Music plays a huge part in our lives, whether we realize it or not. We find it in cars, movies, shops, restaurants, elevators. It helps shape our experiences! You can add value to your podcast production and help boost your audience by using music to bring a high-quality experience to your show. Music sets the tone and affects how we feel at any given moment. For example, remove the background music from your favorite movie and you’ll immediately know how much it changes the overall effect of the movie. We often don’t realize that music has an impact until it’s there. We associate positive conversations with upbeat, joyful melodies and slower, more sad melodies with perhaps more sad encounters. You may not realize it but by simply making a choice about the music for your podcast you are making a choice of your listeners and audience and setting an ambiance.
Incorporating music into your podcast automatically creates more credibility and adds professional value to your show. It allows you to build a connection with your audience and provide them with familiarity. Music is known to naturally fill a void and it will do the same in your podcast for you and your audience. Knowing the importance of music in podcasts we all know that you want to get music for your podcast, and it will be a bonus to find it for free, so we have combined a list to get you out of your worries regarding the music downloads.
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Pixabay:
Pixabay is a quality royalty-free stock music, images, and even videos, and that too completely free. The website allows you to browse music by mood or genre whatever you prefer and offers a variety of sound effects that would be perfect for audio drama and narration. All content on the site is copyright-free and released under a license from Pixabay, so you are not required to credit the artist or pay a fee.
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Audio library of YouTube:
Youtube has the widest selection of free music and unlimited downloads known to people. You are free to look for music in the music library according to your mood, genre, track name, artist, or whatever it is you are looking for. You can overlay the downloaded track directly on top of your footage on the site if you are planning to upload the podcast on youtube. In the youtube audio library, nothing is easier than downloading songs because all you need is a youtube account that is free for everyone.
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909 music:
909 Music’s library might feel small to you but the quality of music is unbeatable with a variety of musicians. They provide you with modern music with edge-cutting and perfect podcast intro and outro music, or theme songs. You are able to download as much music as you want from the site and not have to worry about any limitation—just find the track you need, download the file, and add it to your podcast without a second thought.
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Musopen.org:
Musopen.org is a non-profit organization that has classical music and tunes for you to use for free. You can search by instrument, composer, or time (i.e., Renaissance, Baroque, or 21st century). Musopen’s have an intuitive search engine, they have a great rating system which makes it easy to find a good song in a short amount of time, and you don’t even have to create an account to download tracks.
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Free Music Archive:
Free Music Archive follows an “open source” approach for music. The website has a collection of a library full of high-quality songs that you can use for your podcast theme music. You can also access their library of songs on an Android or iOS device via the FMA App.
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CCMixter:
CCMixter is a global music community of over 45,000 musicians worldwide. The website has music, samples, mixes, acapella, and gives the users opportunity to download, sample, cut, and share music however they like. The users of CCMixter are free to upload their own creations, they may not be as good as they think they are so it might take you a little bit of time to dig and find what you want. But if you need your music for free, we think it’s worth a look.
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Incompetech:
According to our research, this website is the oldest website with royalty-free music on the internet. All the music on Incompetech is the courtesy of a solo artist, Kevin McLeod – some of you may recognize his songs that are used in podcasts or in YouTube videos. There are hundreds of songs to choose from in a variety of genres, but remember, you must credit the artist to access the tracks for free.
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Soundcloud:
SoundCloud is a vital app that gives creators the ability to upload creative works that can be downloaded directly from their app. Use their search tool and click on the filter labeled “for commercial use” to only see results that are ready to download and use for free (with attribution under Creative Commons).