I am asked the question often, "Where do you get the music for your videos?" The answer is, "Wherever I can find it!" Occasionally, I will be working on an edit that has the budget for original music, and I am able to work with a composer. However, the majority of the time, I am simply searching through whatever resources I own or can find online to come up with the right cut of music. The best option for most projects is royalty-free music. This means that once you purchase the song, you are able to use it in any of your everyday productions without paying any additional fees. (I should note that even royalty-free providers usually have limitations on use. For example, they might say an additional license must be purchased if it is used in a production that will have more than 10,000 copies made or that will be used on national network.) There are tons of options for royalty-free music, and a quick Google search is a good place to start. Here are a few sources I use for finding music. Some are collections you purchase, and some are online collections that offer single song licenses for purchase:
My Music Source,
Digital Juice,
Footage Firm,
Sounddogs,
SoundRangers,
Audio Jungle,
RoyaltyFreeMusic.com,
Pond5 and a few more that I am sure I am forgetting. If there are some other good ones that you use, please let me know! The good news is that there are tons of options. When I first started working in radio/tv, at most stations we would generally have one CD library of anywhere from 10-30 discs. And because most of those discs were specialized and rarely useful (eg. Caribbean, Techno, Punk, Metal, Groovy, etc.), you pulled most cuts from about 3 or 4 discs (eg. Corporate, Motivational, Reflective, Up Tempo, etc.). That was it. Producing several spots a day sometimes, the same songs got used over and over and over. That is not a problem anymore. There is plenty to choose from, it just takes a little time to track it down.
