A word that has cost a lot of people money
"Royalty free" does not mean free. It means no recurring per-play royalty. The licence still has terms, it may still cost money, and it may forbid exactly what you are doing. Plenty of people have read those two words, taken a track, and found out later what the rest of the sentence said.
There are three separate things that can go wrong, and they are worth separating because the fixes differ.
- You had no licence. Straightforward infringement.
- You had a licence, but the wrong one. Personal use where you needed commercial; one channel where you needed all platforms; one video where the licence was per-project.
- You had the right licence and got claimed anyway. This is the one that surprises people, and it is the most common.
Content ID, and why a legitimate licence still gets flagged
YouTube fingerprints uploaded audio and matches it against a database of works submitted by rights holders. A match raises a claim automatically. A claim is not a copyright strike — your channel is not in danger — but it can redirect all revenue from your video to the claimant, and it can block the video in particular countries.
The awkward part: many stock-music libraries register their whole catalogue with Content ID. So you buy a licence, use the track exactly as permitted, and get claimed anyway, because the system does not know about your licence until you tell it. Resolving it means submitting your licence details in a dispute and waiting.
This is not a reason to avoid licensed music. It is a reason to keep records.
Free sources that are genuinely usable
- YouTube Audio Library — free, cleared, some tracks require attribution. Safest inside YouTube itself.
- Free Music Archive, ccMixter, Incompetech — Creative Commons, per-track licences, mostly CC-BY.
- Pixabay, Uppbeat, Bensound — free tiers with their own conditions; Uppbeat's free tier requires a credit and a per-track code.
- Musopen — public-domain classical, including recordings released freely.
- Freesound and Zapsplat for sound effects. On Freesound the licence is set per file and varies from CC0 to non-commercial, so check each one individually rather than assuming.
- BBC Sound Effects — a large archive free for personal and educational use under its own licence. Read the terms before any commercial use.
Two traps inside Creative Commons specifically:
CC-BY-NC forbids commercial use, and a monetised video is commercial. So is a video advertising your business, and arguably so is a portfolio piece that gets you hired. If money is anywhere near the video, avoid NC.
A public-domain composition is not a public-domain recording. Beethoven died in 1827; the 2019 orchestral recording of the Fifth is a separate copyrighted work with its own performers and label. This catches people constantly. Musopen exists precisely to give you recordings that are actually free.
Keep a licence log
One plain text file per project. For every piece of music and every sound effect, write down: track title and artist, source URL, licence name, the exact attribution string required, the date you downloaded it, and what you paid.
Do this even for free tracks, and especially for free tracks. Eight months later a claim arrives, and the question is not whether you were allowed — it is whether you can prove it in the five minutes you have before you give up and mute the video.
Ducking: making room for the voice
Music under dialogue has to move out of the way. Two methods.
Manual keyframes. Put music on one track and dialogue on another, and pull the music level down by 12 to 15 dB wherever someone speaks, with a short ramp in — around 0.3 seconds — and a slower ramp out, around 0.5 to 0.8 seconds. Slower coming back up sounds natural; snapping back up sounds mechanical.
Sidechain compression. A compressor on the music bus, keyed from the dialogue bus, so the music automatically drops whenever the voice is present. Resolve's Fairlight page has this, as does Reaper and any DAW. It is much faster on a long project and slightly less musical, because it does not know where the music wants to breathe.
Beginners consistently mix music too loud. You already know every word being said, so you cannot hear the masking. The test is blunt: if you cannot understand the dialogue with the music at the level you like, the music is too loud. Play it once on phone speakers, which is where most people will hear it.
Two more things about music
Cut the picture first. If music goes in early you will start cutting to the beat and protecting phrases, and the structure ends up serving the track rather than the meaning. The exception is a montage, where cutting to the beat is the point.
Start the music on an event. A slow eight-second fade-up over nothing announces that you did not know where to begin. Bring it in on a cut, a door, a word.
Generated music
Tools that generate music from a text description are usable and getting better. Three things to keep straight. Check whether your tier grants commercial use — several grant it only on paid plans. Label it as generated where it is a meaningful part of the work, which is increasingly a legal requirement rather than a courtesy. And understand that the training-data disputes around these systems are live and unresolved, so do not assume the output is free of anyone else's rights just because a tool produced it. The shape of the argument is in Making Things With AI; a lawyer in your country is the person who answers it for your case.
Today
Open your last project and write the licence log you should have written then. If you cannot reconstruct where a track came from, that is the answer about how risky it was.
Before you move on