Music : Sound Recordings

Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. From the reuser’s perspective, the presence of a Creative Commons license on a copyrighted work answers the question, “What can I do with this work?”

Learn more about music communities that help support and share music.

Many musicians choose to release their songs under Creative Commons licenses, which give you the legal right to do things like use their music in your videos.

IMSLP provides access to public domain scores and has recently added recordings covered by Creative Commons licenses.

Sound recordings here are available for free download under Creative Commons Licenses.

The Internet Archive contains audio files and you can browse several sub-collections. Many contain historical recordings.

This collection hosts complete, freely downloadable/streamable, often Creative Commons-licensed catalogs of 'virtual record labels'.

Sound recordings available from this site, but they could still be under copyright or are under a Creative Commons license. You need to create a free account to access the recordings.

The Library of Congress presents the National Jukebox, which makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and other contributing libraries and archives.

Tracks in this site are covered by CC licenses. Search function may not be the greatest, but they have a large library of music to browse.