These statements summarize the importance that has and will have video marketing to communicate in our business, to the detriment of text and images.
Little by little the Internet increasingly resembles television in this matter.
As we will see through it, it is very important to know what type of music is appropriate and where to find it, since we could incur copyright violations and platforms like Youtube could remove or silence our videos without prior notice if we are not playing by the rules.
What kind of music can we use in our videos?
We will start from the basis that you are looking for the highest possible quality for your video without incurring disproportionate expenses.
If you wanted to use a famous song, one that sounds daily on the radio, for example, you should pay a certain amount of money in royalties – previously agreed with the author and his label – every time your video is reproduced.
In this article, we are not going to dig deep into this type of music since very few companies can afford to spend those amounts on their marketing areas.
If we still use a song for which we didn't have permission, one of these different scenarios could happen:
- If we upload our video to YouTube, this platform has an algorithm called Content ID that scans automatically all the recordings of its platform and detects those that are infringing the copyright rules. They will mute or delete our video without prior notice.
- It could also be the situation that the same author or record company that has the rights to the song claims on their own payment of a certain amount of money.
Therefore we will focus on the so-called royalty-free music.
This type of music is classified in several ways, depending on whether it is free or paid music.
Saying free music we refer to those in the public domain or under Creative Commons licenses, which we analyzed in-depth in this other article.
We will not go into more detail since we consider that these kinds of music do not meet the requirements necessary to be used in professional videos for several reasons:
- Most of these licenses are free as long as the project is personal, like a presentation at the university or in our homemade holidays' video of the last summer. If it's used for commercial purposes, it's always mandatory to acquire a license.
- We would spend too much time looking for the right music between different pages on the Internet and reading under what kind of licenses are, to find that most of them require attribution and cannot be modified to fit the video we have prepared.
- We could find problems on Youtube using a free song due to the restrictions on that platform (Content ID).
Therefore, discarding famous songs for its high cost and also free music for the reasons stated above, we have a viable alternative and it's Royalty-free music under licenses.
Royalty-Free Music and Sound Effects
Small, medium and large companies such as Mitsubishi, Nestlé, Atkins, Google or Cisco use this type of music for their corporate videos and digital marketing campaigns.
Here you can see an example:
These are songs specially created to be used as background music in professional projects and are already sold as such, with explicit licenses for these cases and in packages of different versions of the same song to be able to fit it in the best possible way in our video, without having to spend a lot of time editing it.
The music that sounded in the previous Fiat ad, for example, was this royalty-free song, called ‘Beautiful Rainbow'. Licenses are always paid only once when purchasing the music and you don't have to worry about anything else or future royalties, nor should we attribute the artist to our project.
And each license gives us permission to use that song in a particular video or digital product.
We can find this type of music in the biggest marketplace on the Internet dedicated to high-quality stock music, Epidemic Sound offers a library of more than 300,000 royalty-free songs ready to use for Youtube Channels.
Thanks to this type of music we can add background songs to our videos without any further problem!
If, on the other hand, you are interested in buying just one song, the best option then is called Audiojungle.
The cost of the licenses varies depending on the final product and the audience to be reached, although, for a Youtube video, which is the aspect of this article, it is only necessary to acquire the so-called ‘Standard' license.
There are two different types of licenses –Standard, and Premium– so you will have to find out which one you specifically cover your needs. Once you know the license, we simply have to choose the song or songs suitable for your video.
We will go to Audiojungle and we will search the categories or put the keyword ourselves in its own search engine, writing the genre, mood, or instrument (s) we need.
There are also as well other monthly subscription services like Envato Elements.
It works on a $16.50 monthly subscription, thanks to which you will have access to its entire library and unlimited downloads of songs, classified by musical genres.
Visit our article titled how to choose the right music for a video to know what kind of songs you have to choose depending on the type of video you are editing.
