Background music plays a significant (and often underrated) role in all video production out there. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about a full-length movie, a short animation, YouTube how-to tutorials, or any other video content, the music changes the way we perceive that video.
Having chosen the right music, you can rest assured that your viewers will feel the right emotions around the message you are trying to send. Yes, choosing the right music is important, but this task might get pretty tricky. Here are some tips that may help you choose the perfect track for your video project.
Think of the specific emotion your video should evoke
The first simple question you should ask yourself is how you want your audience to feel when they watch your video. Maybe you want them to be excited about your new product and have to consider a teaser with a 30-second music piece to get them excited? That’s part of the whole thing. Whether you are hoping to achieve warm and fuzzy sensations or you want your viewers to be on the verge of laughing, all these feelings can be evoked better with the right piece of music. It is the music, after all, that helps people deal with emotions, and why not evoke them?
If you are not sure where you can find music, our platform is the perfect place where you can start. You can browse our library by genre and emotion. Browsing for music by emotion is the most helpful feature you can expect from a royalty free music for videos platforms.
A pro tip
When browsing for songs, highlight a few, split your screen in two, play your video in one part and pause and then play the songs one by one. Play around with this, see which songs fit best and if these songs are suitable for the entire video or just small segments of it.
Song form vs. video form
Say you’ve heard this pop song on the radio, you remembered the refrain and a bit of the introduction/first verse. It grows on you, and you are starting to think that this might be the perfect song for your video.
Well, we hate to break this to you, but there is a pretty good chance that this song probably won’t exactly jive with your video’s narrative structure. To explain this, let’s talk about form for a second.
Most of the songs we hear on the radio (pop, rock, hip-hop, etc) have a pretty standard structure that consists of the same parts repeated in the same order — verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. Sometimes the 1st verse is doubled, sometimes there’s a pre-chorus after the 1st verse, sometimes the last chorus is doubled, and sometimes nobody even bothered to compose a suitable bridge but you get the idea…
What we are trying to say is that your video transitions simply won’t feel natural with the song’s transitions as it is. This is why you shouldn’t be afraid to loop selected sections of the song to make it fit better in the flow of your video. When it comes to background music, you are allowed to loop and repeat music more than you think. Feel free to cut wherever feels natural.
Actually, this is not just good practice. You should know that when it comes to music and filmmaking, there is a lot more required than simply hitting that download button and using the song as a background.
Now, let’s talk about copyright. If you like a certain song, contacting the artist might just not be enough. Contacting that musician’s label is what you should aim for, and the easiest way to check out musical labels is to use sites like Amazon. However, keep in mind that reaching out to artists and their label is not enough, either. There is no guarantee that they will agree to your terms. Some of them may be willing to do it for free, some will not and some will not be interested in any amount of money…
To save yourself such a headache, it is time for you to start thinking in perspective. What is the point of spending hours of trying to reach out to musicians you hear every day and then spending hours of cutting that piece of music to fit your video content? Why waste valuable resources when there is a place where you can find tons of royalty free music for videos that will save you both time and money?
That’s right, we at Soundstripe, definitely have what you are not even looking for yet. And we’ll have it in the future. Every month, you get 200+ new tracks from a variety of composers writing music in different genres, moods, rhythm, etc… Browse our platform today and produce the emotional videos you work so hard to create!
