Moby’s site to support indie filmmakers with free downloadable tracks

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Generous fella that Moby. He has an excellent site called mobygratis.com. I will leave it to Moby to himself to explain it below…

hi,
i’ll keep this brief.
this portion of moby.com, ‘film music’, is for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short.
to use the site you log in(or on?) and are then given a password.
you can then listen to the available music and download whatever you want to use in your film or video or short.
the music is free as long as it’s being used in a non-commercial or non-profit film, video, or short.
if you want to use it in a commercial film or short then you can apply for an easy license, with any money that’s generated being given to the humane society.
i hope that you find what you’re looking for,
moby

There are some excellent tracks there. It really is well worth visiting, I have chosen a couple of tracks myself for some future work. It’s not new. It’s been around since 2007 but a lot of people don’t know about it, including me, so it’s worth publicising this. One thing to note though this is an approval process site, its not a free for all.

Thanks to Mark Linley for showing me this. Nice tip. Cheers!

36 comments

  6. Good old Moby!
    Free is the future of music in my opinion.
    Also I have written to Vimeo suggesting that:

    When you upload your own footage to vimeo, there should be a box you could tick that would let other users know that they can use your footage royalty free in any project they wish.
    Vimeo could become the worlds greatest royalty free stock footage library!

    Would love to use some Bloom footage in my own projects,
    I think you could pioneer a movement like this Phil.

  10. Excellent, thanks Philip for passing that along.

    I kind of wish film makers would come together to create a catalogue of quality content like this. I also believe strongly in supporting musicians, but it’s been made very difficult to obtain rights (especially for online use) to ‘popular’ music.

    I can’t believe a 3rd party company hasn’t made a site yet (perhaps it’s a testimony of how hard the record companies are to work with) where you can easily create an account and pay a small royalty fee to use a popular song.

    1. More like 2 years….but still very cool. Be warned this is not on demand there is an approval process. Nonetheless there is some extremely good music if you have the right sorta project that it will fit.

      JG

  17. Its a very cool idea and its extremely cool of moby to do it and its certainly a service i will use but it comes with a huge list of conditions that unfortunately are a pain for independent film makers. Also you can’t just download the song, you need to wait for permission to be granted which is a pain also. But having said that its a very cool service and its a shame more artists aren’t/can’t afford to be so giving. Good job moby.

  19. Hi Phil,

    Thanks for the reminder on this. I heard about this site and visited it a while back and then, for some obscure reason, forgot all about it! It really does have some very neat pieces of music, very moody and it is seriously cool of Moby to do this. So, thanks again and lovin’ your work, as always Phil.

    Adrian.

  20. Thank you very much for posting this; finding good soundtrack music is always a challenge and having music this good available will be a great help and an inspiration.

  23. I’ve tried this twice before and never got anything back from them on if I could use the music or not for what I was doing – maybe it’s changed now – that was about a year ago, but I gave up trying to use it after those two attempts

  24. This is a cool site but as Phil said it’s a process and a Moby person needs to approve the use of the song. I did it a year ago, received permission I think 3 weeks later. Definitely not something to do last minute. Ended up not using the track but some great music there.

    Only complaint I have is that it’s sorted like cloths in a washing machine. I’m going to catch some heat that its free and all, which is all and good. But some simple tags would make a tough process easier

  25. This has been around for a while. It’s cool in concept but clunky in execution. The tracks are lukewarm at best, they don’t have a signature moby feel, really they’re not unlike other professional loops you’d get for a few bucks from a stock site.

    I still think it’s awesome but I’ve found it hard to get as excited about “moby gratis” as I thought I’d be.

  27. I’ve had three songs from Moby for a personal documentary project. You just have to submit a project that is non profit. If George Lucas happens to watch your film, choke on his popcorn and wants to take your film to Hollywood you only have to inform Moby’s support team and they’ll make a sensible offer for the music rights. It’s very generous and kind of him to support independent film makers.

  30. It’s a great idea and I stumbled upon it about a month ago. Only problem is the serious delay on it.

    I requested mine three weeks ago for my non-profit production, and again one week ago, and no reply. I now have to find replacement music because I can’t wait any longer.

    Obviously, free is nice, but they claim to give replies within five days, which is not the case.

  31. Hi this site is great! But I have a question: how long to have a song accepted for a project? I asked for one more than 5 weeks ago and still pending. I mean this approach is great but still waiting for it becomes a little bit difficult to manage 😉

    anyway many thanks to Moby for this approach, I hope it will motivate other great artist.

    😉 Luca

  32. Hi, here´s my entry for the moby videocompetition run by genero.tv. The song “wait for me” inspired me to make this emotive video. I supported my father to care for his wife. She was diagnosed with cancer.

    With my new 5D i captured some Moments in camera.

    Please watch it and vote for me if you feel like it.

    http://genero.tv/watch-video/7714/

    lots of love
    hendrik

  33. Phil,

    You feature a lot of music in your videos from all over and you always promote the music. Is that all it takes or do you get permission. Some of us just want to make fan-made music videos – how do we do it? YouTube use to take them down, now it leaves them up with ads and the revenue going to the the copyright holder I imagine, so it appears as though it’s ok to do, and it appears to be a win-win for everyone. Any caveats?

    Cheers,

    Lance

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