Monetize content safely by licensing music from Epidemic Sound in 2024
Learn more about how to monetize content safely by licensing music from Epidemic Sound.
Licensing music in 2024 can be expensive. A hassle. Complicated. The world is at your fingertips but nothing seems clear – something as simple as using music in your content can cause legal headaches.
If you use copyrighted music in content without the proper rights and licenses, the track’s rights owner can copyright claim the uploaded content. A copyright claim is a formal complaint that can have legal consequences.
When you receive a copyright claim on long-form YouTube content, for example, one of three things can happen to your video:
- Block: Blocks the content from being seen or heard
- Track: Allows the claimant to track viewer activity
- Monetize: Lets the claimant run adverts against the video and generate revenue
How to license music and protect your right to monetize content
If you want to monetize content safely, you need to make sure you either own the rights, or have a license, to use the music you've chosen.
Owning all of the necessary rights to a piece of music involves holding the rights to the master recording, composition, performance, and all of the underlying music. This essentially means you have to have written, recorded, and released it by yourself.
If you don't want or have the means to produce your own music, you can obtain a direct license to a track or music catalog. This way, you bypass all the complicated licensing agreements you might come across when dealing with different rights holders, labels, and legal teams.
With an Epidemic Sound subscription, your channels will be safelisted. Just let us know which channels you use to publish content, then you can use our catalog of more than 40,000 tracks to soundtrack and monetize your content.
How does a direct music license work?
To understand direct licensing, we need to understand what royalty-free music is. Royalty-free music is music that you can use in content without having to pay royalties to artists or rights holders every time it’s played. But royalty-free music companies aren’t always alone in owning the rights to the music in their catalogs, meaning you might still get copyright claims from other rights holders and lose the right to monetize your content when you publish it on digital platforms.
An Epidemic Sound subscription goes beyond royalty-free music – we own all of the rights to the tracks in our catalog, directly licensing them to our subscribers. This removes the headache of licensing and frees you up to do what you do best.
You can enjoy the safety of our license hand-in-hand with our massive catalog of 40,000 tracks, covering just about every genre you can think of. You’ll also gain unlimited access to our advanced search functions — finding the right sound’s never been easier.
You can use one account – be that a channel, profile, page, or RSS feed – per platform. That way, the content you publish featuring our tracks will be safelisted by us, as long as it's uploaded while you have an active subscription.
Even if your subscription has ended, content created and published within your active period will remain cleared forever.
However, there can be hiccups if you don’t follow these steps. Suppose you publish videos containing our music once your subscription has ended. In that case, we can't recognize you as a licensed user, and your content will be demonetized as a result.
In other words, it's about ensuring you have an active license for Epidemic Sound's music when publishing your content. Don’t have a subscription? Don’t worry. Signing up is easy. If you already have an Epidemic Sound account and want to use it on the go, get the mobile app below:
What happens if I use Epidemic Sound music after my subscription ends?
If someone uses our music without a license, we monetize it by running ads. This might sound scary, but don't worry. A claim from us doesn’t mean your content will be taken down, muted, or blocked. We’re just making a request for any ad revenue generated, so that we can keep paying our artists to create even more great music.
Before activating any copyright claim, we go through a detailed review process, in which we carefully investigate whether the supposedly unlicensed user does have a license or not. If they do, we naturally don't activate the claim.
Content creators use Epidemic Sound because it provides safe access to a high-quality catalog of worry-free music. Get in touch if you have any questions. Otherwise, get started with Epidemic Sound below.
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