As you might have heard by now, YouTube has begun to mute videos containing ‘unauthorized’ music or audio. What does ‘unauthorized’ mean? We’ll leave that for the lawyers to decide, but it probably has something to do with negotiating permissions for the right to use music in advance from rights holders.

Instead of dealing with the suits, why not consider using Creative Commons music in your next YouTube video? Here’s a ccMixter playlist of 100 Attribution licensed music tracks that you can download and use freely so long as you give attribution to the original creator. YouTube has even been so kind as to include these tracks inside their AudioSwap feature, thereby enabling you to automatically add a soundtrack to your video even after it has been uploaded to YouTube.