How to Legally Play Music on Live Streams
Jul 21, 2021
Can we play copyright music in a YouTube live stream? The answer is obviously no, According to YouTube’s Terms of Service and Community Guidelines, you are only allowed to post content that you created yourself or have permission to use. It’s also illegal (under U.S. copyright law) since only the copyright holder has the right to copy or distribute their work.
So if you didn’t create every aspect of what you’re uploading (videos, images, music, songs playing in the background, etc.), you’re breaking the law and YouTube’s policies and should EXPECT to get copyright notifications and/or strikes.
Want to add music to your live stream but have no idea where to find royalty-free tracks? Here is the right place you visit. There are ways to get great music for your live streams:
YouTube’s Audio Library is free to use and has a large collection of songs that’s always expanding. With so many tracks, the YouTube Audio Library is the perfect starting place for new streamers on a budget who want good music. You can use the music in any of your streams, as long as you follow YouTube’s rules. If you violate any of the rules, you’re in breach of the copyright. You can only use the music outside of the YouTube platform if you contact the artist first.
Amazon has more than 56 thousand free tunes and sound tracks that you can easily incorporate in your video backgrounds.Price range from free to $0.99. Amazon does a great job of keeping their tracks are easily organized by genre thus making it very easy for you to get a specific tune. The only small drawback when it comes to Amazon Music is the limited capability of their search function in finding just the right track for your video.
Free Music Archive (directed by WFMU) is one of the most prolific websites online for discovering a range of curated background music and sounds for all types of content. They even offer a “Spoken Word” genre! All MP3 tracks on FMA are pre-cleared and legal to use in a variety of situations that would otherwise be restricted by copyright laws. FMA offers more than 1,500 public domain tracks (licensed for commercial use) as well as thousands more under Creative Commons giving marketers and creators a plethora of options.
Artlist was founded in 2015, it has uncomplicated universal licensing. For a flat price of $199 a year, you get unlimited access to thousands of high-quality music tracks sourced from an ever-expanding community of indie artists from around the world.Artlist has a library of about 8,000 songs, and you’ll get new music added every month. Once you download music from its library, it is yours to keep and use however you want to.
Soundstripe offers upwards of 4,000 songs, with around 200 new tracks added each month. Subscription to its service starts at $15 a month and provides unlimited access to its music library. Upgrading to a $21/monthly also grants you access to to 30,000+ sound effects and stem audio files for over 1,000 songs. Additional, its $75 a month ‘Business’ subscription gives you access to its full library as well as a bunch of other useful perks.
How to add royalty-free music to your broadcasts:
Once you've actually found the music you want to add to your broadcasts, you can head over to OBS, uploading the music, then adding the music to your scene.
TIP:
Pay attention here that we use a switcher to connect multiple feeds, so when we switch the picture, the background music is here always, but if you are using other equipment, such as a capture card, then you have to make sure that each source is correct when you take it, both picture and music.
Audio plays a key role in live streams. When you add royalty-free music to your broadcasts, it takes them to a whole new level. Hope this blog post gave you some ideas on how to find awesome music for your live stream.