Aussie Bloggers

For a long time I’ve had an account at www.istockphoto.com to source royalty free images for presentations, newsletters, websites and even for books. But I’d not thought about what would be involved in seeking a piece of music that I could legally use until recently.

You see, I’d put together a PowerPoint presentation for use when presenting at conferences but it recently occurred to me that I didn’t want to have any issues with using material I’d not paid for. Further, I wanted to turn the PPT presentation into a movie clip for Youtube, in the hope that it might attract some attention and become one of those ‘feel good’ viral emails that you see doing the rounds. I know that often that are PPS files that get sent around but I thought it would be good to have it up at Youtube too in case people start looking for it.

Anyway, I tried a few places I was told about but in the end decided doing a Google search might be as good as anything else and I was surprised by the number of royalty-free music sites that showed up. Guess I shouldn’t be really, should I?

Result is I did find some really good pieces and now have to make a decision as to which one I want to use. The site I really liked was Freeplaymusic.com because of the way it was set up, you could do searches on types of music and when you went into each category it told you the music mood, the instruments used, the style of music and the length of play – you can do a ‘preview’ before you download it to use it. However, it is important to read the Terms of Use before choosing a piece of music and it would seem that my planned use would require payment and I’m still to work out exactly what that amount would be.

Another site was Royalty Free Music and you can choose to subscribe or pay for a single track or purchase a library of tunes.

And then there was Music Bakery where you can pay once and use the piece forever and the price was very attractive.

It is important to note that ‘royalty-free’ does not mean FREE music, but music that is free of royalty charges for its continued use.

If you have a favourite place for downloading royalty-free music, I would love to hear about it!