It’s undeniable: music is pretty powerful. The right song can create a magical moment (and the wrong one can kill the mood in a millisecond). Whatever tone you’re trying to set, your soundtrack is critical.

When you’re uploading a video to YouTube, knowing where to search for the perfect song can be tricky. We do our best to provide creators with tools to enhance their content and to simplify this process, but we wanted to make it even easier to find great music for your videos.

That’s why we’re launching the the YouTube Audio Library today. Any YouTube creator now has access to more than 150 royalty-free instrumental tracks you can use for free, forever, for any creative purpose (not just YouTube videos). You’ll find a link to the library in your video manager and you can browse the tracks by mood, genre, instrument and duration. The tracks can be downloaded as 320 Kbps MP3 files.


Guitarist Oscar Rodriguez lays down a track for the YouTube Audio Library

As you can see, this project was a whole lot of fun. We searched far and wide for musicians to create tracks for us and ended up finding co-conspirators in multiple places: an acquaintance down in LA, music houses across the country and a well-known music producer in Brooklyn.  And it turns out the latter produced albums for Phish and Sean Lennon.  So, we’re basically rock stars now (or we felt like them for awhile).


We’d love to hear what you think so we can continue to improve the library’s content and browsing capabilities. And if you know any musicians who may be interested in contributing to the library, let us know.

Fred Beteille, Jason Toff & AJ Frank, recently watched "Ylvis - The Fox"