SUMMARY
Episode 27
On this week’s episode of Video Marketing Unscripted, Ben answers a question from Matt in Oriental, NC: What are the best resources for music when putting a video together?
Ben begins his video explaining why you don’t want to just use a popular song in your video, and what could happen should you put the video on YouTube. Ben then goes over the benefits for some options that we like to use at Storyboard Media when we need to find music for a video. Ben’s recommendations include a free option, a lower cost option, a mid-range cost option, a subscription-based resource, and a higher-end option. Look below for a complete list of links to each of these sites.
YouTube Audio Library
Audio Jungle
Premium Beat
Soundstripe
Marmoset Music
TRANSCRIPT
00:00 Ben: Hi, I’m Ben. Welcome to Video Marketing Unscripted, where I answer your video marketing questions. Should’ve breathed before I started to say that.
[music]
00:14 Ben: Hi, I’m Ben. Welcome to Video Marketing Unscripted, where I answer your video marketing questions completely unprompted. I reject your reality and substitute my own. Anthony, what’s our question today?
00:24 Anthony: Well, Ben, today’s question is from Matt in Oriental, North Carolina. And he would like to know what are the best resources for music when putting a video together?
00:33 Ben: Okay. Good question. One of the things that not a lot of people know is that you can’t just use any song when you’re posting a video online. You actually have to get permission and likely pay for permission to use that. So if you wanna try to use a popular song, get ready to pay out $40,000-$50,000. Otherwise, you’re just gonna be using it illegally, and then if you put it on YouTube or something like that, end up with ads, or it being monetized or, worse yet, even just pulled. So don’t try to use popular music in your videos. It won’t work.
01:05 Ben: So what do you do? Well, you’ve gotta go to a royalty-free stock music library. And there are a whole bunch out there, and they range from like free to use with maybe attribution or even no attribution, to custom scores and things like that that can get kinda pricey. A couple examples that we like to use, and I’ll kinda start on the cheap end, the free end, in fact, is the YouTube Audio Library. The YouTube Audio Library has a whole bunch of songs and sound effects that you can use for your videos, not just stuff you’re posting to YouTube. One of the nice things is there’s a little dropdown that you can select attribution or no attribution, so you could actually limit your search to songs that require no attribution, and you don’t even have to credit them. If they require attribution, you’ll have to usually credit them in the description, who wrote the song, what song it is, maybe even link to where it can be downloaded.
01:58 Ben: Another option is AudioJungle. It’s part of the Envato Network, and they’ve got a whole ton of stuff. A lot of it is very synthesizer-y and kind of electronic music stuff. But a lot of that can work really well. Clips start at 8 bucks and go up to maybe $15, $19. They’ve got a ton of options. Decent place to start if you wanna get something a little bit above what might be in the YouTube Audio Library.
02:22 Ben: One that we use quite a bit is premiumbeat.com. They’ve got an interesting mix of electronic composers and then some more actual bands, where it’s actual instrumentation, which sounds nice. They’ve got a really easy pricing strategy. It’s $49 for a standard license, and you can use that in as many videos as you want. So you can use it on TV commercials, you can use it on the web, you can do private use, whatever you wanna do. $49, you got the song, do whatever you wanna do.
02:53 Ben: Another option that we use a lot, it’s a annual subscription, and it’s called Soundstripe. We pay whatever the annual fee is, and then we can go in and try and license any song we want. We can get the commercial license without any additional money, and we can just go in there, and that’s usually where we start, ’cause we pay for the annual subscription.
03:14 Ben: Another really good service that gets to be a little bit more expensive is Marmoset Music. One of the things that you can do with Marmoset Music is actually reach out to their staff and have them help you select songs. Give ’em an idea of what the project is. They can even give you some custom quotes. They’ve also got an option where you can just search through. They’ve got a lot of real bands, a lot of indie bands, a lot of more… What am I going for with real bands? At Marmoset, a lot of their artists are real bands as opposed to maybe just one guy making music on his computer. It’s got more of a real feel to it, some higher quality selections, you do pay for that. They’ve got a whole bunch of different licensing structures, but they’re also really great to reach out to, and they’ll help you with your project.
04:00 Ben: Now, then, of course, you could always search your local area or, I suppose, online for composers who will actually do completely custom scores. I don’t know exactly how you find them, so I’m probably not even gonna go into that much. But, Google it.
04:12 Ben: So, Matt, I hope that answers your question. If you’ve got a video marketing question that you’d like me to answer, put it in the comments or fill out the form on our site. You’re welcome.
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL
