Broadcast Music, Inc. collects license fees from businesses that use music, which it distributes as royalties to songwriters, composers & music publishers. This is one of a couple of sites you can search to see if something is still under copyright.
This site is maintained by the Legislation Committee of the Music Library Association (MLA) as a resource for anyone interested in issues of copyright as they apply to the fields of music and music librarianship.
The Copyright Search Center provides a step-by-step guide to researching the copyright holder or publisher of a piece of music. It also provides forms for obtaining permission from the publisher to arrange a piece of music or make copies of out-of-print music.
CCLI was established in 1988 to provide churches with simple, affordable solutions to complex copyright issues. CCLI helps churches maintain their integrity and avoid costly lawsuits, while also giving churches the freedom to worship expressively and spontaneously.
Public Domain
Public domain music is music that has passed into the public domain, which makes it free and completely legal to download. Note: public domain and copyright laws are complicated. Read the fine print before downloading any music.
A non-profit focused on improving access and exposure to music by creating free resources and educational materials. We provide recordings, sheet music, and textbooks to the public for free, without copyright restrictions. Put simply, our mission is to set music free.
A community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want.
Founded in December 1998, CPDL was ported to ChoralWiki in August 2005. Here you will find free choral/vocal scores, texts, translations, and other useful information
Their goal is to create a virtual library containing all public domain music, as well as music from composers who are willing to share their work with the world without charge.
A collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds.The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, ... released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. Freesound focuses only on sound, not songs.
An incomplete list of full length copyleft/public domain musical works available on Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons, with special emphasis on works that are (or should be) linked in Wikipedia articles
