Sponsored ads on Facebook and Instagram demand legally licensed music that is preferably royalty free and free of copyright infringement by your brand.
In this article, I would like to discuss about your options as a marketer for using legal and safe copyright clear music on your social advertising campaigns.
Are you planning to make an amazing video ad that will leave your audience astonished? Are you looking for affordable background music to use in Facebook and Instagram ads? Would you like to harness the power of music in your video ads?
If yes, you have landed at the right place!
| Table of contents
Why Music is Important for Facebook and Instagram Advertising?
6 Ways Music Enhances the Differential Character of Your Sponsored Ads
Your Inspiration for Background Music for Instagram Ads
5 Legit Ways of Getting Background Music for Sponsored Ads
Conclusion
Videos are increasingly getting popular throughout the world whereas people are becoming addicted to social media channels like Facebook and Instagram. Currently, every fourth ad on Instagram is a video while the accuracy of targeting the audiences on Facebook is about 90%.
These advancements mean gold for advertisers. They can utilize the powerful combo of visuals and music to reach the maximum percentage of the right pool of audience.
Why Music is Important for Facebook and Instagram Advertising?
“60% of Instagram stories are watched with the sound on”- Brandwatch.com.
If we take notice of this, we can deduce that music is one of the most divergent factors for video viewers. But to bring this inference into use, we need to crack this thing.
To start off, let’s revisit the typical consumer psyche. Let me ask you: Of all the video ads you’ve viewed so far, which was the most evocative?
Whichever it was, it would have some catchy background music or song in its script. And till now, whenever this ad is played, the music at once triggers in your mind all those fogged memories associated with it. Your mind starts straying back to the good old days. Here is a big take away for advertisers:
The nostalgia of the music is so powerful that the user finds herself going after the product without much cognitive thought.
Fast forward to today, you’ll still see many ads that evoke the more or less same intensity of feelings in you. These ads embed directly in your subconscious.
They might be comedic, or extremely intelligently portrayed, or the core message might be entirely unique and evoking an emotional torrent, but, for most cases, the main reason is music.
Music makes or breaks the perception of a brand on psychic levels. There is not a single reason why music is so important in advertising, especially for Facebook and Instagram ads.
6 Ways Music Enhances the Differential Character of Your Sponsored Ads
If we analyze the philosophy behind music’s influence in campaigning, the reason boils down to 6 core elements.
You need to understand all of them to sketch the promotional role of music in your social media ads.
1. Viewer Biases Neutralizing
People have innate biases against different lyrical compositions. Music helps overcome such biases in a rather subtle way.
It’s a great tool for desensitization. This way, an ad, despite being vulnerable to the skepticism of people, can reach the subconscious of the maximum of the consumers. In other words, music becomes the major driving element of the ad.
2. Flow & Structure
Music helps in the continuity of video ads. It can emphasize emotional moments, add a bit of drama, sensationalize things, provoke feelings, and permeate a narrative more aggressively.
Plus, it’s a soft mediator between the possibly discordant images in your videos. Music creates the aura of characters-positive and negative, in the ad through melodies, harmonizing, etc.
3. Strengthens the Brand Authority
In advertising, establishing, and then strengthening the brand authority means to enhance the credibility of a brand.
Relatable music can seamlessly double fold the authority of your brand through a promising video ad. It also acts as a bridge between the commodity and the visuals of your ad.
4. Amusement & Entertainment
The role of entertainment can never be underestimated. Music is overwhelmingly handy when the visuals of your ad are not peculiar to the product type (which is unavoidable in many niches), and you rely on the entertainment factor for attention-grabbing.
Then, an entertaining ad gets more shares on social media. Given this importance of music in social ads, it’s like salt in food without which the food is just sullen.
5. Reminiscent Effect
The most profound ability of an ad that advertisers seek is to leave a long-lasting impression on the users.
Research confirms that music has lingering properties. Catchy songs can wander in your memory for decades.
Using evocative music in ads is the most rhetorical technique of enhancing product-recall by increasing its memorability. Plus, when the music and images fuse together, the resulting rush of aesthetics is even more sentimental.
