Podcast Music Licensing: What You Should Know

In this article, we’ll discuss podcast music licensing as well as a few alternative ways to add music to your podcast.

No matter what type of podcast you record – music can make it better. For audio dramas, music can beautifully underscore the emotion you’re conveying with your words. For interview and discussion podcasts, having intro and outro music creates a strong brand identity and signals different segments to the listener. If your podcast discusses music, playing portions of the song you’re discussing provides a ton of context to the conversation.

Unfortunately, you can’t add any song to your podcast willy nilly. Doing so would violate the copyright, because you are profiting off of somebody else’s creative work. In order to use pre-recorded music you have to get the owner of that song to allow you to use it.

So let’s dive into podcast music licensing best practices.

Table of Contents

• Buy the Rights
• Fair Use
• Hire Someone to Write your Music
• Find Cheap Licensable Music Online

Option 1: Buy the Rights

The first podcast music licensing method is to buy the rights to the song. Buying the rights to a piece of music is officially called a synchronization license – ‘sync’ for short. These licenses are granted by the holder of the copyright of a particular composition, allowing the song to be used for a variety of media.

Pros:

• Only way to achieve guaranteed use of most recorded music

Cons: 

• Extremely difficult to get, because license holders can reject you for any reason
• Expensive because you have to pay the writer of the song AND whoever owns the master recording. Can easily cost between $3,000 – $10,000 for the rights, depending on the popularity of the song

Option 2: Fair Use

Fair use permits a party to use a copyrighted work without the copyright owner’s permission for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.

Pros: 

• Free method of acquiring music for your podcast
• Safe if you are using music for parody, “transforms” the song into its own creative work, or if you are critically commenting on the song (like a music review or history podcast)

Cons: 

• If your use of the music doesn’t fit those narrow definitions of “fair use”, many companies have successfully sued creators who use “fair use” as a defense. Damages to these songwriters or record companies can be as high as $150,000. So you have to be REALLY sure that you’re using fair use correctly so you don’t get sued

Option 3: Hire Someone to Write your Music

Freelance musicians and composers commonly work on podcasts. You can give them notes about the tone, tempo, or anything else to guide their compositions. It also helps to send them episodes of your show and samples or similar music you’d like to match the tone of. 

A few places that you can hire freelance musicians to write your show’s music are Fiverr and Upwork.

Pros:

• Can get exactly what you want
• Unique branding for your show with original music
• Can be as cheap as $5

Cons:

• Takes a lot of time to get the right song. Might be difficult to get the right music for a single episode on a timely schedule

Option 4: Find Cheap Licensable Music Online

There are plenty of libraries with music you can license for really cheap or even free. Examples include, Artlist.io, MusicBed, and Free Music Archive.

Pros:

• Legally safe
• Cost effective

Cons:

• Commonly used by creators all over the internet, meaning that the music you use might overlap with other podcasts, taking away from the uniqueness of your show

Once You’ve Got Your Music Dialed in – Claim your Podcast

You’ve put all this work in to produce the best show possible, so you want to get as many eyes and ears on it as possible. How? Claim your podcast on Podchaser.

Once you claim your podcast, you can customize your podcast page, boost your SEO discoverability, add credits for your collaborators (including music), and even sell merch!

Claim your Podcast today to get started

Read More Tips for Podcasters

• How to Promote and Grow Your Podcast
• How to Write Better Podcast Show Notes [with Example]
• A Practical Guide to the Podcast Loudness Standard