What is Royalty Free Music?

When you use music in an artistic production you must pay royalties to the copyright holder. Unless you use royalty free music!

Dec 29, 2006 Chad Criswell

Copyright holders must be paid when you use their music in your slideshow, video, or any artistic production, that is unless you choose to use royalty free music in it!

When a person or business creates an artistic work such as a music video, dance routine, or any other type of expression where music is used as an integrated part of that production, royalties must legally be paid to the person that owns the copyright to the music that was used. Royalty free music is different in that in most cases a person can use the royalty free music in a production without paying royalty fees to the copyright holder. There are dozens of royalty free music web sites on the Internet, and all provide access to high quality, downloadable audio files, but royalty free does not necessarily mean free of all costs.

Royalty free music provides you with the right to use the music in a production without fear of getting sued by the copyright owner. However, in most cases you must pay a fairly hefty price tag up front to download the music or to buy an audio CD. Some web sites sell complete compilations of music in various genres or styles ranging from classical to techno to romance to holiday music. Unfortunately these CD's often cost hundreds of dollars. Once you buy it you can use the music as you see fit, but to buy the music in the first place you often have to pay through the nose.

Most of these royalty free music web sites are aimed at the commercial user, a few however do provide individual songs without the need to purchase the entire compilation on CD. Some of these ala-carte royalty free music sites such as Incompetech offer all of their music for free, provided you give written credit to the composer. Others, like Opuzz., offer various versions and lengths of their songs for reduced per song prices. As always, you get what you pay for. The more you are willing to spend, the more professional and full sounding the music will be. You will be hard pressed to find truly free music that is as good as the higher priced tracks at the major royalty free web sites.

The copyright of the article What is Royalty Free Music? in Arts Education is owned by Chad Criswell. Permission to republish What is Royalty Free Music? in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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Dec 9, 2008 11:25 AM

Guest :

I have been in the RFM business for over 20 years now. I've seen the trends and watched libraries come and go.
There are some of the Lower priced royalty Free Music Libraries that are in fact..better than the higher priced ones. It's that artists are just not all great businessmen and many times don't have access to a lot of cash for promotions. Some of the music at the top sites are only there because they have been promoted out of Dollars and optimizing. Not the musical talent. The music for some of the top site for RFM are mostly crap. Try searching some of the Royalty Free Music sites on Google's or Yahoo's 5 or 6th pages deep ...to start.
Thanks

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