Artlist is decent on selection, good on search, and has GREAT licensing, but the yearly fee is a bummer. The filmmaking industry’s go-to library of high-quality royalty free music for videos, YouTube, advertising and films from inspiring indie artists around the world. Price: Programming starting at $199; Promotional / Branded Content starting at $299. Good for general use. The filtering is on the simple side with options for genre (only 16 listed), mood (only 9 listed), vocals (9 listed), instruments (16 listed) and track length (8 listed). ; Music The highest quality royalty free music composed by grammy award winning artists. One of the hardest things for me when producing video content is navigating music licenses and platforms. They offer YouTuber, Pro and Pro Plus accounts – the YouTuber being the most reasonably priced at $14.99 per month or $99.99 for a year. Featuring mostly indie composers, musicians, and bands, MusicBed is affordable on … Or recommend other services they like? There is now a strong variety of royalty-free subscription music services that mean you can add as much background music as you like to your films and not have to worry about copyright strikes or the possibility of legal action. Music Vine is another affordable option that positions them as a great source for all types of productions. However, there’s more to this site than just a pithy name. Like most of the RMS’s there’s also a playlist facility that groups tracks by theme such as ‘Action and Sport’ and ‘Inspiring Cinematic’ – these are often a good starting point for any music hunt. Pricing is incredibly cheap (even cheaper as of recently where they removed all additional pricing based on usage) but you will spend more time trying to find songs that work for you. My biggest complaint about Epidemic Sound persists though – unlike pretty much every other royalty-free music library you are only allowed to use their music on one single nominated YouTube channel. The Creator/YouTube subscription is the best value at $9.99 per month, which covers you for YouTube, Patreon, Instagram, Facebook and other usages. The pricing of Musicbed seems to be the same and, as with my original review, you’ll need separate subscriptions for each of your YouTube channels. It pains me to rank them so low in this post but I am basing this off of commercial quoting on some past projects. For virtually any paid advertising campaign, you will need to reach out for a custom quote. Finding quality content isn’t the issue – the issue for me has become price for a lot of the work I have been doing as of recent. There’s an all-you-can-eat option at $135 per year ($15 a month) and a premium $245 option which adds 10,000 sound effects and 400 stem songs to the deal. Epidemic seems to have a huge number of trap/electronic songs all of which sound the same, but there’s genuine variety and genuine quality on Artlist and that alone makes it a better option as far as I’m concerned. One of Filmstro’s USPs is that it has plugins for Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro that enable you to add music to any video without having to leave the application. awesome, thanks for sharing and I’ll check out premium beats. The pricing model hasn’t changed since 2018 either, with Soundstripe offering the same $135 for unlimited music licences, $252 for music plus sfx and stems and a business subscription for $795 which includes team member accounts and on-demand playlist curation. They also have an SFX library full of sound effects and stings. Price: $10/month. It felt very similar musically to the weaker parts of Epidemic Sound’s library but as I said it’s all highly subjective so have a listen yourself to decide if it’s up your street. Soundstripe. I will post an update when it is made available. I really wanted to place Marmoset higher on my list because the team working here are by far the best out of the lot in ensuring your experience – whether sourcing tracks for passion projects or branded content – is the best it can be. These guys have rebranded and moved to a new web address. Epidemic have changed the name of their subscriptions since I wrote this article – they’re now Personal, Commercial and Enterprise. You can filter by genre (indie, electronic etc), mood (eerie, peaceful etc), artist, attributes (a capella, solo etc), instrument (accordian, cello etc), advanced (BPM, build, song length and vocals) and you can also isolate further by limiting to just lyrics or just instrumentals. I’d you need exact control, it may not be a good choice. Anyone use Artist or Soundstripe? The table below breaks down the costs and small print for each service – I’ve included each site’s Alexa Rank because it’s a good indicator of how popular it is in the real world: In my testing, I found a big range in the quality of the music on offer by these services, ranging from tracks that you wouldn’t think twice about hearing on the radio, through to annoying elevator music that could accompany an infomercial. The big players are still Epidemic Sound and Artlist, with these two companies fighting over the patronage of the popular YouTubers, but popular is not always best …. But for smaller works, I honestly want cheaper licenses. Founded in 2009, this Swedish RMS has a library of over 30,000 tracks to choose from and (according to Alexa traffic logs) is one of the busiest subscription music site of them all. I spent a bit of time browsing through their library and found the music to be typical of the jangly (and instantly forgettable) tracks that seem to back every travel vlog on YouTube. From the late night brainstorm sessions to cold beers by a fire, I am always scheming the next great adventure.