Every piece of music carries two separate copyrights: the composition and the recording. Pairing either with picture needs a sync licence. Credit, short clips and non-commercial use grant nothing on their own. With no budget the workable routes are CC BY tracks, genuinely public-domain recordings, a musician who signs a one-page permission, or no music at all.
Flow diagram of 5 steps: Read the licence on the page you downloaded from, Check the two restrictions that matter to you, Write the attribution in full before you forget where it came from, Keep a receipt for the state the licence was in, Keep a cue sheet as you edit, not afterwards.
Nearly every music-rights mistake made by a first-time producer traces back to one missing fact, and it is worth stating before anything else. A piece of music you can hear is covered by two independent copyrights, and they are usually owned by different people who have never met. The composition — the notes, the structure, the words — belongs to whoever wrote it, and in practice is administered by a publisher. The recording is a separate work: one particular performance, captured on one particular day, owned by whoever paid for that session, normally a label. Clearing one of these gives you no rights at all in the other.
The consequence catches people from both directions. Re-record the song yourself with friends in a front room and you have dealt with the recording right by creating a new recording you own, and you still owe the composition right to the songwriter, exactly as before. Go the other way and pick a symphony by a composer dead for two hundred years, and the composition is genuinely free while the 2019 recording of it by a working orchestra is under copyright for decades yet. The second version of this mistake is the more common one, because the first feels like cheating and the second feels like obvious common sense.
There is a third permission layered on top, and for anyone making video it is the one that actually bites. Putting music alongside moving image is a distinct act called synchronisation, and it needs its own licence from the owners of both copyrights. It matters because synchronisation has no cheap standard route. Audio-only reproduction has, in various countries, collective and statutory mechanisms with published rates; pairing a track with picture generally does not. The owner is entitled to quote whatever figure they like, or to take six weeks to reply, or to simply say no and give no reason.
For a production with nothing to spend, the honest conclusion is not that commercial music is expensive. It is that it is usually unobtainable. The obstacle is rarely the fee — it is that a rights administrator has no process for a request this small, no way to price it, and no commercial reason to spend an hour on it. Plan on that basis from the start, because a piece built around a particular famous song is a piece with an unsolved problem in it, and the problem does not get easier the closer you get to publishing.
The following four ideas circulate constantly, are repeated confidently in comment threads and creator forums, and are all wrong. None of them is a fringe misunderstanding; each one is the reason somebody has had a finished piece pulled down.
There is no duration below which use is free. The figure quoted is variously thirty seconds, fifteen seconds, seven seconds, eight bars or four bars, and the variation is the tell: none of these appears in any statute or any decided case, in the UK, the EU or the United States. The belief seems to be a garbled memory of something else entirely — possibly the short excerpts used in broadcast reporting under specific exceptions, possibly the sample-clearance conventions of the record industry, which are commercial customs rather than law. Length is relevant to how likely an owner is to notice and to how much damage they could claim, and it is not relevant to whether permission was required.
Attribution and permission are unrelated things. Naming the artist is a condition attached to some licences, most obviously the Creative Commons BY family, where failing to credit correctly puts you outside the licence and therefore in infringement. It is never a substitute for a licence you never had. Writing the name of a commercial track in your description changes nothing about your legal position, except that it makes the use trivially easy to find. The same applies to variations on the theme: no copyright infringement intended, all rights belong to their owners, and please contact me and I will remove it are not licences, and saying them does not create one.
Copyright does not contain a general exception for good causes, small audiences or unpaid work. A charity fundraiser, a school project, a hospital radio slot and a community programme with forty viewers are all uses, and all need permission in the same way a commercial production does. What non-commercial status does affect is the specific set of licences available to you — a Creative Commons NonCommercial track is an option for a genuine volunteer project and not for an advertising agency — and it affects the practical likelihood of anyone pursuing you. Neither of those is the same as being permitted, and the second is not a plan.
Both doctrines exist and both are much narrower than their reputation. In the UK, fair dealing is purpose-bound: it covers criticism and review, quotation, news reporting, parody, caricature and pastiche, and the use has to actually be for that purpose and be fair in extent. In the United States, fair use is a four-factor balancing test weighing purpose, the nature of the work, how much was taken and the effect on the market, with transformative purpose carrying real weight. Music laid under a scene to set a mood is the paradigm case that fails both: it is not commentary on the track, it takes the part of the work people value, and it substitutes for a licence somebody else would have paid for. Worth noting too that fair use is a defence, argued after a claim has been made, not a permission you can rely on beforehand.
