Free Music Archive

Free Music Archive is closer to a public library than a stock service. Originally run by WFMU radio, the platform was acquired by Tribe of Noise in 2019 — the same musician-centric music-for-business platform that runs a separate paid catalogue with 34,000+ independent artists across 190 countries.

FMA continues alongside Tribe of Noise PRO (a paid licensing service at roughly €45 per song), serving as the free Creative Commons-licensed and public-domain side of the operation. Tens of millions of online visitors browse the FMA catalogue each month.

The licensing varies meaningfully track-by-track: CC BY requires attribution, CC BY-NC restricts to non-commercial use only, CC BY-SA forces share-alike on your derivative work, CC0 is public domain. You have to read carefully — using a CC BY-NC track in a monetized podcast violates the license.

The full Kevin MacLeod catalogue is hosted here too, which alone makes the site worth bookmarking. Where it shines is for podcasters comfortable with license diligence who want genuinely indie-sounding music for free.

Where it falls short is search relevance, lack of curation, and the per-track license reading burden — for a podcast scoring 30 episodes a season, the time cost of license verification adds up. Best fit for projects with limited cue needs and creators who value not sounding like every other show using Epidemic.