Buzzcast
Buzzcast is a roundtable discussion about podcasting from the people at Buzzsprout. We'll cover current events and news, podcast strategy, tools we are using, and dip into the Customer Support mailbag to test our podcasting knowledge. If you want to stay up-to-date on what's working in podcasting, Buzzcast is the show for you.
Buzzcast
Free Pro-Level Music For Your Podcast In 2025
In this episode, we explore the best places to find pro-level, royalty-free music for your podcast in 2025—including a surprising archive from Grammy-nominated artist Moby, who just dropped 500+ tracks for creators to use. We’ll also share some of our favorite free and low-cost music libraries!
Music Resources:
- Buzzsprout Blog: Free Music For Podcasts
- Mobygratis
- Blue Dot Sessions
- Breakmaster Cylinder
- Free Music Archive
- Incompetech
- Pixabay Music
- YouTube Audio Library
The music in this episode is by Breakmaster Cylinder (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Check out Riverside's video, "I Asked Podcast Experts How to Grow Your Audience — Here’s What They Said!".
Contact Buzzcast
- Send us a text message
- Tweet us at @buzzcastpodcast, @albanbrooke, @kfinn, and @JordanPods
Thanks for listening and Keep Podcasting!
Hey guys.
Alban:Hey Jordan
Kevin:Hey happy Friday.
Jordan:Happy Friday. This week I saw on social media that Moby had posted a video where he announced a relaunch of his like music archive. He calls it Mobyg ratis.
Kevin:Moby, the electronic music guy.
Jordan:Yeah, singer, songwriter, grammy nominated artist, like MTV award winner, I'm sure. Bald guy Famous bald guy Famous bald guy.
Kevin:All right, confession. I know who Moby is.
Jordan:Yeah.
Kevin:I don't think I've ever listened to any Moby music, oh no.
Jordan:You have, you've listened have?
Kevin:I yeah, because he's super famous.
Alban:Like everybody knows who he is, but I don't know that, like I've never gone on to a music app and searched for movie, this is a good way to get our show banned, if to actually play some for you. But he had an album in the 90s that I think every single track on it got licensed for a tv show or a movie at some point oh wow and so it's uh, I think it's called play, but then, like, everything on it got picked up and it was on all sorts of tv shows, so you'd recognize it.
Kevin:You're hearing moby stuff.
Alban:I'm hearing <oby stuff probably all the time and not even realizing it's yeah right and I think that's the case for a lot of music that we'd you'd be like I have no idea who this person is. Until you listen you're like oh, that's that really famous song from like the commercial.
Kevin:Okay so is he like the composer, for like the Raiders March from, like Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was a movie that was a movie what? He's making famous music scores from movies.
Alban:He wasn't scoring it. I'm just kidding. Oh man, it's different if you get picked up in a Zach Braff. You know movie, it's like oh man, it's different if you get picked up in a Zach Braff movie, and then it's like oh okay, so now you're in a movie versus what's. John Williams is scoring music.
Kevin:I have no idea. So if you need background music for somebody who's solving a tough math equation, Moby might be somebody you go to.
Alban:Beautiful mind soundtrack. Beautiful mind soundtrack, all right. So what did Moby do? Jordan, sorry, we've derailed this.
Jordan:Well, Moby dropped 500 free songs for creators on his website and he said that you know, he's just putting these out there for people to make stuff. He included like content creators, influencers, rappers, whatever and you can just get his music, remix it if you want and use it in your content. So I thought that was really cool, because podcasters are going to be in that content creator group.
Kevin:So basically a huge royalty free library of music. Yeah, that podcasters can now use. Do you need to do attribution or anything like that?
Jordan:Yeah, he asked you to just mention that the music was provided by Moby Gratis and he said you can even use the hashtag Moby Gratis if you're using it for social media. But yeah, it's 500 songs. He said that he's going to add 500 more in the future and then 500 after that, because he said he has I think he has like 1500 songs, just kind of like laying around his studio or something.
Kevin:But yeah, that's how he works. I'm just going to go. What are you doing today? I want to crank out 500 more.
Jordan:Seriously.
Kevin:Okay, that's good. I did click on the site when you dropped the link in. I clicked on it. Yeah, I noticed that in order to preview a track, I had to accept the license terms, and it says I'm going to read this verbatim off the website there are only two things you can't do with the music here Use it to advertise right wing politics or causes, oh. Or use it to promote meat, dairy or other animal products.
