Looking for high-quality and free background music that won’t cost you a dime? Look no further! In this blog, we’ll be sharing 10 fantastic free background music 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 your own 10 fantastic free background music sites by the end of this article.
What is Free Music?
Before we deep dive into each of the best platforms to download free background music for videos, 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.
10 Fantastic Free Background Music Sites for Video Editing
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 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. SoundCloud
As an introduction “SoundCloud is the world’s largest open audio platform, powered by a connected community of creators, listeners, and curators on the pulse of what’s new, now and next in culture”. Indeed, there is a ton of music in this massive audio collection with over 190 million tracks from 20 million creators in 190 countries around the globe.
In SoundCloud, you can search music for tracks, people, albums, and playlists or sign up and upload your own. You’re free to discover, stream, and share music with awesome feelings when immersing yourself in the world of music. The site also lets you narrow your search results through a list of tags, just take a look at the left navigation pane. However, not all the songs on SoundCloud are downloadable. Sometimes, you won’t see a download file button, the songs are just available to listen to, and stream. So, if you are finding background music for free download, search exactly the name and check each song license before using it.
Licenses: All Creative Common types
#3. Facebook Sound Collection
As you know, Facebook is well-known as the largest social networking site and one of the most widely used in the world. Many users take advantage of it to share information, photos, videos, interact, and keep in touch with others… but they don’t really know that Facebook also has a large sound collection.
In fact, the Facebook sound collection is a part of Facebook Creator Studio. At first glance, this sound collection is strongly similar to the YouTube audio library. Therefore, searching, listening, and downloading tracks are easy as a piece of cake.
The sound collection gives you access to more than seven thousand available high-quality audio tracks and nearly two thousand sound effects. The sound collection gives you access to more than seven thousand available high-quality audio tracks and nearly two thousand sound effects that you can download and further mix on your sounding laptop to create original audio compositions. They are absolutely free so you can use them for any Facebook or Instagram video.
Licenses: Public domain
#4. Incompetech
Created by American composer Kevin MacLeod, Incompetech hosts an amazingly wide variety of free background music for your videos.
Looking for a song, listening, downloading, and checking its license is just a breeze with Incompetech’s friendly user interface. Music on the site is completely free to use in case you credit the musician and site. Moreover, Incompetech provides “Mood” searching with 32 different modes for selecting, which help you find the perfect music for your project. 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 free download.
Licenses: CC BY
#5. Bensound
It will be a blank on the free background music sites list without referring to Bensound. Instead of a lovely homepage before, Bensound 2024 looks simple. 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 more than 300 available tracks on the site, there are about 80 tracks to download free without purchasing. Then, you can use them on YouTube, Facebook, or other purposes as long as you credit them. If you’re unable to credit Bensound, you have to buy the license. Note that, Bensound allows you to remix its tracks and use them to create new songs
Licenses: CC BY-ND and Royalty-free
#6. 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 16 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.
FMA supplies more than 1,500 Public domain tracks as well as thousands more under Creative Commons licenses of varying types, and some use an FMA license that is only used for personal purposes. So, if you are interested in any specific one, be sure to take a careful look at its license. Click the track title and you can see more information on the opened page.
Licenses: Public domain, FMA license & All Creative Common types
#7. 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 background music sites for free download as well. This site offers over 1,000 completely free tracks and is ready to be used in your next project.
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. Mixkit confirms that “You’re permitted to download, copy, modify, distribute and publicly perform the Music Items on any web or social media platform, including internet-based video-on-demand services, podcasts, and advertisements”. So, don’t hesitate to give Mixkit a go!
Licenses: Public domain
#8. 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
#9. 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. Generally, that’s really worth experiencing. As an open community, Jamendo also allows you to upload and share your music as an artist. Just sign up and follow the instructions.
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
#10. 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 even for commercial purposes. All they ask is to put the attribution in the credits. 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 free background music sites from some of our nice suggestions. What are your favorite sites? Do you come up with any tips for choosing the best piece of 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.
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