6. Adds Personalized Touch
Different music genres mean different roles for different niches and audience groups. There are many factors that distinguish them from one another.
To make your ads hyper-relevant to the pool of targeted people, the last and most effective tool is music. The mission is to ace the emotions and moods of the audience.
You can do that by combining various contents of music, different tones, genres, rhythms, pitches, and time-changes to cast a material spell over them.
Your Inspiration for Background Music for Instagram Ads
Lastly, you need to learn how to choose the best music for social media video ads. Well, it solely depends on the type of video and how you feel when certain music plays in the background of your ad.
However, for promotions like the following, go for dramatic background music capable of quickly evoking the emotions.
This consummate background music is so cool that every product in the video looks premium.
But, I would urge you to watch it once with sound off. Not only that you would feel prompted to close it but also the impact of visuals won’t be the same as before. The brand’s impression will be different this time. Same products won’t appear that aesthetic now.
This is the power of music that brands realize well and leverage to capture your emotional realms. Check out some more short video cuts on our YouTube playlist “Tell Your Story With Music” Here are some short videos:
Here the music is key to get the required attention level and allowing visuals to explain the plot effectively.
5 Legit Ways of Getting Background Music for Sponsored Ads
Soundtracks by Popular Artists
Famous artists and celebrities offer huge appeal to the young demography and add more colors to your video ads. So using popular songs by such artists in your Facebook and Instagram ads might be the best choice to bring quick sales.
But they tend to demand thousands of dollars for their services, and most advertisers can’t afford this much cost. Plus, this option is too expensive particularly for Instagram ads that are usually meant to achieve short-term objectives.
Free, Ready to Use Music
Many websites are offering free, instantly ready to use music for any commercial ad. Simply download the license-free soundtracks and include them in your video ads.
But the downsides here are really hefty.
First off, with free music, you don’t get a lot of choices to pick from. The available options are either too outdated or substandard to be used in modern ads. Maybe you would appreciate such music in some local casino’s ad back in the 80s but they are not good for today’s fashion and tech ads.
Then, you never know for how long a certain soundtrack will stay license-free. In case the license renewing terms become hard, your whole project will ruin.
Plus you don’t know if the music you are considering is clean or not. So if you happen to be using music illegally out of your innocence, your videos might get blocked.
License Free Songs
This is renowned music that is temporarily set license-free for commercial uses.
The purpose behind keeping these soundtracks free to use is to lure people into embedding them into their projects so that the owners can impose licensing on them later when the projects start enjoying success.
So, the risk factor is huge here as well. The licensed music that you can use with credits also falls under this category. This honeymoon period is also likely to end right when your project starts having a good time. The owner may suddenly ask you to get a license or stop using his music. So if you are sincere with your brand, you want to invest intelligently. Avoid this option!
Licensing
After composing a song, the owner gets its copyrights. Then, she can designate who can use her music and how- License.
Licensing means you can use someone’s music according to fixed rules negotiated between you and the owner. The type of license pertinent to music for Facebook and Instagram ads is a Synchronization License.
Advertisers will negotiate directly and get the synchronization license from the copyright holder. However, in many cases where the song under consideration is widely popular, the artist himself gives the final approval. Sometimes, the financial terms are also negotiated with the artist or his agent.
There is another case. Some owners give licenses of their music to royalty-free music libraries. In this case, you’ll negotiate directly with the music library.
If you get this license, you will have the legal authority to reproduce the purchased music into something else, such as the soundtrack of a business ad or a TV show.
Licensing is not recommended for organizations looking to use the music over a long period of time. Brands with ambitions to keep the music consistent throughout their coming projects should also refrain from licensing.
Many organizations use licensing as a way to acquire music for their social media advertisements but a license is useful only for certain periods and, usually with a lot of restrictions on its use. They are not for a lifetime, so you have to renew them every time they expire. This is why licensing doesn’t suit organizations that need to establish a consistent outlook of their brands.
It suits best the people with short-term goals i.e. concert performers who can capitalize on their investments in one go. If their license doesn’t renew, or the renewal terms don’t attract them, they can easily consider other options.
But for businesses and brands, we have seen quite often that after clinching a handsome license deal for first-time use, renewal becomes too costly for them.
