Royalty-free music at no cost for non-commercial use to include in your media, projects, and learning objects

In my experience, music can improve the quality of videos. I create many videos for learning, teaching, and marketing. However, I do not have a budget and cannot purchase the rights to music. Fortunately, there are several sites I explore to find quality music. I wanted to share some of these with you, including the links.

Here they are in no particular order:

Community Audio
Part of the internet Archive, this site contains thousands of community-contributed Creative Commons licensed audio recordings. Item are free to use, per each specified Creative Commons license.

Free Music Archive (FMA), founded in 2009 by radio station WFMU, offers free access to open licensed, original music. Many curators, netlabels and independent musicians around the world contributed to FMA’s success.

Musopen
Musopen offers a wealth of free classical music tracks. Founded in 2012, Musopen is a 501(c) 3 non-profit based out of San Francisco, CA. It provides free music recordings, sheet music, apps, and educational materials. You may use five downloads per day for free.

National Jukebox
As a librarian, I would be remiss if I did not mention the treasure which the Library of Congress offers free of charge. The recordings are a little scratchy, but they are wonderful and in many cases, free to use.

There are many other quality sites for royalty-free music, but they have a subscription cost. These include Jamendo, Rumblefish, and others.

Avoiding copyright infringement:
Please keep in mind that in all cases, as creators, we need to give credit where it is due. It is critical to attribute the source of music. I usually have a slide at the end of my presentations with the credits. I’m attaching a sample here, which I used in a video. The song “African Bliss” by John Bartmann was a perfect choice for the video.