Legal Music
If you are creating videos to demonstrate your products or the services you offer it is really nice to be able to add music to make it more interesting. The same thing goes if you are producing audio podcasts. Enter the world of "podsafe" music - tunes that you are free to use as long as no one is paying to see or hear the project that you will be adding music to.
Podsafe Music Network
The easiest source for podsafe or Creative Commons music that is being offered to podcasters (or video casters / vodcasters) is the Podsafe Music Network.
Click on this picture for a full view of the homepage - I've circled the Registration button. If you register your podcast under that link then you can have access to all of the songs available in the network. You'll need a website URL and a "feed" URL, I just used our webpage and the XML feed from my old blog. I'll go back and change the XML feed when I'm ready to make my day-in-the-life-of-a-photographer videos a regular thing.
Once you get registered you will see your custom homepage. Ours looks like this:
I have circled the important parts for discovering new music.
It's time to get started. When I have my video rough-edited but pretty close to finished you can click the pull-down button beside "A-Cappella" and pick from the hundreds of genres available. I'm working on a video for camp of our trip to the TriState Conference so I'll start with something pretty generic sounding like World Fusion. Pick your genre then click "Genre Sort".
You can see under the arrow that there are pages and pages of just "World Fusion" music. This is true for every genre. If you click on one of the "play" buttons under listen you can try out several pieces of music before you decide on one song that you will use. I usually download a couple of songs so that I can listen though them to decide which is the best for the podcast that I am creating. Once you've found a song that you like you can click on the "Add to Playlist" button and then search for some more songs or go back to your homepage on the Podsafe Music Network. The "Go To My Page" link is just under the big Podsafe Music logo.
When you get back to your homepage click the "My Playlist" link." You'll see the Download the MP3 button. Download and away you go!
Magnatune - Another Great Choice
Another option that I have less personal experience with is Magnatune, an independent record label that is committed to providing an excellent home for their artists. They also license music for free use in podcasts.
We specifically grant non-commercial podcasters a waiver to use our music without paying any fee to a royalty collection agency, such as ASCAP, BMI or SoundExchange. Because we work directly with artists, we can legally do this.