StrikeFree Music may have the answer to YouTube copyright woes
All you need is three copyright strikes on your account and YouTube disables your monetisation. StrikeFree Music aims to offer artificially generated copyright-free tunes so that you don’t have to worry about it ever again.
StrikeFree Music
Music copyright within YouTube is a very murky business for content creators. We are all well aware of the obvious things you shouldn’t do but it tends to be the background music, the accidental clips and bits and pieces that could trigger a copyright strike against your account. Three strikes and you lose that all-important stream of revenue. YouTube does offer some royalty-free music but it can be a bit dull and everyone will be using it. Unless you’re going to write your own (that’s a good idea!) then finding music you can use without fear of a copyright strike can be hard work and expensive.
So StrikeFree Music has a bunch of tracks you can use right? Yes, and no. The StrikeFree Music website uses algorithms to generate new music every time you load the page. The idea of the algorithm is that no one could possibly have the same piece of music no matter how many times the page is refreshed. It’s always changing, always churning out something different. And it can be a bit “different”. You should go and check it out.
It’s designed to be fast and thoughtless. Go to the website and download the mp3 of whatever it conjures up for you – job done! For a free account you can download up to 5 tracks a week. Or if you want to go unlimited then it’s $8.99 a month. This also has an effect on the complexity and variation of instruments. With a free account it is limited to use up to 4 instruments to generate the beat, typically a couple of percussion tracks and a couple of instruments. And these instruments remain the same all week. With the unlimited account there are unlimited variations that can be generated using thousands of instruments.
You don’t have to accept what it throws at you. There are sliders you can move to influence the way the tracks are formed, how choppy it is, stuttering amount, tempo and so on. You also have some control over the pattern, volume and pitch of the tracks within the beat. It’s a bit like a mini step-sequencer. It’s not awesome to use but it does give you the opportunity to have some creative input. Apparently former Korg synth legend Tatsuya Takahashi was involved in designing the sampler module behind it.
At a stretch, there’s some potential here for idea generation.
Anyway, go and try it out! The beats are on the glitchy side and the drum patterns can often seem like something made by a three-year-old. But with a few refreshes and tweaks it does come up with something passable that you can imagine sitting behind someone demonstrating something on YouTube. Or it might drive you completely mad.
More information
- StrikeFree Music website.
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