Indie Christmas Music for Videos

Most of this collection is sung: only about one track in eight is instrumental, so it leans toward contemporary holiday songs with lead vocals rather than background carols. The instrumental exceptions include Panorama Jazz Band's Jingle Bells and Christmas (Like Ya Just Don't Care) and Steve Rice's harmonica version of Silent Night, and those are the ones to reach for when narration or dialogue has to sit on top of the music.

These are alternative Christmas songs because they are original seasonal tracks and reinterpretations by independent artists, tagged as contemporary holiday with country, folk, jazz, indie rock and contemporary R&B underneath. Titles like The List by NTNT, Downtown Christmas by MODE and Jingle Bell Postcard by Andrea Wittgens and Sugartown are new songs rather than covers of the standards, while familiar carols appear as vocal reworkings or as jazz band and harmonica instrumentals. That is what gives a seasonal spot a non-traditional feel without losing the Christmas signal.

The collection does cover holidays other than Christmas, though Christmas is by far the dominant theme. Beckah Shae's Hanukkah sits alongside her Christmas songs, and a couple of tracks are tagged for Thanksgiving, so a brand running a broader end-of-year campaign can find pieces that do not name Christmas outright. The rest is squarely Christmas, ranging from happy, love-themed pop to sacred pieces such as Seeker's A King Is Born and The Banner Days' Sacred Story.

Paid seasonal ads and client campaigns can use this Christmas music: every track in the collection is cleared for commercial use under the license purchased, which covers ads, client work, monetized YouTube videos, podcasts and social content. Licenses are sold in Individual, Indie Film, Small Business and Large Business tiers, so match the tier to the type of producer behind the campaign. Once a track is licensed to a finished holiday spot, that license is perpetual, so the ad can rerun next season without relicensing.

Tracks average just over three minutes, which is full-song length, so a 15 or 30 second holiday spot needs an edit rather than a straight drop-in. Because most tracks are sung, editors usually lift a hook section or the intro; the instrumental jazz and harmonica pieces are simpler to trim since there is no lyric to cut mid-word. Longer holiday vlogs and end-of-year brand videos can run the full lengths as delivered.