Royalty Free Music is somewhat of a misnomer and is confusing for many people who are looking for inexpensive music for their production.
What royalty free music really means in the general sense of the term is that the music can be used without the purchaser having to pay any more royalties if they use it more than once, they only have to pay a single fee.
It does not however mean the music is free.
This is a slight generalization because all libraries have different licenses and you should always check them thoroughly before you use any of the music you buy.
The only other thing that you usually have to do is fill in a cue sheet if your work is going to be broadcast on TV for instance, all this means is that the composers and publishers get paid for the broadcast of the music, the buyer of the original royalty free music does not have to pay anything toward this.
The quality of royalty free music is something that is often brought into question, and while in years gone by the quality of some library music was somewhat questionable, these days there is some truly outstanding royalty free music available.
The bar on this type of music has definitely been raised up a lot, if it is not good enough it will get lost and not cut it in this highly competitive market, tin pot MIDI tunes are definitely out.
These days the best way to find music for your production is to go online and find what you want, you can audition the tracks and see if they fit what you need.
Another way that is very popular and a great way to save your production money is to buy production music disks, you can still test them online and instantly download the tracks, but you can also get a quality back up CD sent to you for your library.
The advantage is that you pay around the same price as you would buying a single track from most library websites, but you get a disk full of top notch music you can use just as freely on your other productions.
The range of styles of music available encompasses anything you could ever need.
While there are the up to date modern sounding dance or action music for instance, there are also huge sounding full on orchestral scores that are good enough to grace a multimillion dollar movie.
The quality of this type of music has come a long way and can make a low budget movie sound like it has a $200,000.
00 score, so do not think you cannot have a great sounding movie for only a few hundred dollars because with the right research you can.
There are a huge number of talented but struggling composers out there looking for a break to get a credit on their resume and producing this music is the only way they can do it, take advantage of this fact and up your production value now with some great sounding royalty free music.