The good news is that the situation for a small production is far better than it was fifteen years ago. Openly licensed music is now plentiful enough that the constraint is taste rather than availability, and several of the routes below clear both copyrights in a single step because the same person owns both.
The table sets out the realistic options and what each one costs you in attention rather than money. The catches column is the part worth reading twice — most of the trouble people run into comes from a source that was genuinely free, used in a way its licence did not cover.
Free and low-friction music sources, and the condition attached to each
| Source | What it clears | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Tracks dedicated to the public domain (CC0), as offered by several stock-audio libraries | Both copyrights, with no attribution obligation and no restriction on commercial use | A dedication is only as good as the uploader’s right to make it. Re-uploads of other people’s work appear on every free library, and a CC0 label applied by somebody who did not own the track clears nothing at all. |
| CC BY libraries — Incompetech, ccMixter, large parts of the Free Music Archive | Both copyrights, including commercial use and synchronisation with picture | Attribution is a licence condition, not a courtesy, and the form of it matters. Omit it or bury it and the licence does not apply to you, which puts an otherwise legitimate use back into infringement. |
| Public-domain classical: Musopen, and recordings released openly via IMSLP | The composition, and — only where the recording itself is openly licensed — the recording as well | These are two separate checks and people routinely do only the first. A modern studio performance of a Bach partita is a copyrighted recording however old the music is. |
| Music bundled inside editing apps, design tools and social platforms | Use on that platform, usually quickly and with no paperwork | The licence is commonly tied to the service. Music cleared for videos published through one app is not automatically cleared once you export the file and publish it somewhere else. Read the terms rather than assuming they travel. |
| A musician you actually know, writing something for the piece | Everything, exactly fitted to the edit, plus a real person to credit | It has to be in writing. One page naming both the composition and the recording, worldwide, for an unlimited term, explicitly including synchronisation. A verbal yes between friends is a dispute waiting for the friendship to change. |
| Sound-effect and field-recording banks such as Freesound | Atmospheres, room beds and texture, which often do the job people reach for music to do | Licences are set per file, not per site. The same library holds CC0, CC BY and NonCommercial material side by side, so the check has to happen on every download. |
| No music | Nothing to clear, nothing to log, nothing to dispute later | You lose an easy tool for pace and for signalling transitions, and you have to earn those with structure instead. For interview-led work this is frequently the better piece, not merely the safer one. |
Creative Commons is not a single licence, and the two-letter codes after the CC are the whole of the meaning. BY requires attribution and is otherwise permissive. SA requires that anything you build from it carries the same licence onward. NC restricts you to non-commercial use. ND forbids adaptations. Combinations are common, and the last two are where small productions get caught.
ND is the sharper trap because it looks harmless. Creative Commons’ own guidance treats synchronising music with moving image as making an adaptation of it, which means a NoDerivatives track cannot lawfully be laid under your video at all, even unedited and even in full. NC is a softer problem but a persistent one, because non-commercial is defined by intent rather than by a bright line, and reasonable people disagree about where an ad-supported platform, a sponsor credit or a donations link puts you. If your project might ever carry any of those, treat NC as unavailable rather than arguing the point later.
The procedure below takes a couple of minutes per track and is the difference between a use you can defend and a use you merely believe is fine.
Not from a search result, not from a video description, not from a list someone compiled of free music sites. Licences are set per track and change per track, and aggregator pages go out of date. Go to the page the file actually came from and find the licence statement on it.
Does it permit commercial use, and does it permit adaptation? If there is any prospect of advertising, sponsorship, a donations link or later commercial distribution, you need a licence with no NC. If the music is going under picture, you need one with no ND. A CC BY or CC BY-SA track clears both of those; anything with NC or ND in the code needs a deliberate decision rather than a hopeful one.
The convention Creative Commons itself recommends covers four things: title, author, source and licence, each linked where a link is possible. A usable line looks like the track name, then by and the artist name, then the source URL, then the licence name and a link to the licence deed. Assemble it at download time. Reconstructing it a month later from a filename is how tracks end up credited to the wrong person.
Save the licence page as a PDF or a full screenshot showing the date, and keep it with the audio file. Creative Commons grants are irrevocable for the copy you received, so a licensor who later withdraws a track or relicenses it commercially cannot retrospectively make your use unlawful — but you need to be able to show which terms were attached when you took it. Without the receipt you have an assertion rather than evidence.
