This guide brings together information about Open Access Resources and Open Educational Resources. It aims to make Open Access resources easier to find and use for study, teaching and research.
If you are searching for music to use in a video, you need to use music that is not licensed under a No Derivatives Works licence. This means that the musician doesn't want you to change, transform, or make a derivative work using their music. Under Creative Commons licences, synching the music to images amounts to transforming the music, so you can't legally use a song under CC ND / CC No Derivative Works licence in your video.
Creative Commons have put together a page with more information on using Creative Commons licensed music to make your own videos: https://creativecommons.org/about/program-areas/arts-culture/arts-culture-resources/legalmusicforvideos/
Soundcloud is used by a broad range of amateur and professional artists, societies, and broadcasters. SoundCloud tracks can be downloaded, and also shared and embedded within other webpages and platforms such as Twitter. It also offers the full suite of Creative Commons and Public Domain licensing options.
To find reusable music and sounds on Soundcloud, enter your search term, and then in the results page click to search 'Tracks' and then use the below filter options to select how you would like to be able to reuse the music, e.g. 'To modify commercially' or 'To use commercially'.
There is even a Soundcloud account dedicated to providing Royalty Free music and audio loops: https://soundcloud.com/royalty-free-audio-loops
Europeana.eu is a broad collection of digitised Museum, Gallery, Library, and Archival media from all across Europe.
You can filter searches on Europeana.eu by 'Type of Media' in order to select for 'Sound' . Then in order to search for reusable public domain or open licensed content, click on the filter ‘Can I use it?’ and then select 'Yes' or 'Yes, with conditions'. When you click and go to the page for a resource it will include the licensing and re-use information and also provide a handy cut and paste attribution you can use to correctly reference and attribute the resource.
Europeana also offers the ability to filter by institution, so you can search for University of Edinburgh content that has been openly licensed here too.
Wikimedia operates on a copyleft principle, meaning that the work continues to be open and available for re-use, so the majority of media, images, video, sound files are in the Public Domain, CC0, or CC BY-SA licensed. You can choose to search for specific media types, audio file types, recording specifics, and more.
You can download the royalty-free music tracks provided here free of charge to be used in private as well as in commercial video and podcasts. The prerequisite for the royalty-free music is that you include the copyright notice in your project and website.
Bensound.com also has a great range of royalty free music available for download and reuse. Once again the terms of reuse include ensuring that a credit/attribution notice is included in your project and website.
