What Music Can You Legally Use in a Book Trailer?

Legal music for a book trailer usually comes from one of four places. You can license a royalty-free library track, use a Creative Commons track cleared for commercial use, find a recording old enough to be out of copyright, or pay a composer to write a score. Using a commercial release needs two licenses, one for the song and one for the recording, however short the clip.

One scope note before the detail. The copyright rules below are United States rules. That is where most of the published guidance sits, and where the Copyright Office publishes its dates. If you are outside the US, the structure of the problem is the same and the dates are not. Check your own country’s position before relying on a year quoted here. This article is general information rather than legal advice. If a claim is disputed or real money is involved, talk to a lawyer who handles copyright.

Why Does Every Song Have Two Separate Copyrights?

A commercially released song in copyright carries two of them, and both have to be cleared before the music goes into a video. The first is the composition copyright. It covers the melody and the lyrics, and the songwriter or their music publisher usually holds it. The second is the master recording copyright. It covers the particular audio file you are listening to, and the record label usually owns it. One band’s live version and another band’s cover of the same song are different recordings, with different owners.

Putting music in timed relation with moving pictures is called synchronization, or sync for short. Clearing a song for sync means clearing both copyrights. A synchronization license, from the publisher, covers the composition. A master use license, from the label, covers the recording. These are two agreements, negotiated separately, often with parties who have never spoken to each other.

That split is why you cannot buy a song on a download store and drop it into your trailer. Buying a song buys you the right to listen to it. It buys no right to attach the recording to pictures. Every decision about legal music for a book trailer comes back to this, so it is worth getting straight early. Our guide to ideal book trailer length and aspect ratio by platform covers the technical specs for the visual side.

What Does Royalty-Free Music Actually Mean?

Royalty-free music is not necessarily free music. The phrase describes the payment structure rather than the price. You pay once, or you pay a subscription, and you then owe nothing further each time the video is played. Some libraries do offer a free tier alongside the paid ones. What makes the model useful is that the library has already dealt with the publisher and the label. One purchase covers the song and the recording together. For most self-published authors that is a practical route to legal music for a book trailer.

Several libraries serve video creators. Soundstripe, Artlist and Epidemic Sound sell monthly or annual subscriptions. Musicbed, PremiumBeat and Triple Scoop Music offer per-track licensing alongside subscriptions. Each publishes its own tiers, and those change. Read the current pricing page rather than a figure quoted elsewhere, including here.

Checking the Scope of a Library License

Price is the simple part to check. What decides whether a license is any use to you is its scope, and scope varies by tier within a single library. PremiumBeat is a useful worked example, because it labels the difference plainly. Its cheapest subscription tier is marked on the pricing page as personal use only. The tier above it covers commercial web and social projects. A book trailer is not personal use. It promotes a book for sale, which makes it commercial content, and it will run in more than one place.

So check two things before you pay. Confirm the tier you are buying covers commercial use. Then confirm it covers everywhere the trailer will appear. That means your own website, your social accounts, a video platform, and anywhere a retailer or a blogger might embed it. Read the license terms themselves rather than the summary on the pricing page. The summary is marketing copy; the terms are the agreement.

Which Creative Commons Licenses Work for a Book Trailer?

Creative Commons is a non-profit that publishes a set of ready-made copyright licenses. A creator attaches one to their work, and anyone may then use the work on the terms that license sets. The licenses are not all alike, and for video the differences matter more than for almost any other use. Two of them suit a book trailer: CC0 and CC BY. The others carry conditions that either rule a track out for this purpose or follow your finished trailer around afterwards.

CC0 is the simplest. The creator waives their rights, so you may use the track commercially and no credit is required. CC BY is nearly as simple. You may use the track commercially provided you credit the creator. For a trailer that means a line in the description or the end credits. Name the track, the creator and the license, and link to the track page. The track page itself usually gives the wording it wants.

Why ShareAlike Follows Your Trailer Around

CC BY-SA is the one most articles get wrong, and the reason is worth following. ShareAlike requires that anything you build on the material is released under the same license. Under copyright law, building on a work means making an adaptation. For music in video, Creative Commons does not leave that to argument. Its own FAQ says that synching music in timed relation with a moving image is always considered an adaptation, whether or not the law where you are would call it one. So a ShareAlike track means a ShareAlike trailer. Your footage, your cover art and your voiceover would all go out under a license letting anyone reuse and adapt them, commercially included. That is a real decision about your own material, and for most authors it is a reason to pick a different track.

