If you’re looking for copyright-free music for your YouTube videos, you probably don’t want to get your videos monetized by someone else or even end up with a copyright strike.
There are plenty of royalty-free music websites but one caught my eyes a few weeks ago called Tunetank. They offer their own music and don’t claim any of the rights on YouTube. Besides not having to worry about all the legal stuff the music library is also for free.
All you have to do is put the title, author and link into the description of your video.
Besides all the technicality of copyright-free music, the library is quite large and even though the music is free of charge it certainly doesn’t sound like most free music you can find on the web.
There are three main tabs to find the right music. Categories, Genres and Moods.
If you click on the first one you will see the different categories. I am looking for an intense soundtrack for a travel show trailer. I am going to choose “Cinematic” and then “Travel” in the sub-category. In this category alone there are over 120 tracks. Of course not all will fit the dramatic style that I am looking for but let’s listen to some tracks.
Once I found the music of my choice I need to copy a link to credit the author. Make sure to save it as a text file so you can later put it in the video description. Tunetank will also send you and email with the instructions in case you are not sure what to do.
Now it’s time to adjust the music to my trailer and finalize the video edit.
The good thing about the audio files is that you don’t have to download a low quality preview file first with an audio watermark but can get the high quality version immediately. If you decide to choose a different track later on you can still do so.
In case you forgot to mention music info in the video description when uploading the file head over to the Tunetank website and go to the “Whitelisting” tab. All you have to do is copy and paste the link to the affected video and after a while the claim will be removed, and the video can be monetized.
There are plenty of other music choices on Tunetank. For example, if you go to the “Genres” tab, you can find pretty much anything from “Action”, to “Classic” and “World”. There’s even a “Trailer” genre which would have been another way to find the right music for the travel show trailer I played before. If you are not sure which music will work best you can simply add different tracks to your “Favorites” by clicking on the “star” icon and decide later.
If you are not sure which type of genre or category is best for your video, you can also go to the “Mood” tab. You can select one mood for example “Happy” but also multiple ones, like “Happy” and “Energetic”.
A common issue with other music libraries is that they offer the same tracks. We actually have issues with certain videos that we licensed a few years ago but seem to be claimed by multiple music agencies. Each agency claims the rights to the music so if the music is available through 5 agencies it can be claimed 5 times. Not exactly fun to manually submit a response each time especially when having over 300 videos. Luckily Tunetank only uses exclusive music. That means the tracks are in their library only.
Tunetank also offers a Pro version that features sound effects, additional music but most importantly allows you to whitelist your whole channel. That means you don’t need to manually release every claim. Of course this feature isn’t for free but for less than 8 US Dollars a month it’s also not exactly expensive.
Written by filmmaker Moritz Janisch on April 9, 2021