Music

Public Domain prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, etc. from the NYPL collections.

 

Searches Flickr using visual search. 
Limit your search to "free to use" or "free to use and modify."

Searches Flickr. 
Limit your search to "Creative Commons" licensing

Many images in this very large collection are in the public domain. 
Make sure to check the copyright information before using an image in a non-permitted way.

From the site: 
"Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone... Everyone is allowed to copy, use and modify any files here freely as long as they follow the terms specified by the author; this often means crediting the source and author(s) appropriately and releasing copies/improvements under the same freedom to others. The license conditions of each individual media file can be found on their description page."

Great resource for historical images and art. 
From the site: 
"You are free to use these images for non-profit educational purposes, but we ask that you give credit to the copyright holders who retain rights to the images. These works are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License."

Images on this site are licensed by the photographer for academic use.

Make sure to check the rights associated with each photo to ensure it is in the public domain.

Public domain, user-submitted content.

Public Domain scores - free to download. *Be careful, some scores are not public domain in the U.S. make sure to check the rights first before using scores from this site. 
From the site: 
"The ultimate goal of the IMSLP is to gather all public domain music scores, in addition to the music scores of all contemporary composers (or their estates) who wish to release them to the public free of charge."

From the site: 
"Here you will find free choral/vocal scores, texts, translations, and other useful information"

Offers public domain classical and folk sheet music.

80,000 Free audio recordings from the British library. Recordings include world music, classical music, interviews, nature sounds, and more.

From the site: 
"All sounds in the Opsound pool are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license... or are placed in the public domain (the license information for each song can be found under the song link)."

Over 400,000 tracks of music with Creative Commons licenses (free to use for non-commercial purposes). The site also offers licensing for commercial uses.

Free music for audio-visual projects. 
From the site: 
"All music in this online collection created by Jason Shaw. Released under Creative Commons License 3.0. You are free to use the music (even for commercial purposes) as long as you provide a link to this website from yours OR credit us with, "music by audionautix.com""

A library of Creative Commons music.
From the site: 
"The Free Music Archive is an interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads directed by WFMU, the most renowned freeform radio station in America."

Explore all of the audio collections hosted by the Internet Archive. 
From the site: 
"This library contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Many of these audios and MP3s are available for free download."

From the site: 
"This audio archive is an online public library of live recordings available for royalty-free, no-cost public downloads. We only host material by trade-friendly artists: those who like the idea of noncommercial distribution of some or all of their live material."

Also part of the Internet Archive, this collection contains thousands of audio files with Creative Commons licensing.

Tracks by professional composer Kevin MacLeod. Browse by "genre" and "feel" through this library of royalty-free, Creative Commons licensed music.

From the site: 
"Freesound aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, ... released under Creative Commons licenses that allow their reuse."

This is a library of both free and royalty-free tracks of sound effects.

Browse and search videos on Vimeo with Creative Commons licensing.

Our World contains text, video, graphics, photography licensed by the United Nations University under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Once you enter a search on YouTube, click the "Filter" dropdown menu and choose "Creative Commons" under Feature.

From the site: 
"Rick Prelinger and The Internet Archive hereby offer public domain films from Prelinger Archives to all for free downloading and reuse.
You are warmly encouraged to download, use and reproduce these films in whole or in part, in any medium or market throughout the world. You are also warmly encouraged to share, exchange, redistribute, transfer and copy these films, and especially encouraged to do so for free."