The Two Designations That Rule a Track Out

Two designations rule a track out for a trailer, though both are perfectly usable for other things. NC (NonCommercial) bars use for commercial advantage, which a video promoting a book for sale plainly is. ND (NoDerivatives) forbids adaptations. Since Creative Commons counts sync as an adaptation in every case, no ND track can go into a video at all. Creative Commons says as much on its own legal music for videos page. Free Music Archive and ccMixter both host CC-licensed tracks. Both carry a mixture of licenses, NonCommercial ones included, so check the license stated on the individual track page every time.

Can You Use Public Domain Music in a Book Trailer?

Public domain music is music whose copyright has run out, so nobody owns it and nobody has to license it. You can use it in a trailer, with one caveat that catches people out. It is the two-copyright split again: the song and the recording expire on different clocks.

The song comes first. The Copyright Office states that all works published in the United States before January 1, 1931, are in the public domain. That is a 95-year rule, so the date moves forward by one year every January. Check the current figure rather than trusting a year quoted in an article, this one included.

When Does the Recording Itself Clear?

The recording runs later, and the gap surprises people. The Music Modernization Act of 2018 brought old recordings into federal copyright. Under it, a recording made before 1972 gets 95 years from first publication plus an extra transition period. That extra period is why a recording does not clear in the same year as the song on it. The Copyright Office sets the rule out in its Music Modernization Act FAQ. For recordings first published between 1923 and 1946, the transition period adds five years, for an effective 100-year term. So recordings published in 1925 or earlier are in the public domain as of 2026, and later ones clear one year at a time. Recordings from the 1950s and 1960s stay protected far longer, in some cases until 2067.

In practice this means you can use a Beethoven symphony freely as a composition, and still not use a modern orchestra’s recording of it. To avoid licensing anything, you need a recording that is itself out of copyright, or one the performers have released under a permissive license. Musopen commissions and hosts recordings of public domain works, and marks the license on each track with an icon. Its own FAQ says it cannot guarantee that music uploaded by users is in fact in the public domain. Read the license on the track rather than assuming the site clears everything. Verify the song and the recording separately, every time. Our glossary of book publishing terms covers the licensing vocabulary that comes up along the way.

Can You Use the Music Built Into TikTok or Instagram?

The music libraries built into TikTok and Instagram are licensed for personal posting, not for promoting a product. Both companies say so in their own help pages. TikTok states that businesses cannot use the general music library for commercial usage, and points them to its separate Commercial Music Library instead. Instagram says the music in its main library is intended for personal, non-commercial use. It adds that certain business accounts and post types have no access to it. Meta, which owns Instagram, runs a separate library called the Meta Sound Collection for commercial content.

Both of those commercial libraries carry a limit that matters more to an author than the rule above. It is the same limit in each case. The license is good only inside the company that granted it. TikTok’s Commercial Music Library terms say commercial uses outside TikTok are not permitted. Meta’s terms restrict its audio to content distributed on Meta’s own services. A track cleared for Instagram therefore does not clear for a video platform Meta does not own. A book trailer rarely stays in one place. It goes onto a video platform, onto your website, into a newsletter, and to anyone who asks for a copy. A track from either library cannot travel with it. For one trailer you can use everywhere, license the music from a source that is not tied to a single company.

How Does YouTube Content ID Affect Book Trailers?

Content ID is YouTube’s automatic matching system. Rights holders supply reference files of the audio and video they own, and YouTube checks uploads against that database. Music nobody has registered will not match anything. When a trailer does match, the rights holder is notified and chooses what happens. They can block the video, run advertising against it, or simply track its viewing figures. Running advertising is the usual outcome. Google’s Copyright Transparency Report records that in 2025, rights holders chose to monetize over 90% of all Content ID claims. Monetizing means taking the advertising revenue rather than removing the video.

What a Claim Costs You, and What It Does Not

For an author that beats a takedown and is still not the outcome you want. The trailer stays up, but it carries advertising you did not choose and earns you nothing. That undercuts the professional impression the trailer exists to create. A claim is also not the same as a copyright strike. A strike is the penalty that accumulates against a channel and can eventually close it. YouTube’s help page on copyright claims says a claimed video does not give your channel a strike, and that claims usually do not affect the account. Disputing a claim you have no license for is different. The rights holder can respond by asking for the video to be removed, and a valid removal request does bring a strike.

