Free Music for Video Editing: Find Background Music for Your Videos
Finding free music for video editing doesn’t have to be hard. This list includes a number of the top sources on the internet for finding royalty-free, creative commons music.
You can sort by genre, style, album, or artist to find the best background music and sound effects to use in your videos, podcasts, and creative projects!
Are we missing any? Leave a comment below if you know of any other great sites to find free music for use in videos. Background cover photo credit: Freestocks.org
Related: 16 Copyright Free (and Creative Commons) Music Sources
1. Youtube Audio Library
The Youtube Audio Library is an easy way to browse and download free music for your videos. Youtube also has a tool allowing you to check ANY music in your videos to see the copyright policies.
Visit the Youtube Audio Library →
2. Soundcloud
How to Find Free Music on Soundcloud
Soundcloud is one of the largest music sites in the world. Many creators choose to upload music that is both free and cleared for commercial use. Using the Soundcloud search filters, you can find free background music for your videos.
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Search for a type of music such as ‘ambient’ or ‘background music’.
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Click enter and select ‘Tracks’ on the left side of the screen.
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Once you click ‘Tracks’ look down at the ‘Filter results’ section and click ‘To listen to’ next to the © Copyright Symbol.
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Click ‘To use commercially’ and then your search results will be filtered by songs cleared for commercial use.
You can click this link to see an example search for the term “background music” with the results filtered to show only commercially cleared and/or creative commons music.
3. Bensound – Royalty Free Music
Free music you can use in your Youtube videos. Find music from a variety of top categories including acoustic/folk, cinematic, corporate, pop, electronic, funk, jazz, and more.
4. Free Music Archive
Curated music for video from the Free Video Archive. Search by Artist, Album, or Song Title to find the perfect track for your project.
FVA has an awesome advanced search feature allowing you to filter free music by genre, title, instrumental, allowed for commercial use, and more.
Visit the Free Music Archive →
5. Filmstro Royalty Free Music Library
Youtube cleared, royalty-free music tracks from Filmstro. Explore their huge library of songs and filter by film and video genre to find the perfect background music for your video.
6. Incompetech: Royalty-Free Music
Incompetech has a large library of royalty-free music that you can search through and filter by genre, list, and catalog. View collections of music and find the perfect background sounds for your video.
7. dig.ccMixter
ccMixter is a music platform for collaboration and creative partnerships. Musicians can upload original samples and singers can upload original vocals/tracks that producers/djs then mix into interesting new songs and remixes.
Their search engine, dig.ccMixter is for finding free music to use for games, videos, podcasts, and other projects. Browse thousands of hours of free music. Most tracks are Creative Commons and require simple credit to the musicians for use.
8. FreePD.com
100% free music licensed as public domain. FreePD.com features free sound effects, music, background songs, and much more. The home page categorizes them into a bunch of useful categories like horror, upbeat and motivational tracks, comedy, romantic, electronic, and even miscellaneous sound effects free for commercial use.
According to their FAQs, you can use the music for Youtube, Twitch, Facebook, theater performances, advertisements, and even full length films.
9. NoCopyrightSounds (NCS)
NoCopyrightSounds is a record label for next generation artists in electronic music, house, dubstep, trap, pop, and more.
NCS Music is free to use for independent creators and their UGC (User Generated Content) on YouTube & Twitch – always remember to credit the artist, track and NCS and link back to our original NCS upload. Read more about the NCS usage policy.
Related: 5 Amazing Music Video Directors
Audio Copyright
When producing videos for Youtube, social media, advertising, and other commercial purposes it is important to consider audio copyright. You can read the official copyright laws here.
Get a better understanding of audio copyright and how it relates to social videos with this article from Hootsuite.
Things to Keep in Mind When Using Audio for Commercial Video
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Is this music/audio cleared for commercial use under Creative Commons license?
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Do I need to credit the musician? What type of credit/link is required?
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Some music is free for personal use, but requires a paid license for commercial use.
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For larger projects and extensive campaigns, specific extended licensing may be required.
Hi im YouTuber video editing for background music download
Hi Maraj, do you have a portfolio? Would love to check it out!
Great suggestions, Mike! Thank you for sharing. It’s also possible to download tracks from Last.fm https://www.last.fm/music/+free-music-downloads, and you can try Fugue https://icons8.com/music/ – it’s a high-quality free music library.
Wow, thanks for sharing Alena! Icons8 is really cool and seems to be cleared for commercial use as well. Do you know if the tracks on Last.fm are also cleared for videos monetized on Youtube, used in ads, etc.? Or just for personal projects?
lol, I just need an audio downloader and editor. I downloaded a music downloader called wonderfox free hd video converter factory from a giveaway station. I just need this tool to match it.
I admire most of the composers of the sites you mentioned, especially for their talent to make such awesome tracks. I have my own royalty-free music too, still growing, but totally useful for YouTube videos and also video game projects. I know that people have enough copyright-free music with all those sites, but I can’t help it, I’m happy making music and sharing it, trying to offer the best quality. So here it is, if interested: https://patrickdearteaga.com/royalty-free-music/
Any opinion will be apreciated
WOW, awesome resource Patrick. Thanks so much for your comment and share! I think this will be useful to everyone reading. :)
to everyone out there, i’d like to add this website https://www.purple-planet.com/
not as extensive as soundcloud, but the songs go well together if you want to combine some of them. and they’re really calm.
thanks for the selection, Mike :D
Cool resource kaze, thanks for the comment!
Good job! Just want to add another one source with a background music for videos. Think it will be useful to those who are looking for a similar music.
Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/RoyaltyFreeMusicNoCopyrightMusic
All music for free download and from a varius artists.
No copyright music sorted by a popularity, genre, mood, use… The channel has a hot charts and playlists.
You can use these royalty free music for your own YouTube videos and monetize it.
Not only for YouTube… )
Amazing source Antony, thanks so much for sharing!
Hello,
Thanks for the post, very interesting!
We are creating a new site that offers free music for commercial and personal projects (even video games, TV and radio broadcasts), ready to download: https://www.fiftysounds.com
I hope you like it!
Hey Mike great article!
Joystock would be a good addition to the article: it’s free to use, and doesn’t even requires an account.
https://www.joystock.org/
Disclaimer: I’m Joystock’s founder :)
Cheers!
How about Joystock?
It’s free, cool music, and no account needed:
https://www.joystock.org
thank you for that i didnt know that i can download from soundcloud ,thank you so much
Cheers rezzz, so glad this was helpful to you! Thanks for the comment
I have a question, is there anywhere else other than Soundcloud that I should look for music for my videos? You see, I want to start making videos where I go into how I arrange different classical music pieces, and obviously, for a video on a specific piece, I would want that piece for the video(maybe separate movements if the video turns out long for a single movement), so if I do a video on arranging say Horn Concerto no. 2 in Eb, I would want that piece in said video.
I know 2 of my audio tracks, my voice and my arrangement, will come from my own local files. But the other audio track, the piece, that’s what I would be searching for. Anywhere else besides Soundcloud that I should look for classical music tracks? Not the new “classical music” tracks by people I don’t know(which I find when I search “Free Classical Music for video editing” on Google, but you know, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, those guys.