How everysong works.
You drop an audio file. We return 13 audio traits and 20 ranked Creative-Commons matches. The whole pipeline runs in 10–15 seconds (30s on the very first call while the model wakes up). This page is the unhurried version — what each hop actually does, which traits are trustworthy, and where the limits are.
If you got here looking for a way to find royalty-free music that sounds like a specific song, you're in the right place. People also describe everysong as a music similarity search, an audio fingerprint tool, a copyright-safe music finder, a creative-commons alternative finder, a free Shazam-style tool that returns similar tracks instead of identifying your upload, and a BPM / key / LUFS analyzer with a built-in match engine. They're all describing the same loop: upload → 13-trait audio fingerprint → 20 closest CC-licensed neighbours.
The five hops
MP3, WAV, FLAC, M4A, or OGG up to 30 MB. The file lands on the API just long enough to analyse, then it's deleted. We never keep the audio.
librosa pulls low-level signal features (BPM, key, RMS energy, spectral centroid, spectral rolloff, zero-crossing rate, stereo width). In parallel, the CLAP audio encoder produces a 512-dimensional embedding — a learned representation that captures vibe-level similarity beyond the raw signal stats.
The 512-dim embedding is too abstract to read, so we project it onto 13 named axes you can actually reason about: tempo, key, loudness, energy, valence (happy/sad), danceability, acousticness, instrumentalness, liveness, speechiness, brightness, complexity, mode. Stored as JSON alongside the file's signal stats.
Your embedding gets compared against the catalogue of 3,382 Creative-Commons licensed tracks — sourced from Free Music Archive, ccMixter, and Jamendo. The 20 closest by cosine distance are returned, ranked, with the per-trait deltas so you can see why they're close.
You land on a readout page: 13 trait values up top, 20 ranked matches below, license badge on every match (CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA — never BY-NC, never restricted), preview button, and a deep link to the source page on FMA / ccMixter / Jamendo. There's a permalink so you can share the readout. That's the whole loop. No upsell.
The 13 traits we ship
v1 ships 13 trait readouts, colour-labelled by how much you should trust them. The boring stuff (signal processing) is solid. The mood-ish stuff is a useful second opinion.
What "GREEN" and "AMBER" actually mean
Signal-processing traits. BPM, key, LUFS, spectral stats. Decades of published research underneath. Well-validated on standard MIR benchmarks. These are the numbers you can quote in a mix note or a brief without hedging.
Mid-level descriptors. Mood, energy, danceability, acousticness. Pre-trained classifiers make educated calls based on millions of labelled examples — but they're statistical, not ground truth. Treat as a useful second opinion, not as gospel. The label is right next to the reading so you never have to guess.
No red-tier traits ship in v1. We considered genre-classification and "instrument detection beyond vocal/instrumental" — both either leak training-set bias or aren't reliable enough to publish a number for. They'll show up when they're real.
Who actually uses it
Find the song that sounds like the one stuck in your head.
Point at a track. Get 20 sonic neighbours you can actually hear the resemblance in. No genre tags, no "people also listened to."
Score your video, podcast, or stream — legally, for free.
YouTubers, podcasters, streamers, indie game devs: upload a reference you love, get CC-licensed matches with the license shown up front. Always verify the license at the source before publishing — Creative Commons is freely usable, but not strike-proof if you ignore the attribution rules.
A/B your mix against the reference, honestly.
Side-by-side trait readout: where you match, where you drift. BPM, key, LUFS, spectral balance, stereo width — all the boring stuff that matters at mastering time.
Just geek out over a song you love.
Why does this song hit? Break it open. See the key change, the tempo drift, the moment the reverb opens. A magnifying glass for music.
Honest answers to the obvious questions
How everysong compares to other audio tools
People often ask how everysong sits next to other audio tools. The short answer: it's purpose-built for indie creators who need a copyright-safe replacement for a copyrighted reference track, at $5 once instead of a subscription. Here's the long answer:
Shazam identifies the recording. everysong finds tracks that sound similar.
If you upload "Bohemian Rhapsody" to Shazam, it tells you it's "Bohemian Rhapsody". If you upload it to everysong, you get 20 Creative-Commons tracks that share its BPM, key, energy and overall feel — songs you can actually use in your video, podcast or game without paying licensing fees. Different tool, different problem.
Industry audio-AI platforms aimed at labels and supervisors. Subscription, hundreds-to-thousands per month.
