Music is powerful. It can turn your video from a bunch of images gathered together into an epic hero story. Or not. Considering the choice of music for your company video is therefore extremely important.
With YouTube’s Royalty Free Library, you can find music that suits your video. You can download and convert your choice of royalty free music from YouTube to mp4 or mp3. Music in mp3 format allows you to embed the music in your video to better capture the emotion of your audience.
YouTube Royalty Free Library: Music For Content Creators
How exactly does it work
‘Follow the Sun’ by Xavier Rudd, while cycling through the city on a warm spring day. Or ‘The Sound of Silence’ by Simon and Garfunkel at your grandmother’s funeral. Music is emotion. It reinforces an existing emotion or can even evoke a different feeling in you. That is precisely why it works so well in combination with images.
Music strengthens your feeling
Take the above examples. On that warm spring day you can see birds flying, the sun in the blue sky, crocuses poking through the grass and people enjoying the terrace. You feel happy. Xavier Rudd’s song reinforces that feeling, because the happy notes fit perfectly with what you see and experience. The same goes for the somber music of Simon and Garfunkel at your grandmother’s funeral.
A different experience
Yet it can also work the other way around: put on ‘Follow the Sun’ during your grandmother’s funeral, and you suddenly get a completely different experience. In the song you suddenly recognize a deeper, emotional layer, while your perception of that funeral may be slightly lighter because of that song.
Music in your corporate video
Music makes a big mark on your video. It therefore has several functions. According to the German composer and arranger Robin Hoffmann, music in film can have as many as seventeen functions. It can act as a commentator, accentuate movement, create an atmosphere, connect two scenes, refer to a time period and also create a contradiction.
Two clear functions of music in your video
In corporate videos, music often has two clear functions: creating atmosphere and connecting scenes. In a company video you want to show and hear a lot in a short period of time. Music is the ideal element to create the right atmosphere from the very first second. In addition, the music forms the cement that makes the video whole. Precisely because of the speed of the video and the amount of images, it can quickly feel like a mess. The same music underneath the entire video brings all those separate images together.
Do you use a voice-over or not?
Is there any talk in your video or not? A free tip: if you do use a voice-over or other speakers, it is important to adjust your music choice accordingly. Music is a bit subordinate in this setup. It then has even more of a ‘cement function’ than when there is no spoken text in your video. Is there no narration in your video? Then it’s a different story. Music then becomes a lot more important, because it has to take the viewer along in your story, as it were.
Now that you have an idea of the impact of music on your corporate video, you are ready to take the next step: choosing music that matches your corporate video.
