Uncopyrighted music. Where can I find it?

I’m looking for some music (instrumental) that is uncopyrighted that I can use as back ground music for an amature video I’m making. ( :rolleyes: sigh. No, I am not making a porn.) I’ve been looking on the web but haven’t yet found what I’m looking for. A little help please.

[Edited by bibliophage on 08-31-2001 at 01:37 PM]

Have you tried the search term “public domain”? That should turn up something, although I would imagine it will be hard to find recorded PD music, since the recording itself confers copyright automatically.

Or try “production music.” There are all sorts of companies that sell music made specifically for use in films and TV. They have a bit of cheesy wonderfulness to them.

You can buy royalty-free music from various sources, like

http://www.royaltyfree.com/
http://www.royaltyfreemusic.com/

Any song written prior to 1924 is in the public domain. You can record it freely (but you need to play it yourself – a recording by someone else can be copyrighted).

what kind of music do you need and what kind of film is this?

Thanks guys. I’ve already found a couple of good web sties. Before I was just limiting my search to “uncopyrighted music” which is why I wasn’t coming up with much.

Johnfromdenver, I have 2 videos I’m making, one is an instuctional that I’m making for my employer, the other is a video that I’m making of local gardens that I want to get shown on public access. I know that the cable public access people have all sorts of music I can use, but I want to produce this by myself. I’ve dealt with a few of the geeks there in the past, and they wanted to stick their fingers into what I was doing.

My favorite place to look for royalty free music is AudioMicro, which lets you search by length of music, genre, and style. For example, I was searching for music to accompany a book trailer and needed a piece to be at least a minute and a half long, with an action/mystery/supernatural vibe. So I searched for keywords such as drama, mystery, suspense, danger, pursuit, chase, mystical, magic, etc. Came up with some terrific material that was very reasonably priced, too.

For example, you might look up pastoral, nature, peaceful, etc. – whatever ‘vibe’ you want your video to have.

The Creative Commons people have a media search tool, and many items are available there under various licenses that allow you to reuse without cost. You can aslo search for media with specific licensing on Google: go to the Advances Search page, expand the “Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more” item, then select your desired usage right.

Internet Archive has some.

Also the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at UCSB (web page).

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Closing this one.

samclem Moderator, General Questions