Where to Find Royalty-free Music for iMovie Videos?

Video marketing becomes an essential element of your marketing strategy in the current scenario and the future. According to Cisco, more than 82% of all Internet traffic will be consumed by the video!

You may get fired up to take action now with the flow. But the question is: how do you execute that when you don't need an acceptable budget?

There are numerous costs associated with creating a video, from equipment to post-production. Thus, you'll only have to find areas where you can cut through unnecessary expenses.

Luckily, background music is an area where you can save your precious budget. Thus, we'll be discussing lots of great resources to find free music for iMovie.

• Part 1. What's Royalty-free Music?
• Part 2. Top 10 Places to Find Royalty-free Music for iMovie Videos
• Part 3. Part 3. The Best Alternative to iMovie with Royalty-free Music Library

Part 1. What's Royalty-free Music?

Before we start here, let's quickly review the costs of implying the background music for your different video projects.

Royalty-free music doesn't necessarily mean that the music is free; it simply signifies that you will buy a one-time licensing fee. You can use the music anyway and whenever you wish to, for infinity and beyond.

Plus, it's also important to know that Public Domain and Creative Commons works are pretty accessible. The difference is that the Public Domain doesn't need permission from whoever did the work, while Creative Commons usually includes attribution or permission.

Part 2. Top 10 Places to Find Royalty-free Music for iMovie Videos

While in doubt, you can get in touch with the artist before using royalty-free music as well. It's not worth dealing and waiting with the inconvenience later after using the track as video’s background music.

With that in mind, let's consider the ten best places to know where to get free music for iMovie.

1. Free Music Archive

The FMA works with artists, radio stations, curators, and Creative Commons enthusiasts to provide a massive selection of free stock music or royalty-free music for iMovie. It was launched by the non-commercial radio station WFMU and is one of the driving forces behind the availability of free music on the internet.

To give you an idea of the availability of songs, we considered electropunk, a relatively obscure genre compared to various others on the website. However, despite being a niche genre, there are 600 plus music tracks available.

On the other side of the gamut, ambient electronics consists of around 7,000. FMA lists sixteen different main genres, from instrumental and spoken to hip-hop to blues and rocks. Each genre has multiple subgenres mentioned to assist you in finding what you're searching for.

2. HookSounds

Even though HookSounds has licenses and subscriptions for all types of content, they also provide a free Use & Mention license for non-commercial use. It is a practical choice if you are looking for original music, but unluckily, not everyone can use it.

However, meet specific criteria to avoid any copyright infringements, and here is where it gets more complex. For example, to use HookSounds' free music for iMovie, you can't monetize your content. Thus, if you post a video on your YouTube channel, you can't place any sponsored content or ads.

3. YouTube Audio Library

You’ll find their Audio Library in YouTube's Create section. It consists of many kinds of music from various genres, from Country & Folk to Dance & Electronic.

You can freely use any track in your video content. The music is a mix of Creative Commons and public domain works. All you need is to apply the attribute to the track's owner.

You can consider using its search functions to make the most out of the library. For instance, you can search as per mood such as "calm", "dramatic", or "funky". Or you can search as per the track’s duration, which is a good idea to make sure it fits your content’s length.

4. Epidemic Sound

The reason we love Epidemic Sound is that it's excellent to find high-quality copyright-free music for iMovie and your other video projects. In addition, its easy-to-use search functionality and music offerings are some of the best in the business, making it one of the easiest and suitable choices for wanderers like you.

Music licensing can be a bit hard, but Epidemic Sound compiles all of the legal rights you'll require for a simple, valuable license across all platforms.

5. Incompetech

Incompetech also has a vast selection of royalty-free music for iMovie. Altogether, there are 2,000 plus tracks by musician Kevin MacLeod. You can download them for free as long as you credit the site as well as the musician.

Incompetech arranges the tracks in collections as per different genres, such as "Disco and Lounge" or "Rock Classic".

There are also choices among "Film Scoring Moods", where you can install tracks that would fit "Mystery", "Horror", or "Noire" themes, for instance. Moreover, their world music is inspired by beats from various countries such as Brazil and Africa.

