Artlist

Joe Clay | Aug 30, 2017

Artlist is awesome!

A couple of months ago I was watching an episode of Film Riot where they were talking about Artlist. It's an unlimited royalty-free music site. There's a ton of excellent stuff on there.

I paid for a subscription, and have been using it for a few months now and I dig it. And with a few projects a year you can pay off the subscription pretty easily—unlike a lot of the services out there—and there's not a lot of restrictions on use for video projects, and it even seems they allow podcasts. And even if you unsubscribe you don't lose your past licenses. About the only restriction on use has to do with hate content, so don't be racist—not just in your videos but always.

Referral program

This post isn't sponsored. It's my personal opinion. This post would have happened whether or not this program existed, but it's happening now because they just opened up a referral program last week—from what I can tell.

So if you use any of the links on this post to go to Artlist and you sign up for a subscription, we'll both get two months free, which is pretty rad. After ten referrals, you get a lifetime membership. I don't intend to cancel my subscription to Artlist, so that would definitely save me some money. So if you're considering this, and want to use my link it's win-win.

The competition

Before Artlist, I had been going along purchasing tracks individually, and I always hated it. Either the music was good and pricey—especially if you do TV for multiple markets—or you end up digging through cheaper sites to find good tracks that everyone else has already used.

So licensing through other sites means that if your budget doesn't allow it, you're kind of stuck with either junk music or stuff that's been everywhere. There are only so many indie ukulele tracks with hand claps, people. Sometimes you even find that great track and then find out that in the way you intend to use it, the licensing is 10x more expensive and the client doesn't have the budget.

Artlist makes that pretty easy. You just pick something and use it. Done. And since Artlist is still new and on the DL, you're less likely to run into music you've heard before, at least for now. But so far, I've found that there's also just a lot higher quality music on there. There's nothing I've passed over thinking, "who the hell would use that?"

I've found a lot of music that I just favorited because it didn't fit a project but I want to use it elsewhere. I need to cut more reels and work on more personal projects, because I've found a bunch of great tracks! The quality is closer to the higher priced sites, but the pricing competes with the lower priced, single-purchase sites, which is awesome.

Any downsides?

EDIT: When I made this statement, I was using Artlist on Safari. Safari is slow on Artlist. Chrome is nearly instant. Artlist on Chrome might even be faster than any other service I've ever used. Most of the time I could click anywhere in any song in search results and it would just play. So couple that with the amount of good tracks on Artlist, and it's quick to find music for any project.

Artlist's site is slow. It's not unbearable, but it's definitely noticeable going from track to track. However, on Artlist I tend to find a track that I like and that fits what I need a lot quicker. So for me, that offsets the slowness pretty handily. They also have curated items, and good categories. And their email blasts, if you choose to get them, spotlight new artists pretty frequently.

So if any of this sounds good to you, use my Artlist referral link to jump over there and get you some music!