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. Our old-time radio channel comes from here, and this is the source that needs the most care. See the section below on why "old enough" is the wrong test for a recording.
5. Free Music Archive — usable, but treat the public-domain filter as a starting point, never as the answer.

Why "Old Enough" Is the Wrong Test for a Recording

This is the mistake we came closest to making, and it is worth its own section because the intuition everyone has is wrong in a specific, checkable way.

For written works the rule of thumb roughly holds: published long enough ago, public domain. For sound recordings it does not, because recordings only entered the federal system in 2018 with the Music Modernization Act. The Classics Protection and Access Act then set a schedule that is far longer than most people assume:

Read the second row against the shelf of 1940s serials. A recording first published in 1945 is protected until 2045 on age alone. "It's from the forties" is not a licence — it is roughly the middle of a century-long term.

So why is so much old-time radio genuinely free to use? Not age — non-renewal. Works published in the US before 1964 required a renewal filing in their 28th year, and a great many broadcast programmes were never renewed, which drops them into the public domain regardless of the schedule above. That is a per-programme fact you look up, not a property of the decade.

The practical consequence: for anything from this era, the question is never "how old is it" but "what specifically happened to this recording's copyright". The Copyright Office's Schedules of Pre-1972 Sound Recordings is searchable, and rights holders file there precisely so the answer is checkable rather than assumed.

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.

Frequently Asked Questions About Public Domain Audio

Is "no copyright information found" the same as public domain?

No, and treating it that way is the most common way people get this wrong. An absent claim is missing information, not a grant — plenty of protected recordings sit online with no metadata attached, and the rights holder's silence today says nothing about their position if your stream gets an audience. Public domain is a positive status you can point at: an explicit CC0 or Public Domain Mark declaration, an expiry you can work out from the Classics Protection and Access Act schedule, or a non-renewal you looked up. If you cannot name which of those applies, you have not verified it.

Can I trust the uploader's label on Archive.org?

Treat it as a claim by a stranger, because that is what it is. Archive.org hosts what people upload and shows the licence the uploader selected — it does not adjudicate whether they had the right to select it. The netlabel and old-time radio collections are genuinely mixed for exactly this reason. The item page is where you read the licence string, and for anything pre-1972 the uploader's label is not a substitute for checking what actually happened to that recording's copyright.

It's public domain in the US. Can I stream it worldwide?

Not automatically. Copyright is territorial and the terms differ, so a recording that is free in the United States can still be protected where your listener is. LibriVox says so plainly in its own policy: its recordings are public domain in the USA, and status varies by country. A stream is available everywhere by default, which means the safest position is either audio that is clear in the territories you actually reach, or an acceptance that you are exposed outside the US. There is no version of this where the American answer settles the question globally.

What actually happens if I get it wrong?

Usually a takedown before anything else — a notice to your host, the stream or the archive pulled, and a strike on the account if the platform keeps count. That is survivable. What makes it expensive is doing it at scale or after being told: an unverified catalogue running unattended for months is a different conversation from one track pulled the week it went up. This is why recording where you read each licence matters more than it seems at the time — the cost of being wrong is mostly the cost of not being able to show what you checked.

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: U.S. Copyright Office — Classics Protection and Access Act · Music Modernization Act overview · Musopen · LibriVox public domain policy · Creative Commons CC0 · Internet Archive