What is royalty free music?

Pay once, use it for as long as you need it

Royalty free is a licensing model, not a genre and not a price. You buy the licence one time, and what you pay does not change with how often the finished piece is seen or how long it stays up.

Put a licensed track under a video on your site and the fee is the same whether a hundred people watch it or ten thousand, this month or in six years. The opposite model is rights managed, sometimes called needle drop, where a fee is owed each time the music is used and for each territory it runs in. That is the thing royalty free is free of.

What it is not

Not free. Free of royalty, not free of charge, in the same way a tax free product is not free, it is free of tax.

Not copyright free. Whoever writes a piece of music owns its copyright from the moment it exists. A licence is permission to use the work under stated terms; it never transfers ownership, and the composer keeps their rights in the composition and the recording. There is no meaningful sense in which real music is copyright free, and a library telling you otherwise is telling you something that cannot be true.

Not a style. Any music can be licensed this way, from a solo cello to a metal record. It describes the paperwork, not the sound.

Not a quality level. Royalty free says nothing about how good a track is. Quality comes from whether a library screens its composers and picks its tracks, or takes whatever arrives.

Not a price bracket. A royalty free licence can cost a few dollars or a few thousand. It is a licensing model, not a price list.

The part that confuses everybody

Royalty free licensing usually does not cover public performance royalties, and this is where the name earns its bad reputation. Those royalties exist, but you are not the one who pays them.

When music runs on television or radio, the broadcaster pays a performing rights organisation, and that organisation passes composer royalties on. ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, PRS and their equivalents handle it between themselves and the broadcaster. From where you stand as the person licensing the music, it is royalty free. Behind the scenes the composer may still be paid for the broadcast, by somebody else, at no cost to you.

Stock music is a different word again

Stock music means music that already exists and is ready to license, as opposed to a score commissioned for one specific film or campaign. Most stock libraries license royalty free, but not all of them do, and the two words are not interchangeable.

Stock does not mean canned. It covers everything from a badly mixed demo to a session recorded by players who do this for a living. Which one you get depends entirely on the library.

Nobody in the industry likes the term

Better names have been proposed for years: pre licensed production music, single fee stock music, one stop music licensing. None of them stuck, and royalty free is still the phrase people type into a search box, which is most likely how you arrived here.

So the term stays, and the honest thing is to explain it plainly rather than lean on the confusion. On AGsoundtrax you pay once, the licence covers the project rather than one edit, it is worldwide, and it does not expire.