An insanely well priced lower-tier subscription. For $135 a year, you get unlimited access the library, and you can use any song however you want in any video project, from personal to broadcast. It's easily the best bargain on this list.
An flexible higher tier subscription at $245 per year that comes with the goodies listed below.
The ability to download and edit the stems on individual tracks. This means you can essentially go in and create a custom mix of the various elements in a song, or eliminate pieces of it (ie. vocals, drums, or guitar) altogether. For control freaks like me, this is AWESOME.
Sound effects! There are tons of sound effect companies on the market, just like there are music licensing companies. But having a good selection of both under one subscription is just plain convenient and cost effective.
Dead simple licensing. You never have to worry about paying extra for using these tunes in different types of media. It’s all covered by the subscription fee.
Right now, the selection of music is still relatively small, coming in around 4000 tracks. Like all of the others, it's consistently growing, but if you create a lot of content, you will likely run into the "edges" of their library the more you dig through it.
There's a lot of great music on Soundstripe, and no bad music. But there's a good deal of "middle of the road" music that feels pretty average. Maybe it's just because I've listened to so much stock music in my day, and I'm really hard to impress. Either way, if quality and uniqueness are your main priorities, you're better off with Musicbed or Marmoset or Music Vine.
Also, I feel like every time I work through Soundstripe's library, I hear way too much of what I like to call "cheerful hipster music." You know, overly upbeat folk with lots of whistling and clapping and such. I get that style is popular, but every time I hear it, I roll my eyes. That's not really something wrong with Soundstripe, per se. I'm just cynical.
I was introduced to recently, and though I haven't licensed anything from them yet, I like what I see. Their library is HUGE, and the music on their site is damn good.
Like Musicbed, they seem to be primarily aimed at single track licensing, but they do offer a few different tiered subscriptions for YouTubers. The tiers are based on how many video plays your channel gets in a month. And if you’re just starting out on YouTube, it’s a great bargain.
The other cool differentiator I found is that they pay artists up front for their songs, instead of paying based on licensing performance. If you're a musician reading this article, this little tidbit might be enough to push you into the Epidemic camp. Plus they can get your music to Spotify and other streaming platforms, so they’re kind of like an for musicians. Download link:Get Access to the Best Music, Movies, and Books
The good:Super affordable music subscriptions for up and coming YouTubers. At $15 a month for their lowest tier, it's a steal for someone who's just getting started.
World class music, including lots of stuff outside the mainstream. They pay up front for each song, so they're incentivized to curate only the best stuff. From my browsing, this model seems to work well, because I couldn't find any mediocre music.A HUGE library. I don't know how many songs are on Epidemic, but they've been around since 2009, and have clearly been prolific about adding new tunes. Even the deepest searches turned up dozens or hundreds of results.They also have a pretty sizable sound effects library. So for some of you, Epidemic could be a "one stop shop" for your post production audio assets.
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