[2024 Updated] Best Sites to Find Free Background Music for Videos

Looking for high-quality and free background music for videos that won’t cost you a dime? Look no further! In this blog, we’ll be sharing the fantastic sites that will add the perfect touch to your videos, podcasts, presentations, and more.

What elements should we prepare to create a perfect video? Eye-catching footage, lively animations, appealing voices, interesting scripts, and powerful editing tools. That’s right! But not enough. One important aspect of making video content that we often overlook is background music. In fact, choosing the right tune spices up your video far more engaging and conveys the intended message to the viewers, and vice versa. However, finding an awesome tune for your video seems to be really tricky. So now, let’s bookmark the best sites to find free background music for videos by the end of this article.

What is Free Music?

Before we deep dive into each of the best platforms for free background music download, let’s talk about free music licensing. Make it clear and you won’t find yourself in legal trouble.

Similar to stock images and stock videos, background music has its own license for downloading. 

• Royalty-free music: A type of music licensing that allows the purchaser to pay for the music license only once, then they can use the music whenever they want. 
• Public domain: The music tracks have no copyright restrictions. People can use them for any purpose. 

Besides these two types of licenses, you may also catch the Creative Commons license, which allows downloading and sharing music tracks freely. However, there are many types of Creative Commons licenses that you should bear in mind. Here are five that you’ll often see:

• CC0: Completely free to download, use, modify, share, and do whatever you want without any restrictions or conditions.
• CC BY: This allows using the tracks for any purpose as long as you give attribution to the author.
• CC BY-SA: Besides the CC BY license mentioned above, derivative works can only be distributed under the same terms as the original.
• CC BY-NC: This license can only be used for personal purposes providing that attribution is given to the creator.   
• CC BY-ND: With this license, you are just allowed to copy and distribute the material in case you give attribution. No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted.

So, read the track licenses carefully before downloading and using them in your video. Now, let’s move on to the next part to explore great things. 

Best Sites to Find Free Background Music for Videos

It’s time to explore the music handpicked list!

#1. YouTube Audio Library

If you ask someone which sites they will visit to watch a video, YouTube will be the priority answer for sure. 

Created in 2005, YouTube now is one of the most popular sites in the world with billions of videos being watched every single day. Besides, YouTube Audio Library is a huge collection of free background music and sound effects for videos to choose from. Songs are grouped by genre, mood, instrument, duration, and attribution requirements. Using filters will help your search process as quickly and effectively as possible. You can find all the tracks right in your YouTube Studio or click Audio Library Classic at the top right corner to see more sound effects in the opened tab. In fact, the library allows listening and downloading without any limitations after just some simple clicks. 

Especially, “New releases are added to the Audio Library twice a month”, which brings users much more excitement whenever they visit the site.  

Licenses: Public domain & CC BY

#2. Pixabay

Need free background music for your videos? Pixabay has you covered! 

Besides the massive number of stock images and videos, its huge collection of music offers users different styles. So, you’re sure to find something that fits your video perfectly. People love Pixabay because of its free content. Plus, they can use background music for their videos without having to give credits. But having to attribute the author is always appreciated. High-quality and diverse music, easy search, quick download, what do you expect more?  

Licenses: Public Domain

#3. Bensound

It will be a blank on the background music free download sites list without referring to Bensound. Instead of a lovely homepage before, Bensound 2024 looks simply. As can be seen, many famous brands (Microsoft. Netflix, Amazon, Google, etc.) use background music from Bensound for their product.

Bensound provides a nice collection of background music for free download in different genres acoustic, cinematic, pop, electronica, urban, jazz, rock, and more. Among many music tracks on the site, there are about 100 background music free download without purchasing. Then, you can use them on YouTube, Facebook, or other purposes as long as you credit them.

Licenses: CC BY-ND and Royalty-free

#4. Incompetech

Created by American composer Kevin MacLeod, Incompetech hosts an amazingly wide variety of free background music for your videos. 

Incompetech’s intuitive interface makes it easy to search for, listen to, download, and verify the license of a song. In addition, this site also allows visitors to search music based on length, speed, genres, topics, and artists. If you enjoy any song, just click the download icon. The sites will give you the exact attribution so that you can copy and paste it into your video description. For these reasons, Incompetech is worth being an excellent resource of background music for videos free download.   

