Your Guide to Using Royalty Free Background Music in Your Video Editing
Soundstripe Team
Feb 19, 2019
So, you’ve decided to become a video production phenom. Maybe you’ve embraced video marketing as a way to launch your business’s visibility into the stratosphere, or perhaps you dream of becoming the next great YouTube personality.
Whatever your vision, it’s important to know that behind every great video is lots and lots of editing. Yes, editing is the unsung hero of video mastery, and a big part of the editing process is finding great royalty free background music to add to your videos.
Why do you need music in your videos at all? Why can’t you just use Cardi B’s latest hit? And where are you even supposed to find a reliable source of free music downloads?
We’re glad you asked! Before you can become a video phenom, you must first become an editing phenom. And to become an editing phenom, you must understand why music is such an important part of the video creation process.
You want to make videos. Smart idea. According to Forbes, “Videos have a compelling way of fostering engagement, yielding results like click-throughs, shares, lead generation, and sales."
Digital Information World also found that 55% of people watch videos online every day, and that number will likely only continue to rise.
In other words, video marketing can help explode your business’s success. Videos can also be your ticket to stardom if you dream of becoming a YouTube personality.
Top YouTube stars can make millions each year through YouTube ad revenue, merchandise sales, sponsorships, and more. Many less famous YouTubers make a comfortable living by building a loyal audience in their niche.
To achieve success with video marketing, you’ll need to focus on your video production and invest in the right equipment, develop strong video concepts, and get ready to dedicate a big chunk of your life to editing.
Editing is often an under appreciated part of the video creation process, most likely because it happens behind the scenes. However, don’t for one second think that editing isn’t important or that it should be rushed.
Editing can make or break your video. The best video concept will fall completely flat if the scenes are choppy, the story isn’t presented well, and the music is completely off base.
In fact, finding the right musical accompaniment for your video is one of the most important parts of the editing process.
Wait, what? You need to add music to your videos?
Yes. In almost all situations, that is an emphatic yes. Let’s look at why this is true.
There’s a reason why the music is so big during the climactic fight scene in your favorite superhero movie that the fillings in your teeth almost pop out. Or why the soft, whispering music in that horror flick you just watched caused the hairs on the back of your neck to rise.
It’s the same reason why every television comedy uses music to transition their scenes and why you’ll hear background music in almost every single commercial.
Music is powerful. It grabs a viewer’s attention and sets the expectations of the audience. It also has an almost magical ability to affect the emotions of a viewer. Sad music can lead to blubbering. Happy music can transform our mood from sour to joyful.
In other words, the right music choice makes your video more compelling and creates a much greater emotional resonance with your viewers.
Take a look at these three very different videos and listen to the music accompaniment. Think about what the music adds to the videos, why the video creator chose that song, and how the music enhances the story told in the video:
Now think about how different these videos would be without music. Not nearly as impactful, right? That's why it's so important to put music in your videos.
In fact, that leads us to our next challenge. What type of music should you use in your video?
(Hint: Unless you’ve got an unlimited production budget, you won’t be using any Cardi B tracks.)
Now that you have realized that music is a must-have for your videos, it’s time to start looking for that next great track for your current video project.
If your first thought is to start scrolling through your Spotify playlists or to check out what’s trending on the Billboard Top 100, you are setting yourself up for some serious trouble.
Copyright law means that you can’t just toss any song into your video and assume everything will be kosher. That song belongs to someone, and to stay on the right side of the law, you’ll need to receive permission from the song’s owner or pay them a royalty for it.
You can always try to contact Cardi B’s record label and beg permission to use her song in your video, but chances are they’ll send you a sweetly worded demand for a hefty royalty payment instead.
What happens if you try to sneak her song into your video anyway?
If you plan on posting your video to YouTube, the video giant’s Content ID algorithm will likely catch the copyright infringement immediately. Content ID uses a database of over 75 million active reference files, which it uses to constantly scan and compare all its videos.
If it flags a case of copyright infringement, it gives the owner of the song the choice to either monitor the offending video, pull it down, or receive all of its ad revenue.
That’s right. After all the work you put into your videos, you could see all your hard-earned income flow right into someone else’s bank account.
That’s not even the worst possible outcome. Copyright infringement could also have legal consequences. In a worst-case scenario, you could find yourself in court facing a lawsuit. The maximum statutory damage for copyright infringement is $150,000 per infraction.
If you want to stay out of court and keep your YouTube advertising revenue, then it’s a good idea to follow the law. That means using royalty free music downloads for your videos.
That leaves us with just one question. Where do you actually find this mythical source of royalty free background music?
We have some great news! It turns out that a one-stop-shop for great royalty free background music isn’t a myth at all. In fact, there are a variety of resources available if you know where to look.
If you are on a tight budget, YouTube provides a free library of background music and sound effects that you can pull from. However, if you are willing to invest in your video venture, we encourage you to consider subscribing to Soundstripe instead.
YouTube’s music library is limited, and its filtering tools are basic. You won’t find a very diverse set of sounds in its library, and the songs it does offer have been overused by others who aren’t willing or able to pay for high-quality music.
At Soundstripe, we are proud to have built a robust library of royalty free background music. We offer music in over a dozen genres, and our filters make it easy for you to find just the right sound for your video.
Filter our song selection by:
This robust filtering will speed up your music search and make the editing process a little less time-consuming.
We also allow our customers to create custom playlists to make editing even easier. Now you can pull all the songs you need for your next project and save them in a playlist.
The best part is that our subscription gives you unlimited access to our music library. That means you can use as many songs as you want as many times as you want.
This is ideal for a business gearing up to make a big push into video marketing as well as YouTube personalities who plan on posting many videos.
Soundstripe was designed to make finding the right music as simple as possible for hard-working video editors. We know that most of you would rather be behind the camera instead of sitting at a computer stitching together scenes and tweaking the background music.
Editing is hard work, but we hope we can make it a little easier by offering up great songs, lots of filter options, and our convenient playlist feature.
Don’t just take our word for it. Take a look at our music library today, and compare Soundstripe to other licensing companies. You can listen to all of our songs to see what we have on offer.
When you’re ready, sign up for a subscription plan and then start adding great royalty free background music to your videos. We are sending you good vibes for your video success!
While we've gone over everything about how to find royalty free music and different audio tracks and audio clips for your music license and music track needs, we haven't actually addressed what you need to know for your YouTube video solutions.
In general, while a creative commons license would be greatly appreciated for any music track used in your YouTube videos, in most cases you're going to need these outside resources to find the right solutions for your music tracks and sound effects. Our options listed above are going to give you the best mix of different genres and cover all of your licensing needs for your YouTube video content.
Interested in reading more top resources and getting our best filmmaking tips and tricks? Here are a couple of our most popular articles from across the Soundstripe blog:
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