When And Where Filmmakers Use Royalty Free Latin Music In Video Content

It’s way too common to rely on Latin music for specific projects. But this broad, diverse genre is much more than just music with Spanish lyrics or a particular style of guitar. 

Filmmakers and content creators sometimes fall into the trap of using Latin music in an almost cliche style, choosing these songs to add energy or movement in video projects. In fact, Latin music is perfect for adding all sorts of emotion to a project, from pieces that could make a steely-eyed man cry to lullabies for babies.

More importantly, Latin music has a long and storied history. What began as different artistic styles of “folk music” in Central and South America has grown into a huge collection that features different tones, styles, and instrumentations.

And that’s why it’s so important for creators to know how to find and properly use royalty free Latin music in their video projects.

Evolution Of Latin Music

For anyone who didn’t grow up around Latin cultural influences, it’s easy to group all of this music into one generalized genre. But the reality is that Latin music has a few major characteristics, and those differ based on regional varieties as well as its external influences.

Like most cultural songs, Latin music has roots in a pretty broad catalog of indiginous groups. Each region developed a unique set of instruments and music styles, which means that it’s possible for an expert to listen to a song and point out which specific area the song best represents.

If you really wanted to break down the genre’s DNA into distinct parts, you would end up with:

• Style of music: Latin music has a fairly distinct sound or tone.
• Place of origin: Latin music tends to come — you guessed it — from Latin America, or even the Iberian Peninsula (also known as “the part of Europe that includes Spain and Portugal”).
• Background of artist: This is similar to the place of origin, except rather than focus on where the song or style comes from, it’s more about the artist’s heritage.
• Language of lyrics: Latin songs are most often performed in Spanish or Portuguese.

Trying to break this music down into subgenres would create a list longer than we have room for. So it’s easiest to refer to this list of components and remember that as long as a song fits at least one of these four criteria, it’s appropriate to refer to it as Latin music.

In other words, the normal stereotypes of cantina music at a Mexican restaurant are pretty reductive. Yes, those songs are proud and valuable pieces of this cultural genre. But they’re only a tiny sliver of all the different styles represented in the broader category.

External Influences On Latin Music

Indiginous history is a major driving factor in different subgenres of Latin music. However, while this music evolved over the centuries, parts of that change can be tied to external influences.

(And you could argue that those influences have shaped how this music adapted to align with modern, popular trends that we see in other genres.) 

That process began when Europeans came to the Western world. This came with an infusion of Spanish and Portugese language as well as culture. And two parts of that culture were music and instrumentation.

The location of the Iberian peninsula meant that these Europeans had some knowledge of Middle Eastern and African music, and that eclectic blend of styles and instruments meshed with the indiginous styles already native to Latin America.

And as slaves were taken from Africa to the Caribbean, that further differentiated the sorts of music popular throughout the region. These combinations led to the complexities and difficulties around trying to pin down a textbook definition of “Latin music.”

Modernization Of Latin Music

While external influences played a part in evolving Latin music from cultural performance to pop radio hits, another driving force in the modernization of Latin music is the focus on social environments.

Part of this focus can be tied directly to cultural heritage and the importance of music across Latin America. More specifically, we can chart the evolution of dance to parallel how music has grown in significance across Latin America (samba, bachata, tango, etc.).

For many people groups, music was seen as a way to celebrate a shared heritage. And as more and more people immigrated to different parts of Latin America, those roots became important pieces of how communities connected and grew together.

Those unique sounds meshed with other popular music in the region, leading to a curve that can clearly be traced across the past 100 years:

Even when Latin music adapted to outside influences, the DNA (those four component parts we covered earlier) persisted through all of that change. As a result, Latin music is just as compelling and diverse and relevant as it was back in its earliest days.

That’s why artists, filmmakers, and content creators still want to find and use these songs in their products — which is where affordable, easy-to-license royalty free Latin music comes into play.

Finding Royalty Free Latin Music

Getting your hands on music isn’t as difficult as you might think. In fact, royalty free Latin music can provide a great variety that represents different cultures and subgenres, all while being perfectly suited to accompany video footage.

But finding Latin music that you actually want to use can be as difficult or as straightforward as you make it. You can either browse traditional music sights, filtering through thousands of songs and looking for that rare gem — a radio-quality song that actually fits your budget.

Or you can take a simpler path.

By using a royalty free music service like Soundstripe, you can have access to a curated library of music. More importantly, a monthly or yearly subscription gives you unlimited access to every song in that library. So whether you need a few songs for your current project or music to use in every video you’ll work on this year, we’ve got you covered.