In this article, we’ll discuss podcast music licensing as well as a few alternative ways to add music to your podcast.
No matter what type of podcast you record – music can make it better. For audio dramas, music can beautifully underscore the emotion you’re conveying with your words. For interview and discussion podcasts, having intro and outro music creates a strong brand identity and signals different segments to the listener. If your podcast discusses music, playing portions of the song you’re discussing provides a ton of context to the conversation.
Unfortunately, you can’t add any song to your podcast willy nilly. Doing so would violate the copyright, because you are profiting off of somebody else’s creative work. In order to use pre-recorded music you have to get the owner of that song to allow you to use it.
So let’s dive into podcast music licensing best practices.
The first podcast music licensing method is to buy the rights to the song. Buying the rights to a piece of music is officially called a synchronization license – ‘sync’ for short. These licenses are granted by the holder of the copyright of a particular composition, allowing the song to be used for a variety of media.
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Fair use permits a party to use a copyrighted work without the copyright owner’s permission for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.
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Freelance musicians and composers commonly work on podcasts. You can give them notes about the tone, tempo, or anything else to guide their compositions. It also helps to send them episodes of your show and samples or similar music you’d like to match the tone of.
A few places that you can hire freelance musicians to write your show’s music are Fiverr and Upwork.
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There are plenty of libraries with music you can license for really cheap or even free. Examples include, Artlist.io, MusicBed, and Free Music Archive.
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You’ve put all this work in to produce the best show possible, so you want to get as many eyes and ears on it as possible. How? Claim your podcast on Podchaser.
Once you claim your podcast, you can customize your podcast page, boost your SEO discoverability, add credits for your collaborators (including music), and even sell merch!
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