How to have "Commercial Use" Pro music and sound effects for promote your comic? - GC Forums
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How to have "Commercial Use" Pro music and sound effects for promote your comic?
Hello fellow creators, we wanted to bring some cool content to Globalcomix that hasn't been talked about much around here, something that is relevant to the community.
So, as we use Epidemic Sound for our outreach work, we decided to talk a little about them here.
Music is important for almost every creative task. Whether it’s making YouTube videos or commercial movies, music can increase the quality and engagement of any content and it also gives you the creative freedom to deliver a message in the best way possible.
So if you’re looking for professional music and sound effects content for commercial use, we’ve got you covered. In this blog, we’ll be talking about Epidemic Sound, which is a service that has one of the biggest libraries of music and sound effects. It is quite cost-effective too.
What is Epidemic Sound?
Launched back in 2009, Epidemic Sound specializes in royalty-free music and sound effects for creatives and commercial use. The company works on a subscription-based model and provides you with over 100k tracks along with some of the top-notch sound effects which are increasing every day. This allows you to create content while making sure that the music quality is top-notch and related to the video.
Epidemic Sound also has the rights to all the music and sound effects that are on its platform. Hence, half of the revenue goes to the composers as well. 
Why use Epidemic Sound?
When we talk about the creative industry, almost everyone needs commercial music and sound effects to make their videos look more professional and fun as well. From influencers, podcasters, YouTubers, and filmmakers, to Tiktokers, there are no limits.
Hence, it makes sense to have copyright-free music along with sound effects at your disposal at any time of the day. This lets the creators create content while making sure that the music quality is not ignored. So let’s talk about how Epidemic Sound works.
How Does It Work?
Epidemic Sound is accessible right from your desktop browser and your mobile phone as well. Moreover, if you use Adobe Premiere Pro, you can easily download Epidemic Sound’s tracks using the built-in library which takes a lot of stress out.
Moreover, by connecting your social networks to Epidemic Sound, you can leverage their service in the smartest way possible and stream your live content with Epidemic Sounds. The linking feature makes it very easy for creators to enjoy the content while making sure that they won’t pay a huge amount of money on music and sound effects for their videos.
Features of Epidemic Sound
Epidemic Sound is quite similar to something like Spotify. The user experience is remarkable and the overall interface is easy to get used to. When we talk about features, the platform offers a lot of them and each of these features is for a specific type of person. So, let’s talk about it.
1. Genres
The platform offers you to select music and sound effects by choosing the genre of music that you’re interested in. This becomes quite helpful and important since knowing the genre will make you close the gap between what you want and what you get. The platform offers so many genres like Electronica, Dance, Hip Hop, Rock, and a lot more.
2. Moods
Epidemic Sound has also thought about user emotions and decided to launch a feature that will let you choose music and sound effects solely based on the mood your video is in. So if it’s a sad video, you can just browse through the Sad mood genre and pick the video to your liking.
3. Albums
By using the Albums feature, you can browse a wide variety of creators’ works and look at the albums. If you like a song, you can see if it was a single or part of an album. This makes you reach close to your type of music and sound effects and the overall vibe that you want to portray.
4. Sound Effects
Having cool sound effects in the background of your videos make the viewers more engaged and feel closer to your content. The library of sound effects in Epidemic Sound is vast and it incorporates some of the highest quality sounds that will make your audience love your videos. Pricing of Epidemic Sound
Is Epidemic Sound Worth It For Commercial Use?
All in all, Epidemic Sound saves you hours and money by recommending and providing you with the best possible music and sound effects of your choice. Once you try Epidemic Sound, you won’t be worrying about copyrights anymore. The company also offers a 30-day trial which you can use in order to test out the platform.
The in/habitants YouTube channel uses Epidemic Sounds and the majority of the videos have been made with Epidemic music and sound effects. YouTube can automatically detect Epidemic Sound music and sound effects and it works well without any problems at all.
We use it to promote our content in Tiktok, reels on Instagram and Toutube shorts, if wanna take a look:
https://www.youtube.com/c/inhabitantszone
Eh. I'm glad you support them so much. I've unfortunately not had a good experience with them.
If you pay the monthly subscription you can use their music, but if you -ever- cancel it for any reason, they will rapidly go after you. I've had this happen, and I've known numerous youtubers who've had this happen.
It said in their TOS that you can use music you downloaded while you had your sub even after you canceled said sub, but that only goes for -content- that you've uploaded during that time. So if you pay the sub, download a song, and post a video with that song, it's fine (though I have twice had them make a claim on my videos WHILE I was subbed). But if you have that song in your intro, or your content (I'm a game developer by trade, so think for example, a soundtrack for a start menu), and post any sort of content after your sub, they'll make a claim against you.
So basically, unless it's a one off and you only -use- the music during the sub (which is not cheap), you're screwed. It's a lot of money for a monthly sub that most people will have to pay for a long time just to reuse a song they essentially already paid to use.
To clarify (since this is probably confusing to read):
You are only licensed to use the music, regardless when you downloaded it, if you are subbed. If you cancel the sub, you can no longer use the music, even if you paid when you downloaded it. So you are stuck in a perpetual cycle of paying roughly $20 a month (since most people need the commercial license) from the get go. They do not clarify this in their TOS and it has screwed over a -lot- of people.
Also if you do use their music, you have to make sure to put in the blurb they want that credits and links to them. Lot of people don't seem to realize that. No biggie for me, I just know some people have had claims on them by not doing that.
Oh! Thanks for the detailed feedback, my experience with them so far has been great. We use it for our short comic promotion videos.
The first time we had to claim, but after I talked to them, they showed me how to leave an "automatic claim" if I pointed to the project's social networks, so I did it with Tik Tok and Youtube, and I didn't have any more problems.
But I actually bought the annual fee, so I don't know how it goes afterwards, and now I'm a little scared by their offensive posture, because we're preparing a game and we'd like to use some of their audio.
Good to know your experience to prepare me with a plan B, because it seems then that they are not so reliable.