YouTube Releases Creator Music to Help Creators License Music

YouTube has just released Creator Music, a brand-new tool that provides easy music licensing capabilities to content creators. At its core, this tool lets users search for, find, and make a one-time purchase for a license in order to use a music track. This means creators can use music from this library without worrying about copyright issues or demonetization.

What Exactly is Creator Music?

The video-sharing platform has long offered the YouTube Audio Library, a resource full of free-to-use music, either with or without attribution. But this free library is limited and lacks the quality that premium music can provide. This new tool combines the concepts of the Audio Library with third-party music licensing and offers a way to keep the entire process on-platform. You will be able to find songs by artists you know and love, and not just music made specifically as stock music. New tracks will be added as time goes on. The old Audio Library has been melded with Creator Music tool, and those free-to-use songs should appear as free to license.

This feature does have some limitations. It is currently available only to members of the YouTube Partner Program (although it seems this could change in the future). The license is good for only one video and the tracks are not eligible to be used on a live stream. And of course, you can only use this license on YouTube – it does not extend to other platforms. This also only applies to long-form videos, not Shorts. Shorts have a separate music library.

Music Licensing and Free Music Options

Licenses vary in price, and some are free to license. There are certain tracks whose license price will scale with your channel size. Some tracks are also eligible for revenue sharing, which means you won’t have to pay for the license, but the rights holders will receive a portion of the YouTube Partner Program revenue that your video makes. Interestingly, some songs will be available in Creator Music but will indicate that their usage will prevent the video from being monetizable, or will cause the video to be blocked in certain countries.

On a technical level, once you license a song you will be able to download it for use in your video editing software. You don’t need to use any sort of built-in YouTube editing tool to use these tracks.

It’s nice to have this feature built into the YouTube platform, and hopefully it helps creators understand music licenses better. It remains to be seen if it will overcome popular third-party music licensing platforms like Epidemic Sound. These external licensing websites have reasonable prices, huge libraries, and a proven track record.

Related: Explore sound effects on FilterGrade →

When is Creator Music Launching?

US-based creators should see Creator Music become available to them in the coming weeks. It is currently in beta testing and according to YouTube: ‘We’re gradually rolling out the feature to YouTube Partner Program (YPP) creators in the US and plan to expand to YPP creators outside the US at a later time.’ Users outside of the United States can expect to see Creator Music in 2023 at some point.

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One Reply to “YouTube Releases Creator Music to Help Creators License Music”

  1. marcus says:

    This is great! Can we use it for free? Would love to use other music for my videos :)

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