So, go and check out the lists of most recent and most downloaded music lists. These will help you to discover more about what the site has to offer.

If you want to download the entire music library, it’ll cost you a one-off fee of $38.

6. SoundCloud

You may be familiar with SoundCloud already. The DJs and amateur musicians use it to share and upload their music. That’s why you sometimes come across pretty questionable tunes.

But SoundCloud is an excellent music source worth considering for marketing videos. You can filter its search to show tracks licensed for reuse. Enter in "background music", or try something like "uplifting background music", "ambient beat", etc., to get a load of options.

SoundCloud also contains a social element, where you can find a particular track that already has multiples of "likes" and you'll know people will enjoy your video while they use it.

The great aspect about downloading your background music from SoundCloud is that the tracks sound feels more like real music than a contrived track created for a marketing video.

7. Cctrax

If you're searching for electronica, head to Cctrax. The site provides electronic music (though it does also provide a bit of jazz, rock, and modern classical).

One of the significant advantages of using Cctrax to download free music for iMovie or videos is filtering their tracks as per the Creative Commons license. You can also filter by tag, genre, artist, and label to get the exact music kind you're searching for.

8. Jamendo

There are two different sections of Jamendo's website: a licensing section and a listening section. Everything in the listening section has a CC or Creative Commons license, which you can undoubtedly use for your videos.

Unluckily, you can't arrange or filter the tracks by their mentioned kinds of CC license. So you'll have to explore each category. To see the kind of license a track contains, hit the down arrow button on the screen's right-hand side. There, you will notice play counts and symbols that sync with various kinds of Creative Commons licenses.

If you have an idea of your search portion, the genre listings can be valuable to browse search bars or available tracks or the search bar to reduce the list.

Just make sure that you've checked the kind of Creative Commons license available before you download any royalty-free music for iMovie.

9. Audioblocks

Audioblocks provides royalty-free stock audio, consisting of sound effects, music, and loops. (A loop is a short musical piece that's seamlessly repeated)

There are also 100,000 plus tracks on the site. Unfortunately, this service isn't free now. But they also provide a good deal: $149 for unlimited downloads annually. That's not bad, considering you can access multiples of music content.

It's easy to filter search here to look for music according to the exact video length. That's also ideal for saving some of your editing time.

They have some exciting categories for tracks, as per the emotions or feelings like the "Aggressive", "Sad", "Happy", "Playful", and more.

10. Netlabels

Netlabels is a collection of music available at the Internet Archive. Virtual record labels upload various music collections regularly. You can freely download them and use them under a Creative Commons license or to know how to find free music for iMovie.

Currently, there are 65,000 plus pieces of music on the site. And, you can search through them via filters such as year, genre, or artist. Netlabels also provide a small section of available foreign language music.

Another valuable aspect of this website is that music tracks have a view count. Most likely, the tracks that have a higher number of views are pretty famous. Similar to SoundCloud, this assists you in selecting good music for your videos that people will love to hear.

Part 3. The Best Alternative to iMovie with Royalty-free Music Library

If you are hunting a program that is the best alternative for iMovie to edit videos, this is the right place to go with!

Wondershare Filmora video editor offers support for 4K videos, and it is supported with almost all commonly used formats for video files. Beginning a new project or importing the media into Filmora is an effortless process that requires minimal labor.

Making the opening titles, enhancing the video clips' colors, applying image overlays and filters are just a few among various video editing options Filmora makes us available.

Moreover, the video editor has a music library that contains a selection of royalty-free songs, enabling you to make a soundtrack while looking for free music for iMovie. You can export all your projects to your accounts on YouTube or Vimeo directly from Filmora. But, also keep in mind that all videos created with this video editor's free version will have a watermark.

Besides the initially included music tracks and sound effects in Filmora, you can also find more audio files from Filmora's effects store - Filmstock, and even get some free sound and music.

Conclusion

Have you considered using any of the websites or sources listed above to look for and download the video's background music?

Or, did we miss on any of your favorites? We'd love to hear your experiences with the video creation formula using any of the sources mentioned above of free music for iMovie. Feel free to drop any question in the comments below. We'd love to keep this conversation going!