As we reach the end of a *very* long school year, many teachers will be producing end-of-term videos with their students. If these get shared on social media then they will most likely fall foul of copyright infringement claims due to the use of the music in the background.
If you are using songs by well-known artists then you are breaching copyright by sharing it without permission.
To prevent your videos running into trouble, then it’s a good idea to use a royalty-free source of music such as Pixabay.
If you’ve not used Pixabay before, it is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing copyright free images, audio and videos. All contents are released under the Pixabay License, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist – even for commercial purposes. There are a couple of restrictions, so check the terms of the Pixabay licence here.
Attribution is not required. You don’t need to give credit to the contributor or Pixabay but if you can mention where you got the music from, then that’s always a good thing.
Pixabay is also a very useful source of photographs, video clips and clip art images to use in your lesson resources, particuarly if you want to share them online. I’ve been using Pixabay for a while now, and it’s a pretty comprehensive source of royalty-free resources.
Finding your music is very simple. Just go to Pixabay.com/music. You can filter by genre of music and you can also do a straight search.
When you find something you might like, click on the title (or the +) to open up more information about the clip. If you click on the coloured square next to the name you can preview the clip to see what it sounds like.
The download button on the right does what it says. You can download the clip as an mp3 file. This can then be imported into your video editing software.
For more information about using royalty-free and creative commons audio, see this post.
If you’re interested in more like this, then Theo Kuechel has put together a comprehensive list of open content, and it’s regularly updated. Take a look here.
Hi,
Can I use pixabay music videos on my you tube channel. Or is there need to take lisence.
Thank you!
I signed in on pixabay and listened to some music, clicked the heart next to it, and later, I went to narrow my choices down, and I can’t find a way to find the songs I liked when I clicked on the heart. Please direct me to instructions to find these liked songs.
Clicking the heart just “likes” a song (or image). You need to click the bookmark icon next to the heart then you can add it to a collection. This will be on your profile, so you can find it later.
How do you add pixabay music to your video?
download the mp3 and add it in whatever video creator you’re using.