Where to Find Great Music for YouTube Videos

Beautiful images are crucial to create an attractive video, but the soundtrack is just as important if not more. Put crappy sound over your breathtaking pictures, and people will probably not even watch more than a few seconds before stopping the film. When creating content for YouTube, finding good music or sound effects can be quite a challenge. But there are solutions, here are three of them to help you out and hopefully make your clips even better!

Music sets the mood for your videos. A different style of song will set a different atmosphere and convey a different feeling. However, finding the perfect song for your freshly filmed footage is not an easy task, especially one that you can use to promote and monetize your content. Since a little while ago, some of the top 40 and well-known songs can be utilized on YouTube with the condition that the ads put on your content will go to the music creator, but if you count on making a living out of YouTube, that’s not the way to go. Instead, you should find licensed music or license-free songs.

The best-known solution is probably the YouTube Audio Library. It contains quite a few tracks. However, they are not the best available out there. Also, if you’d like to have different songs than most YouTubers, this is definitely not the way to go. Try and listen to some of the best tracks on the platform and you’ll soon realize they are the ones you hear all the time.

Another solution, if you don't have any budget, would be to create your own songs and sound effects. It will take time and effort, but if you know exactly what you want, this is probably the best solution – at least if you are a bit creative and like music. If you own an iOS or MacOS device, all you need is Garage Band, and you can get started!

If you have no idea how to create music and Garage Band is not your thing, then you may want to start looking for someone who writes songs. Perhaps you have someone who does it amongst your friends, but otherwise social networks could help you find someone. Even easier yet, a website such as Upwork or Freelancer will put you in touch with the right person for the job.

Last but not least, there are tons of music licensing services out there. The issue with most of them is the cost. Some will charge per song, and it can become quite expensive for content creators putting multiple videos online every week, while others offer very limited library. Epidemic Sound presented in the video above by Peter McKinnon is probably the best solution out there for YouTubers. Instead of a licensing fee per song, you pay a simple monthly or annual subscription, and you can use as many songs as you’d like on your channel. The cost is defined on your monthly view count. Unless you go over 500K, it will cost you only $15 per month to access the full library of songs and sound effects. While it’s not the mainstream music we are used to, there is a lot of choices, and the content is quite good!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on music licensing for YouTube videos and commercial jobs. How do you go about it? Do you have any other source to get the perfect soundtrack for your films? Do you think a subscription-based alternative like Epidemic Sound is attractive? Let me know in the comments below.