Jordan:So we can't use it on Buzzcast because we talked about the. What was it? The deer jerk here, whatever it was.
Kevin:Well, we weren't promoting, were we promoting it? I think I said I liked it. I don't know if that means I'm promoting it.
Jordan:I mean, isn't that promotion?
Alban:This is so all the crypto carnivore podcasts. You're out. Those are just totally not accepted. You're done.
Kevin:We don't advertise right wing politics or causes. That's safe. But it does make me feel like we are. It does feel like this is like censorship a little bit.
Jordan:Yeah.
Kevin:Right Now are. It does feel like this is like censorship a little bit. Yeah, right now I think I'm cool with it because it's like it's his stuff, right, yeah, so he could say like I think I like the idea that if it's your stuff you can say, hey, you can use it and you can't. Right, you can, you can't. But there have been some, I don't know, like famous cases of you know, bakeries that refuse to create a cake for somebody because they don't like you know like refusal of service or whatever that's happening.
Jordan:Yeah, that's a cake shop.
Kevin:Yeah yeah, and so does this fall into that same category, Alban? Like legally, do you think, or do you think?
Alban:it's totally fine. No, I think he's just giving it away. I'd imagine there's probably I don't know, don't know there's also sometimes like is it legally defensible or is it just I'm throwing it out there and I'd rather not have my music used in like a Trump rally in the future. Yeah, I should have explained this more when I was describing Moby to you. Kevin Moby is an artist from the 90s who's got to be in his 60s. He's bald, but he also has Wait, wait. Why is that a big deal that he's bald? Because I'm just describing him. I'm bald, all right, I'm just describing. That's discrimination. But there is another thing you need to know about moby. Okay, he has giant tattoos down his arms that say animal rights.
Jordan:Okay, I think he's been vegan like his whole life he literally has a neck tattoo that says vegan in like big block letters yeah.
Alban:So him saying I'm just throwing this cool music out there, I want to get it as a gift to the world, but like the two animal rights arms are the ones that made it at my computer, like you don't get to use it for your commercial chicken plant or something yeah so I I think that's fair so there are two things that are very important to him.
Kevin:One is he loves like the protection of animals.
Kevin:Doesn't like the like using animals for food and dairy and that kind of stuff, get that and then they uh, I guess he doesn't like right wing political stuff that's important to him. I mean, I, like I said, I like the fact that it's your stuff. You say, especially if you're giving it out for free, like you should be able to put some guidelines around it. I don't know if it's legally defendable or not, who cares. I feel like it's a little bit of censorship, but it's like type of censorship that like I'm cool with. It's like somebody just saying, yeah, don't do this, like it's my stuff and here's things that yeah.
Jordan:And if you don't fall into those two camps, I mean, the music's really good.
Alban:Is it really?
Jordan:Oh, it's so good. Yeah, Pretty solid free music that you can use. So yeah, if you don't fall in those two camps and you don't care about that licensing agreement, then go for it.
Alban:Do we have any recommendations for the meat podcasts of the world?
Jordan:Yes, we do the right wing meat podcast. Right, the right wing meat podcast right.
Alban:I mean there's, there's a lot out there. We've done videos and we've written blog posts of this, but like pixabay and youtube audio library yeah jordan. I think you said you sent this over blue dot sessions yeah has some of their stuff, you can actually license it, if it's like for personal products, for free.
Jordan:Yeah, I was pulling some of the free music resources that we had for the show notes and then I noticed, yeah, Blue Dot Sessions, which has done music for 99% invisible in the daily. They have loads of Creative Commons music on their website and I'll link to that in the show notes as well, but that's really cool. And then I remember we talked about Breakmaster Cylinder, who does the music for Gimlet's Reply. All also has a ton of free music. So I love that there's all this high quality music coming in for content creators's just like free to use in your creative way and it helps you make your projects like just so cool.
Alban:I would say for blue dot sessions. I think if you use them for your podcast, it looks like you need to have kind of like the basic licensing, so you're getting really good music though. So I think this is a little bit of a nicer alternative for lots of people. I mean, it's why this American life and Spotify and Wall Street Journal and all sorts of people use it, because it's really good music and you can use it in your podcast, probably for pretty cheap.
