Free Royalty-Free Instrumental Music for Your Videos or Podcasts

I like making videos more than scoring music, but I know how important music is to the emotion of a video. So I spend a lot more time than I’d like inside Mac iLife’s Garageband creating instrumental scores — usually customized to the video. To avoid doing this 500 times, I reuse some of them.

I’ve decided to upload many of my instrumental songs to Podsafe so people can use them for no cost and royalty-free. Here’s the link (Music.ofNalts.com), but please credit WillVideoForFood.com if you use them. I’ll eventually have them linked from this new site.

It’s hard to find a lot of music with the “free AND royalty free” terms (they’re usually free with royalties or cost a ton for royalty-free rights). I’m perplexed why musical artists don’t do this more often to promote their work… especially undiscovered artists. The Music.ofNalts site actually takes you to Podshow, where musicians post “Podsafe music.” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech) is a notable exception. He offers his clever instrumentals for royalty-free use, and requests simply a credit (and Paypal donation).

Many, many YouTubers have incorporated MacLeod’s cheerful songs into their videos (I used his work for Crawling Through the Airport, and he custom scored this “Secret Mentos Elixir” promotional video, for a reasonable fee).

I hope people can find ways to use these songs. Some are quite generic, as I’m not a musician and not fully aware of how to use Garageband (that would require reading a manual- ick).

12 thoughts on “Free Royalty-Free Instrumental Music for Your Videos or Podcasts”

  1. Kevin,
    I bought youtubesounds.com a while back for just this purpose… although I have no musical talen or ability (I usually start with concepts and figure out the problems from there…)

    Anyways… I’ll never use it at this point. Would you be interested in such a domain? Let me know..

    Seth

  2. Just a word of caution…using loops from garageband and making music and giving it away may not be allowed especially if you are making them into loops again. I know for certain that some loop providers do allow you to make royalty free music with them. That’s my problem with buying from some sites that take in work from many artist without proper check. I am afraid these loop makers will one day come down hard on those that resell or give away their music and may have a backlash on my productions that use them.

  3. I use Sony Cinescore. I was using loops from Sony Acid Pro, but it was way over my head. Cinescore is much better and builds a coherent piece of music to fit the length you want and the mood you want. It works from a library of royalty free music – you select from a wide variety of variants and control the tempo and style. Most people leave positive comments about the music and ask “What is that cool song?”. But then, others say “The music sucks” – I think they are the real musicians.

  4. d’uh, somehow I don’t get to terms with podshow — is there _any_ way to actually use the loops? oO

  5. Hi, just stumbled upon your post and its good to know that there are some nice free alternatives for production music. From my experience for more intensive / advanced (non-youtube) video and film production the cheapest and most professional way to go is the royalty free music libraries. They host great music and you pay a one time fee, usually at a low budget price. Saves me a lot of time …
    As someone commented here though, you should take the time to find a site that looks professional and trustworthy, you don’t want problems with your license after your video production / presentation is already out there with the licensed music.

  6. As a retired sailor who love making videos, I could not exist without you guys. How do I say THANK YOU!! I am on my way to the Caribbean in January (Jamaica to be exact) and I hope to find some music here to match my videos there. Thanks again. As for Kevin Macleod, I made a video thanking him for his generosity. I had to!

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