If you film weddings for any length of time, you are inevitably going to run into a couple that has one specific song they want you to use in their video. Maybe it’s the song that was playing whenever they fell in love, or it’s their first dance song, and without fail that song is going to be a top 40 song, meaning it’s incredibly popular, it gets played on the radio constantly, and most importantly of all, it is absolutely not going to be sitting there waiting for you on a traditional music licensing site.
So in this post I’m going to share three lesser known sites you can use to actually license those very popular songs legally, so you can put them in your wedding films, make your couples happy, and save yourself a giant headache.
Also, for the sake of ethics, I want you to know that none of these sites have paid me or sponsored this in any way. They don’t even know I’m writing about them. I am an affiliate member for some of them though, so if you do sign up, I may get a kickback.
Site 1: Tracks Music
The first site I recommend you check out if you’re after top 40 songs is Tracks Music, and they have a truly massive selection of popular music from artists like Ed Sheeran, Dan + Shay, Bruno Mars, Charlie Puth, Rita Ora, Michael Bublé, and on and on. This is not a catalog of songs that sort of sound like the radio. This is the radio.
What makes them so useful is that they offer a very simple pay per use license, so if you have a couple insisting that oh my gosh, we really want you to use Perfect by Ed Sheeran, you can license it for only 79 bucks and drop it into their wedding film without ever worrying about it again. That’s a pretty great deal considering the alternative, which we’ll get to.
But there are a couple of caveats you need to know about before you get too excited. First, you cannot monetize your videos on YouTube if you use a song from Tracks Music. That is just not allowed, so if you’re in the YouTube Partner Program, you are not going to be making any ad money off that video.
Second, Tracks Music is really focused on licensing to videographers in the United States, and they really only want you using this music for weddings and other “life events,” as they call them, so birthday parties, quinceañeras, and anything else along those lines. On top of that, their license only covers you if you are based in the United States. So if you live in another country and you want one of these songs, unfortunately Tracks Music isn’t going to work for you.
Like I said though, if you have a couple that is demanding one of these songs and they’re paying you a lot of money to film their wedding, I think the price makes it worth it.
Site 2: Fyrfly
The next site I recommend is closely related to the first one, and it’s called Fyrfly. The reason it’s so closely related is that Fyrfly and Tracks Music are actually owned by the same company, but the difference is that where Tracks makes you pay per song, Fyrfly offers a subscription for $299 per year that lets you download unlimited music from them.
To be clear, not everything on Tracks Music is also available on Fyrfly with a subscription. But Fyrfly does have some great options in there, like The Afters and Dave Barnes to name a couple.
Here’s the part that makes this actually clever though. Because Tracks Music and Fyrfly are essentially the same company, whenever you sign up for a Fyrfly subscription, you also get a discount on anything you license over on Tracks. So instead of paying $79 per song on Tracks, a Fyrfly subscriber pays $39.
So here’s what I would do. As you’re looking for top 40 music, I’d check Tracks Music first and just license from them, especially if you do not find yourself using very popular music like this all that often. But if you commonly get couples asking for top 40 songs, then I’d look into signing up for Fyrfly and using that Tracks discount on top of it to save some money.
Site 3: Lickd
The last site I recommend has arguably the weirdest name of the three, and if you thought Fyrfly was weird, you haven’t seen anything yet, because this one is called Lickd. That’s L, I, C, K, D. I’m fairly sure the meaning is related to the musical term for a short series of notes and not to anything you do with your tongue, but regardless, it does make me a little uncomfortable to say the name out loud.
My feelings about the name aside, Lickd has a ton of top 40 tracks available to license, and they claim to have over a million of them. So if you’re looking for Imagine Dragons, Migos, Charlie Puth, or Papa Roach, dang, that one takes me back to high school, they’ve got it.
Now, the majority of Lickd’s marketing is aimed at YouTubers and influencers rather than wedding filmmakers, which might make you nervous, but they do have a helpful FAQ page that specifically says yes, you can use this music for wedding videos as well.
Where Lickd really gets different from the other two is the pricing. Unlike Tracks Music and Fyrfly, Lickd bases what you pay on how many YouTube views your videos typically get. To find out your price, you enter your YouTube channel info on their site, and they analyze the average views on the last 50 videos you’ve uploaded. If you’re getting less than 50,000 views on average per video, congratulations, you’re only going to pay $8 for one of these songs. If you’re a very popular wedding film YouTuber pulling hundreds of thousands of views per video, it of course gets more expensive.
One really nice plus though is that Lickd will let you monetize videos using music you license from them, so if you’re in the YouTube Partner Program and you want to make some extra money on the side, this is a great way to do it.
Which One To Use
And there you have it. If you need popular top 40 music for your wedding films and you don’t want to deal with the headache that usually comes from licensing popular music, Tracks Music, Fyrfly, and Lickd are the three places I would check.
Keep in mind that all of this is for the rare occasion where a couple absolutely insists on a specific radio song. For everything else, for the music you actually build your films around, you want a traditional licensing site, and I’ve put together a full rundown of the best music licensing sites for wedding films if you want to go deeper. The three I personally use and recommend are Soundstripe, where the coupon code “WHOISMATT” gets you 10% off a monthly or yearly subscription, Artlist, where that link gets you two extra months free, and Musicbed.
Free YouTube Tips For Wedding Filmmakers
Lastly, before you go, I have one more thing for you. If you film weddings and you use YouTube, which I’m going to assume you do considering you found this post, I put together a guide called YouTube Tips For Wedding Filmmakers. It’s completely free, and it walks you through practical things you can do to dramatically increase the views, the likes, and the bookings you get from couples on YouTube. You can download it for free right here.
If you want the footage in this one to look the way mine does, that’s my own color grading presets doing the work, and you can grab those at whoismatt.com/luts. My full list of filmmaking gear is over at kit.co, and if you want to go deeper on any of this, I have filmmaking courses as well.
Thanks so much for reading, and have a great day!