What’s the Point of Royalty-Free Music

When you hear “video production,” your mind probably goes to shot composition, lighting, timing… how a video looks. But what many people neglect or completely forget is how a video sounds.

Have you ever watched a video and felt like there was something missing in between the lines? Or found yourself nodding off while watching a video with an important message? Chances are, what’s missing is the right music. Just as much as snappy editing and a great message… Background music sets the tone of a video and moves the viewer through it from start to finish. In other words…

How do you make your videos more interesting? Add the right music!

Having fun pulling pranks on your friends? A lighthearted song in the background helps you move from laugh to laugh. Need to impress the importance of a serious topic? Lead with something somber, but not too slow. Sharing someone’s incredible story? A cinematic track will push it to the limit!

The Trouble with Song Choices

Of course… It would be easy to track down your favorite song that’s making the radio airwaves or blowing up on Spotify… but it’s not quite that easy. What’s the problem with using popular songs for your videos? First of all, copyrights can and will stop your video before it can get off the ground.

The right to play and use almost all popular music you hear today is owned by one of several major record labels. Using the top-40 music you listen to every day in your videos is almost always a violation of copyright law. At best, this will result in any revenue you made from the video belonging to the record label. But in most cases your video will just be muted or deleted. No matter how hard you worked on a video… It won’t be worth the effort if people can’t actually watch it!

As much as we love hearing strong vocals from our favorite artists, songs with vocals are often not what you’re looking for as accompaniment for a professional video. Apart from the obvious issue of having the singer drown out your speaking roles without careful mixing… The lyrics of a song can often detract from the goal and message of a video. For example, you may find a song that sounds slow and heartfelt for a wedding video… but the lyrics are about a breakup. That won’t go over well!

So, what you need is a song that fits the tone and message of your video, likely without vocals, that isn’t going to get your video taken down for copyright violations. Where do you turn?

Getting the Perfect Royalty-Free Music for a Video

Stock music, royalty-free music, production music—call it what you will, there’s a whole industry around providing songs for people to use in their work without having to make it themselves. Stock music companies have been around since sound was first added to movies. So, there’s no lack of content to use for your projects.

What’s the best part about using stock music? Unlike record companies which share the profits from every song with its original creator, stock music companies own their music outright, so they can do with it whatever they like. Generally, this means you can get the rights to use a song more easily and for a lower price…Even for free! The specific terms vary for each service, but in general you can pay a subscription or a one-time free for access to a huge library of music which you have the rights to use in your own work. No more copyright takedowns!

And because these libraries are built specifically for the sake of making videos and other content, they do their best to make life easy for you. Have a look at the user interface for Artlist, the service we use most often at BCC Live:

Sort by your tone, the type of video you’re making, what instruments you want to hear, or just what other people have been using, right there. Every category has dozens of songs on call for you to listen through and choose what fits the best. Our team puts a lot of value on getting videos finished and sent to our clients quickly, and often you can find the right song on Artlist in seconds!

Other services like Epidemic Sound, Musicbed, or Incompetech have different ways of sorting and presenting their options, but once you learn how their system works, you’ll be browsing music in no time. But when you have access to thousands of songs… how do you pick the right one?

Picking the Right Song for Your Video

Sure, it’s easy to say, “this is a funny video, so I need a funny song.” But do you? And which song? To pick the right song for your video, first consider both the text and the subtext of your video. If the intent (subtext) is to be funny, but the video itself (the text) is about someone sneakily stealing a lunch from the office refrigerator, wouldn’t an overly serious “secret agent” song be a better fit to get a laugh? If someone in your video is sharing their story of heartbreak, but the overall goal of the video is to lead the viewer on a story of triumph, which tone should you choose?

There’s no one-size-fits-all rule for what tone to select, just as there’s no “perfect song” for every video. Should you lift up what you feel is your video’s weak point, or accentuate its greatest strength? Consider it carefully… Your first impression might not be the right one!

Even once you’ve figured out what mood and theme to look for, there’s another crucial detail to consider: timing. The length and pacing of a video are absolutely crucial—especially in the world of TikToks and Instagram Reels, which impose hard limits on their video lengths and hang their success on “short and snappy.” Your music must fit that as well! When you’re trying to find the right song for your video, it’s best to do so either before you start your intensive editing pass or after you’ve got all the timing of your edits down pat. Why? So you can find something that hits your visual beats at the right time!

This doesn’t mean you need to sync every action and cut to a beat of the song like it’s a music video—far from it. Rather, knowing the visual tempo of your video and the timing of emotional highs and lows lets you look for a song that roughly follows that path. If you’ve been building towards a reveal in your video, how nice would it be to have the music crescendo at the same moment? Or, if you don’t feel like some of the cuts are very interesting, wouldn’t it be nice to have the music shift at the right time to add extra vigor?

Similarly, the tempo of a song should fit both the mood and the pace of your video. Generally, the shorter your clips and the higher the action, the higher a tempo needs to be to fit. It’s simple enough to do this by trial and error, but some services allow you to sort by tempo to make this easier.

Taking It to the Finish Line

What’s the point of using stock or royalty-free music? Overall, it makes the video production pipeline much easier. The simple licensing means you no longer need to worry about videos being restricted or removed due to copyright violations, and most stock music providers make it very easy to browse for the perfect song. As much as it might be fun to use a popular or trending song over a relatively unknown stock track, the painless nature of using stock music makes having access to a stock library a must-have for any video creator. It’s well worth it to pick up a stock library for yourself!

 There’s plenty more that can be discussed here—matching edits more closely to beats, using stems to control exactly what instruments you hear, mixing to fill out your soundscape more effectively, and more. If you want to know more, reach out! What’s more, the world of music licensing is fascinating and goes much deeper than what is discussed above. Stay tuned for an in-depth look at that!