techcrunch.com

YouTube currently offers more than 150,000 audio tracks on its site that video producers can use as background music for their videos. Those tracks, however, can’t be downloaded or remixed, which makes it hard to use them in creative ways. For users who want to do a bit more with their background music, however, YouTube today is expanding this library with a selection of 150 new royalty-tracks. The music in this new YouTube Audio Library can be downloaded, remixed and used for free forever.

The tracks, which are available as 320 Kbps MP3 files, YouTube says, can be used for “any creative purpose” – even outside of YouTube. The team says it searched “far and wide” for musicians and producers to work with on this project. It’s also soliciting submissions for additional musicians who would like to add their music to the collection.

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Overall, the quality of the music is a step up from most of the 150,000 other YouTube audio tracks. There’s a decent mix of genres ranging from ambient and classical to pop and R&B, and songs are also classified by moods (angry, dark, happy, romantic etc.).

With 150 songs, this is obviously still a very small library, but it does give its users more options to use high-quality music for their videos without running into the kind of copyright issues that have long plagued the service.