Episode Summary: Music Licensing 101 — the legal terms every podcaster and video creator needs to know, plus a curated list of paid and free resources for finding usable music.
What You'll Learn
- The key legal music terms every creator needs: copyright, public domain, royalty free, Creative Commons, fair use
- A curated list of paid royalty-free music sources, with real per-song and subscription pricing
- Free music and sound effect sources worth bookmarking
- A practical organization system for keeping licensed tracks and their attribution together
Common Legal Music Terms
- Copyright — a legal right protecting the original creator of music, photos, art, and books, ensuring they're compensated for their work. Writing the song or clicking the shutter makes you the copyright owner automatically, protected by law.
- Public domain — copyright has expired, or the work is old enough to no longer be protected. Plenty of old books and songs fall here, free for anyone to use. Trivia: music produced after 1978 is currently protected for the creator's life plus 70 years before entering public domain.
- Royalty free — permission to use copyrighted material with unlimited usage rights and no future royalty payments. Pay once, use on as many projects as needed.
- Creative Commons — free to use, but the copyright holder can set terms, most commonly requiring attribution (credit, often a link back to the artist's site).
- Fair use — a narrow exception to copyright law, granting temporary permission to use material in specific circumstances like news coverage or journalism.
Organizational tip: when a track requires attribution, save a text file with the credit link right alongside the audio file in the same folder.
Download tip: choose .wav (uncompressed) over .mp3 (compressed) whenever the option exists — noticeably higher quality.
Paid Music Resources
- AudioJungle (Envato) — royalty free, ~$20/song
- PremiumBeat — royalty free, ~$50/song, with excellent After Effects and video editing tutorials
- AudioBlocks — subscription, unlimited downloads, royalty free, $99/year
- VideoBlocks — for video assets
- Pond5 — royalty free, ~$40/song, plus photos, motion graphics, and video
- Epidemic Sound — subscription, $15/month for YouTube use, great for vlog-style videos
- Artlist.io — subscription, $199/year, excellent selection, unlimited royalty-free downloads
Bonus resources:
Marmoset Music — $99/song, one of the best curation tools around TuneFruit — $30–65/song Triple Scoop Music — $60/song, great for photographers Jamendo — $5–50 Filmstro — Premiere plugin, $25/month, DIY mixing
Read the complete show notes and resources on mikemurphy.ai.
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