To say licensing music for podcasts is “tricky” would be an understatement. Whether an episode is getting millions of downloads or three, it counts as a broadcast that can be accessed the world over, opening the uploader to the terrifyingly tangled spaghetti mess of international copyright law. It’s enough to send a podcaster running for the deep forest, resigned to a life of building microphones out of sticks to interview woodland creatures. Squirrels can’t file copyright cease-and-desist letters (yet).

Fortunately for us podcasters, the world has kind-hearted musicians who’ve been gracious enough to make hundreds of hours worth of music available royalty free with proper attribution. Unfortunately, the more new media matures, the more of a chance an easily-discovered track is something that other, far more popular creators got to first. 

This doesn’t mean those tracks are entirely off the table, mind you, but it does mean there’s a much higher chance your target audience already has a memory associated with that song. It’s no longer generic background music, it’s “that song from ____.”

Congratulations, you’ve been bamboozled into a discussion disguised as a listicle! We’re all using the same building blocks to make podcasts! Join me on this adventure. 

Broke for Free – Add And

We start with a little ice-breaker demonstration that free music can be found anywhere, including content creators who’re racking up major cash. With millions of subscribers and frequent guest spots on huge channels/television shows, Binging with Babish is a cooking juggernaut on YouTube. His outro? Broke For Free by Add And. That’s right, he rocks a royalty-free outro (after ditching legally-dubious Frasier and Ratatat clips from his early videos, at least). There’s absolutely no shame in using stock music. The trick is in the sourcing.

Buddy – iMovie

Buddy is an excellent example of how a song can both be used within an inch of its life and still have some use left… if one is willing to put the work in. Being a stock song that came with Apple’s video editor iMovie, Buddy has been around since 2006. The opening ten seconds of the song has been imprinted on YouTube audience members the world over. It’s a staple of Red Letter Media’s popular Half in the Bag series, as well as the introduction to Chef John’s Food Wishes recipe videos for the past 13 years. 

If one scrubs past those first ten seconds, though, there’s sections of the song one would be hard-pressed to identify as being from Buddy. Smarthistory’s videos, for example, select a slice from near the middle of the track that, dodging those well-tread seconds and accidentally evoking memories of snarky movie reviews or wholesome pun-filled recipes. 

Broadcast News – iMovie

For the sake of brevity I’m going to package in Broadcast News with the Kevin MacLeod track NewsSting. They both serve the same purpose as a song and serve the larger point of this piece. Whether you’re a video editor trying to create a “breaking news” skit or a podcaster trying to ape a news broadcast in your next audio drama, these are the first two music stings you’re most likely to find. Which, by extension, means they’ve also been used hundreds of times by this point. Just like Buddy, both songs have been around for the better part of two decades.

Carefree – Kevin MacLeod

Oh boy, Carefree. The song that launched a thousand vlogs. It’s impossible to know for sure how many times this cheery xylophone and ukelele combo has been used across the internet, but it’s certainly been used so much it’s often mocked. While there are hundreds of royalty free songs featuring ukulele, Carefree has been used to the point where most commentary channels use the term “royalty free ukelele” they mean Carefree. It’s been used so much it’s become an ironic joke to deploy the song, a way to quickly communicate “this is a parody of cheesy content.” There’s an argument to be made Carefree might be the most-heard royalty-free song.

Local Forecast – Kevin MacLeod

Do you need elevator music? Do I have the song for you, but it’s also been around the block quite a few times. It’s been acerbic media commentary channel I Hate Everything’s theme for the better part of four years now, but with 2-ish million subscribers and a specific audience it’s not as likely people associate it with being his theme. This song is more known as the song chosen if a person in a podcast comes within fifty feet of a waiting room, elevator, or mall. Slap some reverb and EQ on it for that “distant speaker” vibe and boom: free muzak.

Monkeys Spinning Monkeys – Kevin MacLeod

Much like Local Forecast, this hasn’t necessarily become the song of [insert internet personality] but it does get tons of airtime. It’s also where I reveal a big reason why Kevin MacLeod is so prominent on this list: his website allows users to search by mood. Incompetech’s easy-to-use checkbox system allows incredibly granular control of what one is shown in a search return. Plug in the terms Bouncy, Bright, Humorous, and Uplifting, users got a shortlist of songs with Monkeys Spinning Monkeys near the top.

Incompetech’s music is popular for good reason! MacLeod’s stuff  is awesome and royalty-free. That said, it’s easy to trace a good deal of these often-used songs to an editor who didn’t go past that first broad search. Monkey Spinning Monkeys is, in a vacuum, an excellent song for a mischievous or bright scene. Outside of that vacuum it’s a song that’s been used to the point of meme-dom. As of this writing it’s been making the rounds as a popular sound on TikTok. For the past few years Dan Bell has used it and several other MacLeod tracks in the series An Another Dirty Room, a show in which four friends go to the worst hotels and do deep inspections to show just how filthy they can get. Happy flutes take on a different context when your first exposure to them is footage of slimy bathrooms and cockroaches.

Dreamy Flashback – Kevin MacLeod

This one is a bit of a cheat, as I’m not just talking about Dreamy Flashback, I’m also talking about nine other songs used in the soundtrack of the spaceship-building simulator Kerbal Space Program. Like a lot of indie developers, Squad made liberal use of MacLeod’s library to fill gaps left by their in-house produced tracks. Whether Squad intended to swap out the soundtrack later or leave it as-is, the songs have become “the songs from KSP” for millions of players and people watching on YouTube. If a variety gaming channel existed between 2013 and, well, now, it’s likely they’ve taken a swing at building (and blowing up) a rocket full of Kerbins.

Kerbal Space Program is a prime example of how stock music can be an effective tool when deployed well. MacLeod’s Brittle Rille had been used before and has been used since, but put in the context of being background music while the player designs their next rocket… it feels right. Dreamy Flashback is in the rotation of songs that play once a rocket has successfully entered orbit, a moment of relief and success that’s difficult for beginners to achieve. MacLeod’s floaty harp feels intrinsically linked to seeing outer space.

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The above is by no means an exhaustive list of royalty-free music that’s gained widespread use, I barely scratched the surface of MacLeod’s offerings alone, but they are a good starting point. One of the oldest lessons in creative writing is “good writers read.” That mindset carries over into new media. In the same way fiction writers can evolve or build on the same tools everyone else has used for decades (e.g. Vonnegut’s story shapes), streamers, videographers, and podcasters can bring their own twists to the party. 

I’ve done it myself! When editing a scene in which someone sees space for the first time, I ended up using Dreamy Flashback knowing full well some listeners of a sci-fi audio drama are most likely going to be familiar with Kerbal Space Program. Even if it does end up piggybacking off the audience’s familiarity with another thing, they’re both the same vibe of wonder and excitement. 

By going beyond that first search term, digging a little further past the first few results, asking fellow creators what tools/sites they use in their own works, and paying attention to how people creating the media we enjoy use royalty-free assets, podcasters can dodge (or knowingly embrace) widely-known songs used for a specific purpose. Good luck out there. 

And, most importantly: make sure to properly credit and thank the folks providing untold hours of music for free! 

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