Licenses: CC BY

#5. Free Music Archive

If you are looking for an interactive library of high-quality and legal background music, Free Music Archive (FMA) is right for you. All the tracks on the sites are downloaded directly from WFMU, the most renowned freeform radio station in America. 

In general, FMA’s soundtracks are grouped into 15 different main genres, from Electronic, Hip-Hop, and Pop to Folk, Old-Time/Historic, and Spoken. Each genre has numerous subgenres listed to help to find what you’re looking for exactly. Click on the track title then you can see the detailed information about its license on the opened page. If you are interested in any specific one, be sure to take a careful look at its license.

Licenses: Public domain, FMA license & All Creative Common types

#6. Mixkit

“Hey, wait a minute!”. You are saying “Mixkit is a free stock video site only”. The answer is “No”. Mixkit is one of the nice video background music sites for free download as well.

Unlike other free background music sites, you just can search through genre, mood, and tag. However, there is a wide range of choices in each option that won’t let you down certainly. Besides, each music track is easy to listen to, download, and use with no attribution or sign-up required. Note that, using Mixkit’s tracks on CDs, DVDs, video games, TV, and radio broadcasts, or remixing them, claiming them as your own, and registering them on any rights management service is illegal. Don’t hesitate to give Mixkit a go! 

Licenses: Public domain 

#7. ccMixter

This is another platform that offers visitors a huge variety of music choices, especially, since you can create your own mixes. ccMixter is a community site taking contributions from thousands of creators around the world. Musicians upload their music, vocalists upload acapella, and DJs mix the two together to captivate songs. All the songs are available under an attribution license, so you’re free to use them as long as you give credit to the artist. Meanwhile, you can buy a license (TuneTrack)  to remove any restrictions.

In ccMixter, there are three main categories of songs: Instrumental Music for Film & Video, Free Music for Commercial Projects, and Music for Video Games. You can find thousands of tracks here although it can take time to navigate at first. Hence, using the “tag search” is a great choice to help narrow down your search. 

Licenses: CC BY & CC BY-NC

#8. Jamendo

“How’s cool”! That’s what I exclaimed when accessing the Jamendo site for the first time. 

As you can see on the Jamendo homepage, there are two main sections: Music and Licensing. While Jamendo Licensing provides royalty-free music for commercial purposes, Jamendo Music is a collection where all songs are licensed under Creative Commons. If you’re a newbie, you may find it a little bit challenging to get used to searching songs and using the sites. Click “Hot Selections” to explore these handpicked playlists by Jamendo music experts. Almost all the songs in the Music section are only used for personal purposes. For this reason, remember to check out each song license before downloading and utilizing it.

Licenses: All Creative Commons types & Royalty-free

#9. Free Stock Music

Last but not least, Free Stock Music is worth trying to find the perfect soundtrack for your video. And the name says it all! 

Overall, background music on the site is free to download and use for different purposes. Just click the track name and you can see clear instructions and requests. Then, copy the available information of the track and paste it into the description box when you publish your video. One more good point of Free Stock Music is allowing users to download music in both .mp3 and .wav files. Furthermore, this library gives you a chance to search for music according to license options. Thanks to that, you can get the songs to meet your needs. 

Licenses: CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-ND

Final Words

Now, you can save your own awesome places to find free background music for videos from our nice suggestions.  What are your favorite sites? Do you come up with any tips for choosing the best piece of free music for your video? Don’t hesitate to share with us your ideas. Remember to check licenses carefully whenever you intend to download and use songs for your project. 

After finding the perfect music, let ActivePresenter help to set it as background music for your video. 

Click the below button to download ActivePresenter right now!

As you may know, ActivePresenter is not only a powerful screen recorder and eLearning authoring tool but also an easy-to-use video editor with a lot of effective editing tools from basic (Cut, Copy, Delete & Crop; Split and Join, Insert Time, Change Video Speed, Adjust Volume, to advanced (Audio Noise Reduction, Audio Normalization, Green Screen Effect). Thus, adding background music and creating engaging videos have never been so easy with the app. 

So, give ActivePresenter a go. And feel free to contact us through our Facebook, Twitter, YouTube channel, and our user community.