Where to Find Public Domain Audio You Can Legally Broadcast

The Internet Archive, Musopen, LibriVox and the netlabel collections — with one large caveat: a "public domain" search filter is not a licence check. We learned that the hard way while assembling a broadcast catalogue, and it is the single most common way people end up streaming something they shouldn't.

We verified 1,212 tracks across 65 hours for our own always-on channels. Every one was checked by opening its page and reading the licence string. A meaningful number of candidates failed.

What's the Trap?

Filters conflate "free" with "unconditional."

Free Music Archive's public-domain filter surfaces CC0 tracks alongside CC-BY and CC-BY-SA. Those last two are Creative Commons licences that require attribution. They are free to use — but not free of obligations. Streaming a CC-BY track without crediting the artist by name is a licence violation, not a technicality.

For a radio stream this matters more than for a blog post. There is often nowhere to put a credit, no one reading it, and no practical way to attribute a track that plays at 3am to an audience of nine.

So we set one rule:

A track only goes on the air if its licence asks nothing of us at all.

Which Licences Are Actually Safe for Broadcast?

That last row catches people constantly. "Royalty-free" usually means you paid once instead of per-play — it is a pricing model, not a licence status, and it frequently excludes broadcast rights.

Where Should You Actually Look?

Ranked by how reliable we found them:

1. Musopen — classical recordings released deliberately into the public domain. Our classical channel is built on it. Highest signal-to-noise of anything we tried.
2. LibriVox — public-domain audiobooks read by volunteers. LibriVox deliberately chose public domain over Creative Commons specifically to avoid attribution obligations, which makes it unusually clean for broadcast. Note their own caveat: recordings are public domain in the USA, and copyright varies by country.
3. Internet Archive netlabel collections — genuinely mixed. Many CC0 gems, plenty of CC-BY. Check every item.
4. Internet Archive old-time radio — 1940s–50s serials, mostly public domain by age. Our old-time radio channel comes from here. "Mostly by age" is not a licence, though — verify per item.
5. Free Music Archive — usable, but treat the public-domain filter as a starting point, never as the answer.

How Do You Verify a Track Properly?

Four steps, and there is no shortcut:

1. Open the actual item page. Not the search result, not the filter — the page for that specific recording.
2. Read the licence string verbatim. "CC0 1.0 Universal" and "CC BY 4.0" look similar in a list and are legally very different.
3. Record where you read it. We store a verified_via URL for every item, so any claim can be re-checked later without re-doing the work.
4. Re-check performances separately from compositions. A public-domain composition can have a copyrighted recording. Beethoven is public domain; the 2019 orchestra playing him is not.

Step four is the subtle one. We rejected several promising candidates for exactly this reason — the composer died centuries ago, but the performers hold rights in their recording.

What Does a Verified Catalogue Look Like?

Ours, as a concrete example:

Every item carries attribution_required: false. Five are CC0, two use the legacy CC public-domain declaration, one uses the Public Domain Mark. Nothing on the air asks anything of us.

The rejects are as informative as the accepts. We keep a list of candidates that did not clear the bar, with the reason — mostly "not yet verified; commonly CC-BY."

Does This Mean You Need Zero Licences?

For public domain and CC0 audio, yes — no SoundExchange fee, no PRO fee, nothing.

That is the same exemption that makes talk radio free to run. If your station is speech plus verified public-domain music, your recurring licensing cost is $0, against roughly $1,500–1,700/year for a station playing commercial music. The full breakdown is in how to start a talk radio station without licensing fees.

The Honest Limitation

Public domain audio is not a substitute for a music library. It skews old, the recording quality is uneven, and you will not find current releases — that is the definition of the category.

What it is good for is exactly what we use it for: filling the gaps, so a listener arriving between shows hears something rather than silence. Given that the median listener gives up after 13 seconds, that gap-filling is worth more than its production values suggest.

Sources: Musopen · LibriVox public domain policy · Creative Commons CC0 · Internet Archive