If you’re worried about using music on your website, YouTube video or even your local theater production, then royalty free music is the way to go.

It’s designed to be bought once and used as often as you want, in as many ways as you want, without having to pay a single cent more to the person who wrote the music.

There are many different styles of royalty free music plus you can get those special sound effects as well. Sound effects are perfect whether you want a thunderstorm or the soothing sound of ocean waves.

Finding royalty free music:

If you make your own meditation or hypnosis recordings then buyout music can make a useful and easy backing track. You can check out some specially designed royalty free meditation music here.

The joy of royalty free music is that all you have to do is concentrate on the sound you want – it takes away all the fear of a big music publisher suddenly demanding hundreds or even thousands of dollars of royalties. This even applies to songs like “Happy Birthday” when used in a commercial context – it’s copyrighted until at least the year 2030.

So it’s best to stay on the safe side and get hold of music tracks you can legally use in any of your productions for one single copyright “buyout” payment.

Probably the best way to choose your royalty free music is to find a website that allows you to listen to music samples.

These will give you a flavor of the music you’re about to buy, although bear in mind that most sites will either reduce the quality of the samples or they will put some kind of regular “watermark” on the track so that you can’t use it until you’ve paid for it.

Whilst this may seem annoying, it’s actually being fair to the author.

Think about it for a minute: when you listen to the latest Kylie track on the radio or MTV, the station will pay a royalty each and every time it’s played. This royalty carries on for years and years and years – it’s only now that early Cliff Richard tracks are coming out of copyright.

With royalty free stock music, the author only gets paid once. It’s sometimes called “buyout” music because you’re actually buying out the author’s right to claim copyright or royalty payments once you’ve made your purchase.

If you can find the right genres, you may be lucky and come across cheap royalty free music on sites like eBay.

More specialist music can take a bit more effort to find, although the various links on this page should help you to locate the kind of tracks you’re after quickly and easily.

It really is important to make sure that you listen to the tracks before you buy them if at all possible. You want the music you’re buying to sound good and to be appropriate for your needs. Hip Hop and R’n'B, New Age or World music or even music on hold for your telephone system. The choice available is wide and quite affordable.

Click here to check out this wide variety of royalty free music.