Royalty-free Music Online

September 21, 2005 11:41 PM

Where can I find high-quality, royalty-free music? I know of lots of sites that offer great, royalty-free pictures, but I've never come across a site that offers a similar service for music. Note that I'm looking for high-quality (mp3) music files, and preferably full-length stuff. I've seen tons of sites with (mostly) cheesy sound effects and tons of sites with endless collections of .wav files clipped from TV and movies, and I'm not interested in any of that. I need music.

Genre isn't very important. I'd prefer classical or film soundtrack sounding stuff, but if I could find a decent site, I won't quibble over the genre. I understand that the very nature of wanting royalty-free music means I won't be getting stuff from big, known artists, and that's okay too. In some ways, it's almost better.

(By high-quality, I mean the quality of the file. Please no .wavs! The quality of the music is, of course, purely subjective.)

posted by robhuddles to Media & Arts (9 answers total)

Just to clarify, you're looking only for stuff you can legally use in, say, a film, and it's not sufficient that you be able to legally download them for your own listening, correct?
posted by musicinmybrain at 11:44 PM on September 21, 2005

I double-check that only because I can think of plenty of free sources for the latter but none for the former. :-/
posted by musicinmybrain at 11:48 PM on September 21, 2005

Hey, sorry for the triple post, but I found some stuff! Organized by license:

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License

• a collection of choral music

EFF Open Audio License 1.0 or EFF Open Audio License 2.0 (Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license)

• some chamber music (go to DOWNLOAD.html)
• various works by major composers from the Classical and Romantic periods
• Musica Liberata, mainly for sheet music at the moment, and currently with server-side breakage, but showing promise

And then there's

• a page with a massive list of links of unknown quality and relevance

Hope there's something there you can use!
posted by musicinmybrain at 12:17 AM on September 22, 2005

You could always find freely-distributed music from little-known musicians and ask permission for whatever use you're looking for. There's a lot of musicians out there who would be understandably wary about leaving their rights completely open, yet would jump at free publicity.
posted by Saydur at 12:27 AM on September 22, 2005

I'm sure there are cds and the like available at music stores, the same as there are royalty-free image packs you can get at CompUSA. Check there first.

But otherwise I had this link bookmarked which will give you tons of sources to peruse:

DMOZ
posted by JJ86 at 3:39 AM on September 22, 2005

Magnatune might be just what you are looking for.

Bt.Etree.org is bittorrent site for trading taped concerts of trading-friendly bands. Many of the bands listed have free music on their websites. My favorite band that I found on etree is Yonder Mountain String Band. Check out "Left Me in a Hole".
posted by McGuillicuddy at 5:05 AM on September 22, 2005

Check archive.org's music files, and take a look at the FPP that I just put up. It's got lots of vinyl soundtracks that are far enough out of print that they're unlikely to get you sued, along with some music that's just given away free by the owners.
posted by klangklangston at 5:35 AM on September 22, 2005

scene.org has a big music section.
posted by atom128 at 9:03 AM on September 22, 2005

Do the offerings of the www.archive.org audio section meet your needs, in terms of legality? I haven't checked to see what they do or do not allow but they have a large collection.
posted by caution live frogs at 1:04 PM on September 22, 2005