Shopping for Royalty Free Music

Most designers are pretty familiar with shopping for royalty free photos and illustrations for use in their designs. For anywhere from one dollar to hundreds, you can find just the image you need from various stock library sites.

Interactive designers often need more than images to get the message across. For many Flash pieces and videos, music or sound effects help convey the mood or indicate user input and movement through the piece. A quick search for royalty free music or sound effects will bring up loads of options (some of which are mighty cheesy), but I’ve come across a few interesting ones…

Sites like The Beat Suite offer a wide range of music and effects for any interactive project.

The Beat Suite http://www.beatsuite.com/ sells high quality royalty free music, soundtracks, loops, and sound effects at pretty reasonable prices. I really like their $20 Flash button sound packs which contains dozens of sounds you can apply to an interactive application. I also found their categories and descriptions much more helpful than most other sites’, and there’s a huge range of styles from rock to folk to… crime thriller espionage?!

Sometimes it pays to go with a name you already know and love, and to go with licensed audio rather than royalty free. The folks at Getty Images http://www.gettyimages.com/ have a service called Pump Audio http://www.gettyimages.com/Music/PumpAudio.aspx that is packed with high-end, original music. Rather than royalty free, these music pieces are licensed, and you pay by type of use, format, media, and license term. It can get pretty pricey depending on the job, but for your big budget, top name clients, this is really the way to go. Searching and previewing tracks is simple, though unlike Beat Suite, you don’t get handy descriptions that help you decide which tracks to preview.

Now back to royalty free. Royaltyfreemusic.com http://www.royaltyfreemusic.com/ (a division of Jupiterimages.com http://www.jupiterimages.com/) offers some interesting ways to get your royalty free tracks. You can buy them individually from around $5 for a single button effect to around $60 for a single music track, or you can buy library discs based on a specific genre or usage for around $100. There’s also a subscription service that really cuts costs if you use many tracks or sound effects per month. Previewing the clips is a bit trickier than on other sites, but the purchasing options can make this a more flexible choice for frequent users of stock sound.

As with stock photos, use stock audio in ways that keep the finished piece and its components feeling unique. Many other libraries are out there than the ones I’ve noted, so you can really dig around to find the right sound for the right price.