Epidemic Sound gives a video creator unlimited access to a library of tens of thousands of licensed music tracks and sound effects, with copyright clearance built into the subscription rather than checked per download. For someone who’s had a video muted or a strike issued over a stray needle-drop, that removes the need to double-check a license before every single upload.
4.3/5 on G2 from 32 reviews See the reviews
What Epidemic Sound does
Epidemic Sound is a subscription library of royalty-free music and sound effects, with more than 40,000 tracks and roughly 90,000 sound effects spanning a wide range of genres and moods. The company holds direct licenses to its entire catalog, which it says lets subscribers publish content across any platform without the copyright concerns that come with sourcing music from scattered, unverified sources online. Beyond browsing and downloading full tracks, the platform supports filtering by mood and genre, and lets creators download individual stems from a track to remix or customize it for a specific edit. It’s aimed at video creators and content producers who need a reliable, recurring source of cleared music rather than licensing tracks one at a time from different sites.
What it saves you
Without a service like this, sourcing music for regular video content means either paying per track from a stock library, negotiating a license for a specific song, or risking a copyright claim by using something found online without proper clearance. Each of those has a cost beyond money: checking a license’s specific usage terms before every upload, or dealing with a video getting muted, demonetized, or hit with a claim after the fact because a track’s license didn’t actually cover the platform it was posted to. For a creator publishing regularly, several videos a week, say, that per-track licensing check adds up to real time spent reading fine print instead of editing the footage itself. Epidemic Sound’s subscription model removes that per-track decision entirely: anything in the library is cleared for use across platforms, so the licensing question gets answered once, at subscription level, instead of every time a new video goes out the door.
How it simplifies your setup
The main simplification is turning a per-track licensing decision into a single subscription decision. Instead of researching a track’s specific usage rights, checking whether a license covers the platform being published to, and keeping records in case a claim comes in later, everything in the Epidemic Sound catalog is pre-cleared under the same terms from the start. That also removes the need to juggle receipts or license certificates from several separate stock-music sites if a creator previously bought individual tracks from more than one source over time. Being able to download individual stems from a track removes another step too, instead of asking a separate audio editor to isolate a layer of a song, a creator can pull just the stem they need directly from the platform and remix it themselves.
Who Epidemic Sound is for
Epidemic Sound fits a video creator or content team publishing regularly enough that unlimited downloads under one license are worth more than paying per track, a weekly YouTube channel, a social media team producing daily clips, or a small production house scoring several projects a month. It’s a weaker fit for someone who needs just one or two tracks a year for an occasional project; a single per-track purchase elsewhere could cost less than an ongoing subscription. Some reviewers have also noted the search experience can be harder to navigate than expected and that pricing runs higher than certain competitors, which is worth weighing against how often the library actually gets used in practice.
The link below goes straight to the provider. We earn a commission if you sign up through it, at no extra cost to you.
Common questions
Is Epidemic Sound safe to use on YouTube without copyright strikes?
Epidemic Sound holds direct licenses to its full catalog, which the company says lets subscribers publish content across platforms, including YouTube, without the copyright issues that come from using unlicensed music. As with any licensed library, it’s worth confirming a subscription stays active on any video that continues generating views, since licensing terms are typically tied to an active account.
How many tracks does Epidemic Sound have?
Epidemic Sound’s library includes more than 40,000 music tracks and roughly 90,000 sound effects, spanning a broad range of genres and moods, according to the company. The catalog is updated regularly with new additions rather than staying fixed at that size over time. New tracks and sound effects are added on an ongoing basis, so the library a subscriber has access to today is larger than it was even a few months earlier.
Can you download individual stems from a track?
Yes. Epidemic Sound lets subscribers download individual stems from many tracks, isolated instrument or vocal layers, so a creator can remix or adjust a track’s mix for a specific edit rather than using the full mixed version as-is. That’s useful for a video editor who wants to lower a track’s volume during dialogue or drop the drums for a quieter section, without needing separate audio-editing software to do it.