The right music can make or break a video. Music has the ability to transform us emotionally and it is quite surprising how significant it is in video production.
People seem to understand that you shouldn’t use copyrighted music. No matter how much you love that song on the radio, unless you are prepared to pay the artists for the rights, you are not entitled to use it. You know it, the artists know it and even YouTube knows it. In fact if you upload a video onto YouTube with a commercial song on it, YouTube will not only send you a email about being in breach of copyright, but it will also mute the soundtrack.
Pretty cleve huh (and a little scary in a big brother kind of way). But YouTube is not all bad. They actually have a library of free royalty free music. And no that wasn’t a stutter about free royalty free. Generally you have to pay for Royalty free music. iTunes also has a library of free Royalty Free music. The thing is, the music libraries from YouTube and iTunes are okay, but they’re not extensive or necessarily easily searchable for the right track for the right production.
So for the last couple of years I’ve subscribed to a royalty free music service. It’s given me unlimited access to tens of thousands of tracks. You can search by style, emotion, pace, energy. It’s been great and it’s really helped make some great sounding productions. But it has cost me a couple of thousand dollars a year. Ouch.
I’ve recently stumbled across Audioblocks which provides the same sort of thing but for $99 a year. You can still search by genre – Aggresive, Epic/Inspiring, Happy/Upbeat, Playful/Silly, Relaxing, Sad, Sentimental, Suspenseful or by instrument – Brass, Guitar, Orchestra, Percussion, Piano, Vocals, Woodwind.
You also search by tempo, duration, sound effects and loops.
So if you are looking for some great impact for you video productions then grab some great music. Click here to get the same great $99/yr offer.
Geoff Anderson is the owner of Sonic Sight, a video production facility in Sydney.
He is an author, presenter and a video producer.
