How to choose the music for your video before you shoot, and what to do if you can't yet
Most advice on music for video is a list of websites. This is the criterion: how to pick a track by what it has to make people feel, by its shape and its pace, when to pick it, and how to plan the shoot when the song won't be chosen until the day before.
Search for how to choose music for a video and you get lists: ten websites with royalty-free tracks, five libraries by subscription. Useful, once you know what you are looking for. Nobody tells you how to know.
This guide is the criterion. What makes a track right for a video, how to hear it in thirty seconds, when to choose it, and the question the lists never answer: how do you plan a shoot when the song isn't chosen yet, and might not be until the day before?
Start from the feeling, not the genre
The people who do this for a living, directors, editors, the music supervisors who pick tracks for films, all begin in the same place: before they hear a single song, they write down what the video has to make people feel. Calm that turns into momentum. Quiet pride. A small city morning that ends in warmth.
Then they search by that, not by genre. Every music library has filters for mood; the genre filter is where you end up with a track that sounds right and feels wrong. If you haven't written the feeling down yet, the guide on the emotional arc is how.
Five things to listen for
Thirty seconds into a candidate, you can answer these.
- Does it move the way the video moves? A track has a shape: where it starts quiet, where it climbs, where it drops out, where it peaks. That shape has to match the arc you drew. A song that peaks at forty seconds is wrong for a video whose big moment is at the end, however good it sounds.
- Does it change clearly? You will cut the picture where the music changes, so the changes have to be clear: a new instrument, the drums dropping out, the chorus. A track that is one long even wash gives you nowhere to cut.
- Is the pace right for the pictures? Not fast music for fast cuts. Fast music over slow, still shots creates friction, and sometimes that friction is the point. But decide it, don't inherit it. Loosely: 60 to 80 beats per minute feels calm, 90 to 110 walks, 120 to 140 runs.
- Can you cut it? Almost nobody uses a track whole. It gets shortened, a section repeated, the intro trimmed. A song with a clean intro and a clear ending is far easier to shape than one that fades in and out.
- Does it leave room? If there is a voice in the video, the music is instrumental or it fights. And a track doesn't have to cover every second: the silence before the biggest moment is often the best thing in the video.
When to choose it
The trade is split, honestly.
Before the shoot. Many of the filmmakers whose travel work you have seen pick the track first and listen to it on location. The reason is practical: knowing where the music climbs tells you which shots need to move and which can hold, and how long each one has to last. The video is shot to fit the song.
In the edit. Others shoot first, look at the footage, find the clip that holds the feeling of the whole thing, and only then look for a track that matches it. It works when you can't control what you'll find, a trip, an event, a day you can't repeat.
Both are right. What never works is the third option, the one most videos actually follow: no decision, a track dropped in at the end, and footage that fights it.
Rights, the short version
Three things to know, and then go read the licence of whatever you pick.
- A song has two sets of rights: the composition and the recording. For a video you need permission for both. Libraries by subscription bundle them; a famous song does not, and the price is not for a small video.
- "Royalty-free" means you pay once, not that it is free or has no owner. "Creative Commons" means read the exact licence: most require credit, some ban commercial use.
- Where the video goes matters. YouTube detects music and can mute or block a video, or send the ad money to the rights holder; Instagram can mute a reel whose track isn't in its catalogue. The licence has to cover the place, not just the video.
What to do when the song can't be chosen yet
This is the case nobody writes about, and it is the most common one. The client hasn't decided. The licence isn't closed. You know the feeling of the video but not the track, and the shoot is on Saturday.
Plan it anyway, on a clock you draw yourself. Decide how long the video is. Draw how intense each part has to feel over that length. Cut it into its parts and decide the shots and the seconds for each, exactly as you would with a song, using the arc instead of the music to tell you where it climbs and where it breathes. The guide on the emotional curve walks through it.
Then shoot. When the song arrives, choose it by the five things above, with one more: it has to fit the shape you already drew. A track that climbs where your plan climbs will slip under the footage; one that doesn't will tell you so in thirty seconds, before you've cut anything. The parts and the shots you planned move onto its seconds, and what you filmed was filmed for the slot it is about to fill.
The same thing in PreFrame
With the song chosen, the track is the timeline: its waveform, its sections cut where the music changes, and every shot on its seconds inside its section. Without it, the emotional curve is the timeline, drawn over the length you decided, and the sections and shots sit on that instead.
When the song comes in later, it is added to the project you already planned: the sections and the shots keep their seconds, the curve is laid over the waveform, and anything that falls beyond the new length is kept aside rather than lost. The plan survives the choice. How the curve, the track and the lock between them work is explained in support.
