The music you choose for your podcast is an essential part of ensuring it stands out. In this post, we’ll explore the websites with the best royalty-free music for podcasts that will enhance your podcast without breaking the bank.
Your choice of music helps set the tone for the episode that your listeners are about to enjoy. It also adds some sonic branding, which helps cement your brand in your listeners’ minds.
However, using copyrighted music without permission can land you in hot water. You could end up having your podcast removed from the platforms your episodes are on. In addition, YouTube episodes could be demonetised. It’s just not worth the risk.
That’s where royalty-free music comes in. Royalty-free music is music that you’re allowed to use without having to pay recurring fees for each use. This is crucial for podcasters who want to avoid issues and ensure that their content remains accessible to listeners worldwide.
There are dozens of options out there, but we’ve narrowed it down to find the best free and paid option that strikes the balance of ease of use, quality of music, and value.
ALWAYS CHECK THE LICENSE
Just a quick disclaimer: we can’t offer any legal advice. Make sure that you check the terms of use on whichever website you download your music from and ensure you’re allowed to use it for a podcast.
It’s important to read through the license and understand it rather than just taking anyone’s word for it. I’ve seen many recommendations online for using Bensound‘s royalty-free music for podcasts, for example. Within their FAQ, thought, (at time of writing) it states that you can’t use it for audio-only projects like podcasts.
BEST ROYALTY FREE MUSIC FOR PODCASTS (PAID)
Our pick for the best royalty-free music website at the moment is Premium Beat. Out of the many we’ve tested, this is the one that we’ve stuck with and use when our clients need royalty-free music for their podcast intros and outros.
The reason for this is that it ticks all the boxes that we mentioned before in terms of ease of use, cost and music quality. It’s effortless to find music in any kind of genre you can imagine. The quality of the music is also generally good across the board. There’s a lot of music that sounds like it’s been recorded with real instruments and vocals.
It has a really simple license structure – a flat rate for a piece of music to use indefinitely. The price is the same for every song. Some other providers, while they may look cheap on the surface and offer songs for five to ten dollars, the lower cost songs are often very synthetic, corporate and unimaginative pieces of music that your listener has probably heard somewhere else before, and then you’d likely be paying more for the more interesting pieces.
As a user of Premium Beat, you’re also provided with a coupon code to share with others. It grants 25% off a new user’s first purchase (and gets you $25 credit). Ours is NHSUINNS if you want to give Premium Beat a go.
Alternative Subscription Option
With it’s one-off pricing structure, you avoid being tied to a monthly subscription. If you only need one piece of music, this will likely work out far cheaper in the long run.
However, if you want more flexibility and you’re willing to pay more, then you might prefer a subscription option that lets you use any song at any time.
For an ongoing monthly fee, this is obviously going to rack up in terms of the cost, but it does offer more flexibility. A solid recommendation for a subscription service, would be Epidemic Sound, which has a wide range of high-quality music.
BEST FREE OPTION
If you don’t have the budget to spend money on the music for your podcast, I want to share with you a recommendation for a website where you can get royalty-free music at no cost.
Pixabay is known for providing royalty-free photos and videos, but they also provide user-created music files, and there are hundreds of high-quality music on Pixabay that cost nothing.
There are other sites where you can get free music, but I find that it’s quite difficult to find something unique that doesn’t sound super cheesy on the other offerings.
Just be aware that a lot of the free tracks on there are listed under YouTube’s Content ID system. This means that if you’re posting your podcast episodes on YouTube, they may get flagged as copyrighted. This could impact your ability to monetise your videos. However, there are plenty of songs on Pixabay that don’t have that Content ID badge.
A Solution To YouTube Content ID Flags
If you are uploading your episodes to YouTube, you could consider putting together an alternative ‘YouTube-friendly’ intro and outro with music from YouTube’s Audio Library.
It offers a way of adding music to your YouTube videos using music that’s been cleared of any copyright by YouTube itself. This is what I do for my podcast, Podcasting Amplified. I do have the license, for the music on my podcast, of course, but just to avoid any automatic flagging of my content, I play it safe and use YouTube Audio Library music for video episodes.
So, these are our recommendations for finding the best royalty-free music for podcasts. Again, just be sure to take a look at the updated licensing terms before you use any music you’ve downloaded from the internet.
