC BY: The author must be mentioned.
- Attribution-Share Alike or CC BY-SA: The author must be mentioned, and the material can be modified.
- Attribution No Derivatives or CC BY-ND: The author must be mentioned, but no modifications or cuts are allowed.
- Royalty-free: It requires a one-time payment for the right to use it freely.
Creative Commons, on the other hand, states that the use for commercial purposes is not allowed, but you can use the material for personal projects.
- Attribution Non-Commercial or CC BY-NC: the author must be mentioned.
- Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike or CC BY-NC-SA: The author must be mentioned and you can change the material.
- Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives or CC BY-NC-ND: The author must be mentioned, and you can’t change the material.
Top 4 best services for no copyright music and sounds
Website and platforms for downloading music and sounds can be free or paid. When choosing a service, you need to be careful and read the TOS and licenses. Some services provide songs not for commercial, but only for personal use.
Free Stocks
You can search for tracks in the YouTube library as there are a lot of free music that can be used for videos that aren’t copyrighted. Facebook also has something similar on their Creator Studio, and TikTok literally has an entire library of it. The disadvantage is that there are not many compositions, and they’re not unique.
Free Music Archive
Free Music Archive offers music and sounds sorted by genre, name, titles, and finally, type of license. In total, there are more than 100k compositions available. You can filter tracks by the”Public Domain”, or “Commercial Use” licenses and use the ones you need.
Website: https://freemusicarchive.org/
Download Features: License types, the license is indicated next to each track.
Freesound
On the Freesound website, you can search for tracks and sounds using keywords. There is also a tag cloud where you can pick the genre. If you want to download files, you just need to register, it’s completely free.
Website: https://freesound.org/browse/tags/
Download features: Each song has its own license, be careful not all tracks can be used for commercial purposes.
Envatomarket
This platform gives you thousands of tracks for free and without a license in different genres, but only for personal use. For commercial use, you will need to pay for a subscription.
Website: https://elements.envato.com/audio
Copyright restrictions: Creative Commons for personal and commercial use.
Pricing: from $16.5 a month