The way to avoid the whole sequence is to license music that comes with Content ID clearance. Libraries differ in what they offer, so check the one you are buying from. Soundstripe, for example, documents the tools it gives licensees for resolving Content ID claims, including proof-of-license files and YouTube clearance codes. Whatever your library provides, keep your license and the confirmation email. A dispute rests on being able to show what you bought. YouTube’s page on disputing a Content ID claim sets the clock out plainly. From the day you file the dispute, the claimant has 30 days to respond, and the claim expires if they do not. If they reject the dispute and you appeal, they have 7 days to answer the appeal.

When Should You License a Commercial Song Instead?

Licensing a song you already know, by an artist the reader might recognise, is the fifth route and much the hardest. It is worth considering in one situation. The song is tied so closely to the book that no library track stands in for it, and the budget can absorb the clearance. Otherwise the arithmetic goes the other way, because you are buying two separate licenses and a wait of weeks.

Tracing the Publisher and the Label

The process starts with finding the rights holders. For the song, search the performing rights organizations, the bodies that collect royalties on songwriters’ behalf and keep public records of who publishes what. In the United States they are ASCAP’s ACE Repertory, BMI’s Songview and SESAC’s repertory search. Other countries have their own, such as PRS in the UK and APRA AMCOS in Australia. For the recording, the label is named on the release itself and on the retailer’s listing. You then write to both asking for a license. Set out how you will use the music, which platforms it will run on, which countries, and for how long.

What it costs is the part nobody can tell you in advance. Sync has no statutory rate: no law sets the price and no schedule publishes it. The Copyright Office’s own music licensing charts list sync rates for both the recording and the composition as freely negotiated. Each deal is private. Figures quoted in articles are industry folklore, repeated between blogs without an origin, so treat any range you read as a rumor. Ask for a quote for your actual use.

Commissioning a Composer Instead

Commissioning a composer is the remaining route, and it is the one most authors overlook. You get music written for your book and nobody else’s, usually for less than a commercial clearance. It also matches nothing in a rights database. One trap comes with it. Paying someone to write music does not automatically make you the owner of it. In the United States, a commissioned musical work is not work for hire by default, so the composer keeps the copyright unless a written agreement says otherwise. Agree in writing what you are buying before the work starts. Be specific about whether you are buying the copyright outright or a license to use the music in particular ways.

Legal music for a book trailer is a two-copyright problem with a short list of answers. A royalty-free library, a CC0 or CC BY track, a genuinely public domain recording, a commissioned score, or a full commercial clearance if the song is worth the trouble. Whichever you pick, the checks are the same. Confirm the license covers commercial use. Confirm it covers every platform the trailer will run on. Then keep the paperwork where you can find it if a claim arrives.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use a song in my book trailer if I only use 10 seconds of it?

There is no legal 10-second or 30-second rule for music in video. Any use of a commercial recording needs both licenses cleared, one for the song and one for the recording, whatever the clip length. The rule-of-thumb myth is behind a great many copyright claims and takedowns.

Do I need a music license if my book trailer is not monetized?

A book trailer promotes a product for sale, so it is commercial content whether or not the video itself earns anything. NonCommercial Creative Commons licenses do not cover it, and neither do the consumer music libraries built into social apps, which are licensed for personal posting.

What happens if I get a Content ID claim on my book trailer?

Content ID is YouTube’s automatic music-matching system. When it flags a trailer, the rights holder can run ads on the video, block it in some countries, or track its statistics. YouTube says a claim does not give your channel a strike. If you hold a valid license you can dispute the claim, and the claimant then has 30 days to answer. Disputing a claim you have no license for is a different matter, because a removal request that follows does bring a strike.

Are platform licenses on TikTok and Instagram enough for book trailers?

TikTok and Instagram license their main music libraries for personal posting, and both run separate commercial libraries for business use. Those commercial libraries are limited to the platform that runs them, so a track from either one cannot travel with the trailer to YouTube, to your website, or into a newsletter.

How much does royalty-free music cost for a book trailer?

Music libraries sell either a monthly or annual subscription or a per-track license. Prices differ between libraries and change over time, so check the current pricing page of the one you are considering. Check which tier carries commercial rights as well, because the cheapest tier often does not.