You can’t use popular songs or any copyrighted music for your videos online. It’s illegal. Yet, finding royalty-free music beds for your YouTube videos is a difficult task. It needs to be something that suits the video you’re making and it needs to be legal to use. If you find the right song, it helps your video become a moving story, filled with emotion and wonderment. The wrong song will sink your entire production, no matter how good it looks.

YouTube Audio Library

YouTube has traditionally offered a library of over 150,000 songs that users could swap into their videos, replacing music they didn’t have the rights to. The problem is, these tracks were only accessible by swapping them out on YouTube. The user wasn’t able to download, cut to, or edit the music tracks. That’s changed now. This week, YouTube announced the launch of the YouTube Audio Library. Now, YouTube creators have access to more than 150 royalty-free music tracks that they can download and use for free, forever.

Free Downloadable Tracks

The tracks are downloadable as 320 Kbs MP3 files. Users can find the library by going to their YouTube dashboard and under the Creation Tools tab there is a link to the Audio Library. The library is searchable by genre, mood, instrument, and duration. YouTube presents a solid initial offering with a range of music, including rock, pop, R&B, country, folk, punk, well-known classical pieces, and more.

The tracks in this library are of a good quality, especially when it comes to stock music. One of the great advantages of this library is that YouTube grants permission for the use of these tracks in any creative endeavor, not just YouTube. So, a user had the right to download these tracks and use them in projects that will go to DVD or live on their own website. It’s a great service that YouTube is offering to its creators and it will be interesting to see if this sort of trend continues across the web.

Chris "Ace" Gates is a four time Emmy Award-winning writer and producer. He is a big fan of animation and transmedia storytelling.