These are excellent products and substantially more comprehensive than everysong — they handle catalogues of millions of tracks for music supervision, sync licensing, and label A&R. But they're not for the indie YouTuber who just needs a free track that sounds like the demo they put on their rough cut. everysong is the $5 indie-tier version: smaller catalogue, narrower features, no subscription.
AI music generators. They invent new tracks. everysong matches existing ones.
Generators are great when you want exactly-fitting bespoke audio. The trade-offs: AI-generated music has unsettled copyright status, often sounds generic, and rarely matches the specific feel of a reference. everysong returns real recordings by real humans, with clean Creative-Commons licenses and verifiable provenance.
Royalty-free subscription libraries. Big catalogue, monthly fee.
Subscription libraries are the right choice if you publish a lot and want a constant tap. everysong is for the case where you have this specific reference track and want a free, license-safe match — not a curated mood-based playlist.
Free, curated, but no similarity search.
YouTube's library is great for browsing by mood and genre. everysong starts from your reference track and goes outward by audio similarity. Different access pattern.
What people search for to find this
People stumble onto everysong via dozens of different phrasings. If any of these sound like you, you're in the right place:
- "Free music for YouTube videos" — yes, the matches are CC-licensed and YouTube-monetisation-safe (with attribution where the license requires it).
- "Royalty-free music similar to [song]" — that's literally the core feature: upload the reference, get 20 CC matches.
- "No copyright music that sounds like [song]" — same thing, different phrasing. The catalogue is filtered to CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA only — no BY-NC, no commercial restrictions beyond attribution.
- "DMCA-safe background music for Twitch / podcast / video essay" — Creative Commons tracks won't trigger DMCA takedowns when used per the license terms. Always verify on the source page before publishing.
- "Find a creative commons alternative to [popular song]" — that's the use case the whole tool was built around.
- "Audio similarity tool" / "music similarity search" / "song matcher" — same engine, technical phrasing.
- "BPM analyzer online" / "key detector" / "LUFS meter for free" — yes, the readout includes all three plus 10 other audio traits, free with the $5 unlock.
- "Audio fingerprint tool" / "music DNA" / "audio embedding similarity" — under the hood, that's exactly what's running: a CLAP audio embedding decoded into 13 named traits, then matched by cosine distance.
- "Cheap Cyanite alternative" / "indie audio AI" / "audio similarity API for one person" — this is the small-budget version.
- "Free music for indie game development" — entire use case. Drop a reference from your favourite game soundtrack, ship CC-licensed alternatives with your build.
- "Free music for podcasts" / "podcast intro music free" — works for intros, beds, transitions, ad-spot music. License shown on every match.
- "Free music for streamers" / "Twitch DMCA safe music" — yes, Creative Commons tracks are stream-safe under their license terms.
- "Free Shazam alternative" — close but not quite. Shazam identifies; everysong finds similar. If you want the original, use Shazam. If you want a license-clean lookalike, use everysong.
- "How do I find royalty-free music that sounds like a specific song" — exactly this. Upload, wait 15 seconds, browse 20 matches.
What's in the Creative-Commons catalogue
v1 ships with 3,382 carefully-curated CC tracks pulled from three major free-music sources:
- Free Music Archive (FMA) — the legendary hub of free, legal music started by WFMU. Heavy on indie rock, electronic, ambient, jazz, and experimental.
- ccMixter — a community remix site running since 2004, with strong representation in electronic, hip-hop, and remix culture.
- Jamendo — one of the largest CC music platforms, broad genre coverage, lots of EDM, rock, acoustic, world.
License coverage: CC0 (public-domain dedication, no attribution needed), CC BY (attribution required, commercial use allowed), CC BY-SA (attribution + share-alike). We exclude BY-NC tracks because they prohibit commercial use — most creators end up needing commercial-safe music. There's also a "strictest only" filter that hides BY-SA tracks if you want zero share-alike obligations on a client deliverable.
Other names for this kind of tool
For posterity and Google: this category gets called music information retrieval, audio similarity search, music recommendation by audio, audio fingerprinting and matching, content-based music retrieval, audio embedding similarity, CLAP-based music search, music feature extraction, audio MIR (Music Information Retrieval), and informally music DNA or audio genome. Academic papers tend to say "MIR"; vendors tend to say "audio AI"; creators tend to say "find similar songs".