Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Royalty free Music for Filmmakers and Other Projects

Recently I have been involved in editing one of our short documentaries and was trying to get some good music to compliment the visuals. Obviously the best option is to work with a composer to get the right music done for your requirement, but for many of us independent filmmakers this can be tough and costly. But luckily there are many like-minded musicians who would like to collaborate and who would like to allow their music to be used for free, its just that you need to locate the right site.

I did some research and these are some good places you could try and find some good royalty free music for both commercial and non commercial purposes.

YouTube Audio Library
www.youtube.com/audiolibrary

Launched in September 2013, this place features some great music that can be used for both commercial and non-commercial projects. Its a great initiative by Youtube, where even musicians and artists can submit their work to be featured.

www.mobygratis.com

Moby started to give out some of his awesome music to filmmakers for free several years back. Now the site has been updated and relaunched to offer a large number of tracks from his album. You could apply for a track and it will take only 24hrs to get approved most of the time. 



freemusicarchive.org

Personally this is the best place for me. Free Music Archive is a great initiative, where you would find a wide variety of music for your projects. It also arranges music under "curator" categories where the admins does a great job in bringing music from creative commons licenses as well as other reputed organisations into one place. Its also a great place to discover free music!



There are two more places that I would recommend,

www.jamendo.com/en

This is a great place to discover great free music! Since almost of of the music here are licensed under creative commons you can find tracks for non-commercial projects for free. You could also contact the artists directly and see if they are willing to give their music to your projects. 

vimeo.com/musicstore

Vimeo started off a music store for filmmakers as well. This site features both paid and free music that you can use for your projects. I haven't really used this directly but since its vimeo it should have some great tunes in thier library.

What do you think of the above sites? Are there any other sites which you have had an experience with?

Good luck with your productions!