Facebook’s Offering Completely Free Music and Sound Effects to Video Creators

In an attempt to capture the attention of more video creators, Facebook has rolled out a pretty extensive selection of free music and sound effect through their new Sound Collection.

It functions very similarly to YouTube’s Creator Studio: you can directly download any song or sound that you want from it and you can sort through its content by using filters. Many of the filters are the same as Creator Studio. You get the basic genre, mood and length filters, but Facebook has added a filter that lets you to sort songs by vocals. For instance, if you want a song without vocals, you can select the “No Vocals” filter option, or if you want a song with female vocals, you can select the “Female Vocal” option. It’s a nice touch that isn’t really present in Creator Studio.

Facebook says that all of the music is completely owned by them because they bought the rights to them from their original composers and songwriters. So, you won’t have to worry about getting flagged for using them.

“The Sound Collection gives you access to thousands of high-quality audio tracks and sound effects from all over the world to spice up your videos. These sounds are owned by Facebook, and are free and clear to use in any videos you create and share on Facebook and Instagram,” says Facebook

The collection of content on Sound Collection seems to be pretty extensive: there are so far 1,000 music tracks offered and about 1,500 sound effects. And all the music is composed by real bands and singer-songwriters that Facebook promotes by displaying their information and links to more of their music.

To be clear, the songs aren’t from majorly popular artists. The New York Times did report earlier that Facebook has been trying to reach a solution with the music industry since 2015.Facebook essentially wants to give their users the freedom to use big-mane music in their videos without being forced to take them down due to copyright laws. They clearly haven’t reached a solution yet, but they believe that Sound Collection will be a good start to solving that problem.

“This update begins to solve a problem I’ve heard from creators — they love making and sharing videos on Facebook and Instagram, but it can often be difficult to find audio or sounds to include,” writes Facebook’s head of video Fidji Simo.

Facebook also launched the new 360 Community page that’s reported to offer a new suit of tools to help you create 360 degree videos for Facebook. It is also said to offer a number of tutorials for getting started with 360 video. Also, Facebook will now loan out 360 cameras like the GoPro Fusion and the ZCam S1, with more cameras being offered for rent in the coming months. What’s pretty interesting though is that Facebook says that’s it’s completely free to borrow a camera. Though, the catch is that Facebook asks that some of the content created with the camera be shared to them.

The launch of Sound Collection and the 360 Community page does point to Facebook getting more serious about video, but the fact that Facebook’s actually lending out equipment is a serious sign they are trying to challenge YouTube. They clearly want to have more premium content on their platform, and not just from their Watch tab, but from their everyday users in general to basically attract more video creators. There’s still much more work needed to be done for Facebook to really challenge YouTube, but there’s real potential that it could happen in the future if Facebook keeps updating their video tools.

Sean Berry
Sean Berry
Sean Berry is Videomaker's Managing Editor.

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