When you’re looking for good background music for your TV production, advert or online video such as a YouTube video, it’s often easy to get bogged down with too many choices. Here are 5 top tips on filtering down the options to find the perfect background music so you can choose between 3 tracks instead of 300!

A quick note on choosing the best music for your video

We’re assuming you’ve gone through our Top Tips on how to Choose the Best Music for your Video and have a list of tracks you think would work for your audience and fits your video. If you haven’t done so, then that’s the first step as we need some tracks to work with.

Try to pay special attention to your audience’s needs and what they respond to as, after all, your video is meant to engage them! If you’re unsure what they’re interested in, look at popular videos created by your competitors and use that as a guide. If you’ve made a few videos already then look at the engagement levels (like watch time on YouTube’s analytics) to see how your videos fare against each other.

As a caveat, this isn’t a fail-safe way of measuring how well the music works as there are other factors (like the content of your video) that influences analytics. But the better the engagement, the more likely it is you’ve chosen the right music!

1. Download the previews

It may sound obvious, but download previews of the music and place the tracks underneath your video. This is by far the quickest way to discard tracks that don’t work as you’ll be able to see if the music has the right tone for your video and it doesn’t cost you a penny to do so!

2. Background music with dialogue

When choosing background music to go with dialogue-heavy productions, it is best to either choose a track that sits subtly in the background or use volume curves so that the music doesn’t interfere with the voice over or interview dialogue. The second option is harder to do as it involves mixing things properly, but both techniques can lead to excellent results.

For example, when selecting music for a business explainer video with lots of speaking in it, something like this:

Buy this track

Would be better suited than something like this which has a lot of energy and movement in it:

Buy this track

However, if this was a product promo video with some text overlays and little dialogue and you’re trying to get your audience excited about the product, then something like Dance Club Anthem would be a better fit.

3. Speedy Gonzales

Look at the rhythm or tempo of the track. This is similar to the example above where busy tracks can get in the way of dialogue, but we’re focusing on the speed of the track. Some tracks are just too fast for the visuals they are placed against, so filter out tracks that are clearly too fast or slow for your video.

4. Length is everything

Or so they say… Is there a version of the track that lasts as long as you need it to to fill your video? You might want to use the length of a track as a way to further filter down the tracks you have to just the ones you want. However, bear in mind that while there are multiple versions in most of the tracks you’ll find on Instrumental Background Music, you can always request that a new 30s / 60s / loop version of the track from us and we’ll create it for you for free. Just contact us if you find a track that you love, but it doesn’t have the 30s / 60s / loop version you need. That brings us on to one of the most useful ways of filtering down your tracks:

5. How editable is the track?

If you’re going to be editing your video to the music, then this is less of a concern as you would be using the track as a guide for your edits. However, if you’re editing the music to your video, then you’ll want a track that is easy to edit and has a beginning and an end that works with your video.

Let’s look at a great example of a track called The Happy Life that is highly editable (and is also one of our bestsellers!):

Buy this track

Why is this track so popular? Because, other than being a incredibly uplifting track, it is fantastically versatile when it comes to editing it to picture or with voice overs / podcasts etc. I know this because I’ve edited it to picture for many clients over the years and you can literally end it at almost any point by trimming its length and then adding the ending. Don’t believe me? Compare these three tracks for the same client and notice how it ends nicely in each of them at different points:

Ok, so I hope that’s helped some of you out with trimming down and choosing a track (or various tracks) for your production. Remember, if you love a track you’ve found on our site, but you need a 60s version which isn’t available, just let us know and we’ll get you sorted.

Cheers,

Cato

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