Jordan:Yeah, and for my podcast. I mean, I have music licensing that is recurring for Epidemic Sound and Artlist and I've used Storyblocks, which I think has been renamed to something else. And then there's like Audio Jungle and that can get so expensive so fast, and there are really great free music archives. There is one specifically called Free Music Archive, but a lot of these are really hard to comb through and what I really love about seeing these new music archive and databases coming out is that they have it organized by like feeling or mood or instrument or beats or genre of music and just makes it so much easier to find the free music that you're looking for, because it used to be a nightmare to search for free music.
Kevin:Yeah, it makes me think of this point, jordan, is that my sensibilities and I'd like to hear your thoughts. But when we talk about music for podcasts, I think about it in terms of using music to enhance your podcast through storytelling. Are we building drama, or is there a big reveal, or is there something inquisitive or whatever's happening? If you're doing storytelling, or if you're interviewing somebody and they're telling a story or something, that's the right time to sort of use background music to enhance the mood. We're not talking about doing a DJ show yeah, a DJ show.
Kevin:We're not talking about doing a big intro theme song or a big ending theme song. I mean, ending theme songs are better than intro theme songs, but any theme song in general is typically not something that I'm super into. I know on a full Buzzcast episode we still have the what is it?
Jordan:Here we go yeah.
Kevin:That deal. It's what? Three seconds when you drop that in, yeah, like, and it's just kind of a transition piece for us in between, like our cold open segment and then getting into the topics of the day. But I do still stumble upon podcasts from time to time that anytime I click play on that podcast it's like 30 seconds of music. And I don't know about you guys, but I'm reaching for that like advanced fast forward button right away.
Alban:Well, one of the features I really like I think Pocket Cast has this. I know Overcast has it is by podcast you can set skip the beginning of this much of the show. Yeah, and there's a lot of shows. I'm like I don't know why they mix it so that music is too loud.
Alban:Oh yeah, I mean it's kind of embarrassing. Sometimes you're like, wow, it's 40 seconds of like intro. It's not even an ad, it's just like you know one song you liked one time and I throw it in the beginning every time and I'm like no one wants to hear this song again.
Jordan:I would point out that my dreamful intro is 21 seconds long.
Kevin:before I start talking Is it like setting the mood, though Right, I think, if you use it correctly, it's fine. It's a vibe shift, you're going to try to help people relax and get into a calm state.
Kevin:This was a big thing in YouTube videos. I think it's phasing out over the last year or two but, like five years ago, like any big YouTube channel that you went to to click on, they usually would hit you with a 15 or 20 second cold open Like here's what we're talking about today, we're about to dig in, here we go and then there's like some big title sequence created by some you know after effects guru, with a spinning logo, like 30 seconds of 3d art and loud music before you get into the content.
Kevin:Luckily that's starting to go away from YouTube and hopefully it's going away from podcasting as well.
Alban:I think, we really should try to focus more on. What's really good about algorithmic content sometimes is that you start seeing pretty quickly like some of these dumb trends that nobody liked, you kind of get filtered out. The really long song, the really big intro you see on TV all the time, the constant end cap and then recap surrounding commercials All that stuff got weeded out in YouTube because they realized like nobody liked this, nobody really wanted this, and now it's gone. Yeah.
Jordan:Yeah, all right. And speaking of YouTube, stephen Robles posted a video saying I asked podcast experts how to grow your audience, and right on the thumbnail photo is Albin.
Alban:Oh, look at that. Jordan sent this to me a few minutes ago and I did not know what I said, so I had to go watch it. Stephen and I met up at Podcast Movement Evolutions and I thought the advice on there actually is pretty good, but it's not going to be unique for anybody who listens to this show. The advice is you want to grow your show, you should do some marketing, and a lot of shows do zero marketing. And then the other is to do that marketing. You need to know who is your audience and what is the show about. And then where does that audience hang out? Because you need to be able to present them your show the right time, like where they already are. You can't just hope that magically they will find it. So maybe a little bit more boring, but I think still applicable advice produced video.
Jordan:It's a great watch. He has everything paced out perfectly and visually interesting. So, yeah, there's quite a few people on there that I think have good points about podcast marketing. So if you want to watch that, I will drop a link to that in the show notes as well. All right, and we're still looking for submissions for our last sound off question, asking you what is the strangest marketing tactic you've used on your podcast? That worked. So make sure to tap the Text the show link in the show notes and until next time, keep podcasting.
