LEGAL MUSIC FOR FACEBOOK & INSTAGRAM VIDEOS or Ads

Choosing a song to use on Facebook or Instagram is not as simple as it may seem.

The main problem comes when we upload a video that contains some type of music protected by Copyright since any platform can, without prior notice:

This situation, which may seem small when we download free music from the Internet, is aggravated if we are a company who wants to publish that video on our fan page or to use it in Facebook or Instagram Ads.

Using free music could lead easily to lose precious time and risk our brand or channel to receive negative notices from the platform or worse, the closure of our account.

What options do we have to save time and money in the process?

ROYALTY-FREE MUSIC FOR FACEBOOK, SNAPCHAT, TWITTER, TWITCH & INSTAGRAM

Choosing royalty-free music and paying the corresponding licenses is the ideal option.

Using this type of music we make sure that:

There are several online marketplaces that sell royalty-free music licenses, however, the cheaper, simplest and most intuitive is Envato Elements.

In this marketplace we can find all kinds of musical genres and sound effects under a single license that will serve you for all kinds of uses, for just 14.50€ per month.

This subscription provides us:

There are, as well, other monthly payment services for which you can access a library of more than 300,000 royalty-free songs.

Best known is Epidemic Sound, and that’s why the most famous YouTubers and big social media channels use it.

You will see that they provide a service specifically for Youtube, but they allow you to use the music as well in other sites, as mentioned here.

In my experience, they do not insist on crediting them, and you will be able to monetize your videos without any further problems to not to receive a copyright claim never again.

USING FREE MUSIC

Another option is to use free music that is distributed under Creative Commons licenses.

The main problems that we will have are:

However, it is a very valid option for personal accounts, in which these types of problems are not as significant as if we are a company or serious brand.

Often the content (video) is created with other apps or software that offer songs “for free” and the problem only appears at the time of publication.

To prevent this from happening to us, we will have to download free music from these places:

In all of them, you will find music libraries with all sorts of background songs from different genres and sound effects.

We recommend reading the terms of these free licenses within each page to make sure you can use them in your videos without any problems.

THE MAIN DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO OPTIONS: FREE OR ROYALTY-FREE?

As we said, the essential difference in choosing royalty-free music to place on your Facebook or Instagram videos is basically the peace of mind that provides the purchase of a legal license.

If the video is created by a company or brand or is going to be published as an ad with Facebook/Instagram Ads there is no discussion: it is essential then to choose a standard license from Envato Elements.

If, instead, the video is going to be published in a personal account, then yes, we can be a bit more condescending and use free music but beware! as long as it is royalty-free, never a famous song or from an artist who has not explicitly said that his music is not under copyright and can be used without problem.

Artists and record companies use the technology called Facebook Rights Manager by which they can control at any time thanks to a comparison algorithm videos with their music that is uploaded to the platform, so there is no way to skip that limitation.

Conclusion

Best thing to do is, therefore, to adapt ourselves to the rules imposed by these social platforms: by acquiring the corresponding licenses, we will end up saving a lot of time both in finding the right music and subsequently avoiding undesired actions such as the automatic elimination of our videos or the closing of our account.