Affordable Music for Documentary

I’m about to shoot a documentary. The goal is to get into a festival where it can be screened in a theater. Beyond that, hopefully some sort of distribution.

It’s pretty low budget, but I want to use quite a bit of music. What are my options?

Did you check this out?

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There are a huge number of choices, and it depends on what kind of music you want. It also depends on what you mean by "pretty low budget". Here are a few thoughts:

If you don't have the music selected, the hardest part might be finding the right music to suit your film (assuming your budget doesn't allow for a music supervisor to do that job).

If you have something specific in mind already, you have to contact the administrator for it and find out what it would cost to license for your project.

Many independent recording artists who distribute digitally through aggregation platforms like CDBaby or Tunecore also opt into sync licensing services with those platforms, which give you a single point of contact and maybe a better deal than the big names.

You might save some money by using cover versions so you are just paying for the well-known songwriter, not the performer or producer.

There are also libraries of music that you can license for a one-time fee, but those generally have fairly generic material, intentionally mimicking a popular contemporary style.

I definitely look forward to listening to that free music. So generous to put your stuff out there like that for free!

I don't want to license any commercial music. Just looking for a library that's affordable. It's a documentary that will probably utilize a lot of piano, acoustic guitar and atmospheric stuff (perhaps some stings as well). I just want to be able download a bunch of stuff, try it in places and edit to the stuff that works.

My big client uses killer tracks, but it's too expensive for me and my labor of love side project that I'm doing on my own time.

I don't want to license any commercial music. Just looking for a library that's affordable. It's a documentary that will probably utilize a lot of piano, acoustic guitar and atmospheric stuff (perhaps some stings as well). I just want to be able download a bunch of stuff, try it in places and edit to the stuff that works.

Just a word from past experience. Read the license even if it is free or royalty free, or from a free site before using it. You don’t want to use someone free music that you downloaded only to find out that you cannot distribute, stream, or publicly make it available, including selling your doc film someday and having to remove, replace the music, or worse get drag into a copyright lawsuit. Even if you win, you will wish you didn’t get into it in the first place. Check out for Creative Commons licenses and how to attribute them.