HOW TO SEE IF A SONG IS COPYRIGHTED?

Everything depends on the use you are going to give to that song.

• If it’s for purely personal use yes, you can use it without a problem, for example, to play on your smartphone or in a homemade video that you do not intend to monetize.
• If it is for educational or commercial purposes or you want to add the music to a video that you’re going to upload to Youtube then you have to be careful and follow the rules.

But, how to check if a song is available to use?

The easiest way to know if a song is free of copyrights

We can follow the video for the instructions or see below:

Let’s go step by step.

Click on the link and, once you have logged into your account, then you’ll see this screen:

In its own search box (marked with number 1 on the image) you can write the name of any song to see under what copyright is.

Having found the corresponding song, click on the small arrow down that appears to the left of its title (marked with number 2) and a pop-up opens with the following information:

As we can see, it says in which countries of the world is allowed to use the original song for a video (number 3) or a cover interpreted by us (number 4).

It is therefore possible that, as in the example above, if we use the song “Duele el corazón” from Enrique Iglesias, our video will not be available in 2 countries (Germany and Switzerland) as they have more restrictive policies and, as shown in the following image, the author of the song can make money playing ads on our video:

What can we do to prevent this from happening?

If there’s a song that doesn’t appear in Youtube’s music policy can be also under copyright and maybe is not in its database.

The best thing we can do is not to take risks since we are exposed not only to our video being blocked, but to have legal problems afterward.

We will use then royalty free music to follow the guidelines.

Attribution means that we have to explain in the video description who the author of the music is.

For example, if we use the song Heavy Drum Bass, from artist Audionautix, we should write a phrase like this:

If you want -or need- to know more about the topic, we wrote an in-depth guide about what is music without copyright. Worth reading!

Music without copyright for commercial projects

Alternatively, if you want to use high-quality music for commercials, video games, radio, television or movies or you simply don’t want to attribute the author, you can always acquire the relevant licenses.

The best marketplace we know about this matter is Envato Elements, where you can find thousands of songs and sound effects classified by genres and at very affordable prices: 14.50€ per month for all the music you need!