Creative Commons licenses are a popular set of free and voluntary copyright licenses. With CC licenses, creators have the choice to give up certain exclusive rights normally associated with copyright, while retaining others. There are six different licenses that provide users with different levels of freedom. For more information about the different licenses and how they work, check out our Creative Commons landing page and the Creative Commons page on licenses.

Before you start

Creative Commons licenses are not for indicating that you don’t have the rights to distribute a particular piece of work. If you don’t have permission from the copyright holder, you shouldn’t upload that sound to SoundCloud under any license.

Select a Creative Commons License

When uploading a sound or set, select the license you want to release your work under. You can change the license in the sound settings (by clicking the pen icon above the waveform) at any time.

If you release all your sounds under a CC license, you might want to change your default license setting your “extra” settings. No matter how this setting is configured, you can still change the license on individual sounds.

Search for Creative Commons Licensed Sounds

We recently released advanced search features that let you select to search under CC parameters. Learn more about how to use advanced search in this blog post. Additionally, you can explore tracks licensed under CC licenses on our Creative Commons landing page.

Use Creative Commons Licensed Sounds

You can use sounds that you find on SoundCloud according to the terms provided in the license. All Creative Commons licenses require at least attribution, which means you must give credit to the original author. (A link to the track page on SoundCloud is probably smart, also.)

Sounds that are licensed with a Non-Commercial term means that they can only be used in a non-commercial setting; a No-Derivatives term means that you can't create any work that is based on or incorporates the original work; and the Share-Alike term means that you must release any work that uses the original under exactly the same license.

If you stick to the terms of the Creative Commons license, you do not have to ask for permission from the original creator—in fact, that's the whole point—but keep in mind that many creators are interested in seeing projects that use their work!

More Info

• For more information on sharing in general, please check out our basic sharing 101 that can be found in The Basics section of our 101's.