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If you are a Youtuber or create blogs, or you are an up and coming movie producer seeking to create awesome, quality content…Or you just need some honest to goodness good music for some content you are creating, you may have run into some snafus of trying to figure out which music is ‘safe’ to use without running into the music police with sirens blaring that you have just used someone’s music without permission.
Using music in your Youtube or digital content or story can go a long way for quality.
While platforms like Youtube offer royalty free music, you may have other platforms where you want to create content before uploading to Youtube. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Therefore, you will need more options besides the music offered by Youtube to create your content, right?
If you are anything like me, you would probably begin a wild hunt through the internet at this point, searching for websites that offer ‘royalty free’ music. Indeed, there are very good sites out there that could provide some good music for your content.
Sadly, there are several posts and advice available as well that talk about how to ‘avoid copyright’ or ‘make copyright music into non-copyright music’ or ‘how to bypass being caught if you use someone’s music without permission’. The reality is that it is going to cost you in the long run.
Copyright theft could be the death of a good content creation career.
Therefore: How do you use music for your content and ensure that it is not infringing on anyone’s copyright? I always recommend 2 ways:
- Subscribe to a good stock music provider: There are various options of royalty-free music providers, like Epidemic Sound, Shutterstock, or Premium Beat. The benefit of a subscription service is that you know you have paid for the content you are using, and especially, it is usually understood that you are purchasing the music not just for private, home use, but in creating content for public consumption, like a public video to advertise your business.
- Use public domain music: This is my personal favorite choice. Thanks to the Oxford dictionary, the definition that I find to be one of the simplest for public domain is: the state of belonging or being available to the public as a whole, and therefore not subject to copyright. In other words, if you stumble across a piece of music that is in the public domain, it means that the music does not or no longer belongs to anyone.
In order for a piece of music to ‘no longer belong to anyone’ so that everybody else can use it freely, one out of four things would have happened:
- The copyright on the music expired
- The owner of the copyright did not register it properly
- The owner of the copyright dedicated the work to the public, and gave up their rights
- The work could not be protected by copyright in the first place
In many cases, #1 is what happens to the work – The copyright expired. This usually happens 70 years after the work’s creator dies. If it was a corporate copyright, it expires 90 years from date of publication or 120 years from date of creation.
You are probably thinking: If it is public domain music that was made 70 years ago before it became ‘free for all to use’, does that not mean it is old music?
Public domain music is not always old music.
Remember the 4 reasons I mentioned earlier about music in the public domain? One of the reasons that a piece of music is in the public domain is that the owner of the music, and very much still alive, has decided to ‘dedicate’ the song to the public for use. There are artists who decide to do this with their music. You can find some of these dedicated public domain music at Envato Elements.
Without bugging you down on these details about years or duration or expiration of copyrights, the simple message here is that, when copyright expires, or there is no longer a copyright on a piece of work that was created, it has now ‘entered the public domain’ – and guess what? You can use it however you please.
Therefore, if you are looking for some good old blues music to accompany that new video ad you are creating, you may want to check out the public domain record for some beautiful vibes in that genre. To start you off on your search for public domain music, check out sites like PDinfo.com, Free Music Archive (FMA) or Musopen.
Have fun creating vibrant content with the peace of mind that you are not infringing on anyone’s music copyright!
Do you have a good or bad story to tell about a music copyright experience? Drop a line, stories are awesome!