Choosing Royalty Free Music

Recent customer comments:

"You offer a great service at a great price. I am very impressed with the quality of your music. We run a small web design/programming shop in the U.S. and tracks like these give us the polish we need to compete with the big boys. "

"Your high quality recordings have enhanced our productions a great deal and will hopefully keep doing so for many years to come"

"Thanks for a great service!"

Production Music Styles

MUSIC LIBRARY - this is the easiest and most flexible way to search our royalty free music library, and refine your search accurately.

Music Categories - a simple and direct way to view the production music by genre, mood, instrument or tempo.

We often get asked questions about Royalty Free Music so here's a selection of the favourites...

So what's so useful about royalty free music?

This is buyout music to use in your media productions (television, radio, website, commercials, DVD, corporate training etc) and the big difference compared to regular music libraries is in the fee you pay - it's much less expensive! Traditional music libraries will charge you a scaled fee for each use of the music in your project, calculated according to the length of music and it's eventual use. This fee might range from just $100 for a few seconds of music in a corporate video, to several $1000's for the same clip if the audience is larger - such as a TV broadcast for example. Royalty free music comes with an instant licence to you or your company for use of the music in any of your productions, as many times as you want with no further payments. That's how you can save money.

Exactly what is the license Royalty-free.tv gives?

Technically it's a "synchronisation" license to use the music in timed relation to visual images, i.e. the license you need to reproduce a piece of music in your audio/visual productions (in the UK, you may have obtained these in the past from the MCPS, in the US from ASCAP or BMI, read our copyright advice page for more information). In summary our buyout music can be used for television, radio, corporate productions, presentations, mass-market retail distribution, Internet and films. Read our license terms on the licence page.

Surely royalty free music can't be free?

Although it has become popularly known as royalty free music, a more accurate description would be "license-paid" music. Your payment to download the tracks gets you a license to use the music within your media productions. People are often confused and believe that royalty free music can never have any royalty costs incurred at all, and while this misconception is understandable given it's name, it is not true. For example whenever any music is performed in public, the local Performance Rights organization will want to know about it, and may expect payment. TV stations, for example, pay an annual fee to these organisations to cover all their music output for the year, and this money eventually finds it's way to the composers of the music that's aired. The good news as the media producer (you) is that this won't cost you anything, as TV & Radio stations have already paid this fee annually - all you have to do is tell the TV/Radio broadcaster exactly what music your production contains (see cue sheet page).