When their videos start getting popular and the background music begins to be recognized as part of their DNA, the owner tries to bargain with them for the maximum price. And, if they don’t pay the demanded price, they can’t use the music anymore.
So, this uncertainty is a huge risk for your business as you can easily imagine the consequences from here. So, better stay away from any of the above-mentioned options including Licensing!
The best way out should be to buy music that you can use for a lifetime. It doesn’t matter if you have to pay a bit high for the first time. If you can find a good soundtrack, this will still be an affordable deal on a broader spectrum.
How can you legally use copyrighted music?
You can use chunks of music or whole work that is available for public use. Copyrighted music doesn’t remain strictly copyrighted after a certain period of time. It becomes a public property after say 10 or more years, etc. You can use then use it.
But the downside is, this music will most probably be out of fashion and need to be reproduced in all its aspects. Using it without any changes won’t help you present a unique identity of your brand.
Nevertheless, you can take help from the free online music library of Facebook. But again, it doesn’t offer much variety. Plus, picking up music from here would kill the uniqueness of your projects.
Can you be penalized if you don’t use a license? Or if you use copyrighted music in Facebook ads?
Unless the elements of music you are using in your projects are not significantly large, you can use copyrighted music in Facebook Ads.
But this insignificant portion is not more than a few seconds of music, and of course, it doesn’t suffice your needs.
Plus, there are some regions where Facebook doesn’t have music deals in place so this general rule of thumb doesn’t apply there. That means, if you use copyrighted music for free in your video ads, it won’t be able to reach certain regions of the world.
Royalty Free Music
The word “Free” in “Royalty Free Music” doesn’t mean this music is free of cost. Instead, it’s free of royalty.
That is, you don’t have to pay each time you use this music. Instead, you pay only once to get its using rights.
To elucidate this thing, let’s first understand what is Rights Managed Music – opposite to Royalty Free Music.
In Rights Managed Music, the purchaser pays royalties (money) to the owner according to the two factors.
1. Estimated number of people exposed to the music
2. The number of times the song is played.
So, advertisers have to pay the royalty company every time the copyrighted music is played in their videos. This becomes a huge total.
But with Royalty Free Music, the cost equation is quite simple and I would say a rather intelligent solution. Simply put, Royalty Free Music is a type of license for lifetime use. Pay once and enjoy for as long as you want.
Then, Royalty Free music comes with all the necessary rights an advertiser would need for music for his video ads. You can synchronize this music easily and use it as many times as you like in your videos.
To acquire Royalty Free music, all you have to do is pay a unique price. It doesn’t matter whether you use it for one month or ten years OR ten visitors play the music or 10 million, your cost doesn’t increase.
Thousands of Royalty Free tracks are available in the market that would suit all your advertising music needs. Even there are families of music which you can buy at just one go and include different yet look-alike music tracks in a series of videos.
Plus, you can get rights to its multi-platform use by paying an extra amount so that you can promote your brand with peace of mind.
So, to conclude this chapter on choices, I would say that all the free sources of music are either not good or they pose more restrictions than the value they provide so it’s a zero-sum game.
Free music is not always completely free. There are hidden aspects to such things i.e. few seconds of free music doesn’t suffice the needs. Then, outsourcing music to famous artists costs a top dollar.
So the best recourse here is Royalty Free Music.
Over to you
The inclusion of music, no matter what type, will enhance the impact of your social media video ads. From establishing your brand’s authority to penetrating the message into the depths of consumer minds, music has a critical part to play.
However, make sure you pick the music that is perfectly in accordance with the video type and business niche and match it with the pulse of the video’s images. Then, most of the brands have a limited budget to spend on background music for video ads.
They can look to Royalty Free music as one of the best solutions to this challenge. Variegated music libraries like Foximusic offer a vast range of Royalty Free music genres and soundtracks to complement your ads in nearly any niche.
Here at Foximusic, we produce our music in-house and the music is always hand-picked by the owners. We hold 100% of all copyrights so you can be sure no third party copyright holder is involved with your purchase.
If you want to know more about Royalty Free music for Facebook & Instagram ads, don’t hesitate to ping us in the mailbox. We will be pleased to help you.
