YouTube rolls out a new royalty-free music library

The number of songs you’re legally allowed to mix into the personal videos you upload to YouTube is understandably low when it comes to well-known songs.

For this reason, YouTube is launching a new royalty-free audio library that should help its users add the perfect sound to go along with their video creations.

The YouTube Audio Library itself contains more than 150 royalty-free instrumental tracks people can use for free, indefinitely. Also, you aren’t restricted to only using these tracks for YouTube videos either, as the company is making them available for all creative projects. You can navigate to the new audio library via a link within the YouTube video manager page. Users will be able to browse the royalty-free music tracks based on mood, genre, instrument, or duration. As for the tracks, songs are available to download as 320 Kbps MP3 files.

The new audio library is a smart move for YouTube, mostly because it’s providing a way for people to get around having to risk using a copyrighted song within their videos, which can cause the site to remove them at the request of copyright holders. (YouTube also pays royalties to some music labels for any video that uses one of their songs, so this is also cheaper in the long run for them.) YouTube is also swinging open the doors for musicians to add their own work to the audio library to help add some variety, too.