A plain text file or spreadsheet with one row per piece of music: timecode in and out, track title, artist, source URL, licence, and the exact attribution string. Broadcasters have required these for decades for good reason. On a six-minute piece it takes a few minutes and it answers every question anybody will later ask, including your own question about which of four similar files you actually used.
On-screen end credits, a caption at the point of use, and the published description are all acceptable places, and which you choose affects the edit. An end card needs several seconds of runtime, and adding it after you have exported and set loudness means doing both again. For audio-only work the credit goes in the episode description and, where the music is prominent, in the spoken outro.
Being legally in the clear and being left alone by an automated system are two different states, and confusing them causes a lot of unnecessary panic. Content matching systems on the large video and audio platforms are contractual arrangements between those platforms and rights holders. They compare your audio against a database of reference files and act on a match. They do not read your licence, they cannot tell that a track was released under CC BY, and they will happily flag a public-domain recording of a symphony because a label submitted an album containing the same performance.
This happens often enough that several openly licensed libraries warn about it on their own front pages. A false claim on properly licensed music is an annoyance rather than a crisis, and the dispute process is the reason step four in the previous section exists: a saved licence page showing the terms and the date is exactly what a dispute form is asking for. What you cannot do is win that argument from memory. It is also worth distinguishing a claim, which usually just redirects any revenue, from a formal takedown notice, which is a legal instrument with consequences for repeat recipients — the first is routine and the second is not.
One further wrinkle is worth knowing about. A track can be openly licensed today and commercially exclusive tomorrow, because artists change their minds and sign deals. The Creative Commons grant on the copy you already hold survives that, which is the point of irrevocability, but the version of the page that proved it will not survive. This is the entire argument for keeping receipts rather than bookmarks.
It is also worth being straightforward about the limits of what sits behind you here. Kind Channel is new. Nothing has aired yet, the community is small, and there is no cleared music library, no production library deal, no rights desk and no lawyer who will clear a track on your behalf. Nobody here can obtain a sync licence for a commercial song, and nobody can indemnify you for a use that turns out to be wrong. Music is the proposer’s responsibility, start to finish.
The practical effect on anyone thinking about proposing something is small but real. A proposal that names a specific famous track as its theme is describing a dependency that will not clear, and it is better to find that out while the idea is still a paragraph than after the edit is built around it. A proposal that says the music will be CC BY from a named library, or that a friend is scoring it, or simply that there will not be any, is easier to assess and reads as someone who has thought the production through rather than only the idea.
No. There is no duration threshold anywhere in UK, EU or US copyright law below which musical use becomes free, and the fact that the number quoted varies between thirty seconds, fifteen seconds, seven seconds and eight bars is a good indication that none of them comes from a statute or a decided case. Length affects how likely an owner is to notice and how much they could claim in damages; it has no bearing on whether permission was needed in the first place. A short excerpt of a commercial recording laid under a video requires a licence from both the publisher of the composition and the owner of the recording.
It frees the composition and not necessarily the recording, and this is the single most common trap in the whole subject. In the UK and across the EU, composition copyright generally runs for the life of the composer plus seventy years, so anything by Bach, Mozart or Beethoven is unquestionably in the public domain as a piece of writing. The recorded performance is a separate copyright with its own term — in the UK, seventy years from release for a published recording — so a modern orchestra playing Beethoven is fully protected. To use classical music for nothing you need both a public-domain score and a recording that is itself public domain or openly licensed, which is what archives such as Musopen exist to provide.
No, and the two things are not related. A streaming service holds licences negotiated with labels and publishers that permit that service to play music to its subscribers. Those licences run between the platform and the rights holders and grant the listener nothing beyond listening. The same reasoning applies to music that is free to download as a promotional release, to tracks posted by the artist on social media, and to anything described as free to listen. Free of charge and free of restrictions are different claims, and only an explicit licence — a Creative Commons deed, a library licence, or written permission from the owner — supplies the second one.
It depends which of three quite different things has happened. An automated content match on a large platform is the most likely, and it typically diverts any revenue to the claimant rather than removing the piece; if the music was properly licensed, disputing it with the saved licence page and date usually resolves it. A formal takedown notice is a legal instrument, removes the content, and carries escalating consequences for anyone who accumulates several. A direct approach from a rights holder or their agent is rarest and normally opens with a demand for payment. The defence in all three cases is the same paperwork: the licence as it stood on the day you took it, and a cue sheet saying exactly what was used where.