Your ears perk up, but you can’t remember where you heard it. Flutes gallivant while a parade of plucked strings wag their tails eagerly in the background. The feeling is cheeky and curious, a soundtrack to innocuous mischief. “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” is the soundtrack to an endless flood of videos in every language of devilish cats and matcha lattes and next-gen brainrot; it’s been used in over 28 million TikToks, the fourth-most of any song on the platform. The composer is Kevin MacLeod, a 53-year-old from Wisconsin who’s the king of royalty-free music, music that you can use in content without continually paying royalties to the rights holders. He offers his catalog under a Creative Commons license that allows anyone to use his songs in commercial content and earn a profit as long as they credit him.
Early on, MacLeod cracked internet marketing; he realized that his music, uploaded to his site Incompetech, would reach way more ears if he didn’t charge a fee. A burgeoning field of YouTubers and amateur filmmakers with no resources took to his themes. As a result, his compositions have become strange totems of the internet, like global ringtones. He made the internet’s defining elevator music. His music is littered across a generation of Minecraft and porn videos; it’s in video games like Saints Row and Kerbal Space Program, while Martin Scorsese used it in Hugo. Kristin Wiig and Will Ferrell presented an award at the 2024 Golden Globes to the tune of his burpy “Fluffing a Duck.” MacLeod has been the subject of the documentary Royalty Free: The Music of Kevin MacLeod, which features a dominatrix as a talking head who says she beats her submissives to the rhythm of his beats.
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I discovered his music through Battle for Dream Island, an animated Total Drama Island spinoff. That show inspired me to make my own spinoff of a spinoff. I had no money to license music as a teen, so I also turned to MacLeod; I spent hours poring through playlists to find the perfect compositions for my scenes. His catalog had any genre or atmosphere I could possibly want—from the tweaked-out square-dance of “Spazzmatica Polka” to the bittersweet defeat of “Rains Will Fall.” For me and other DIY video makers, his music was indispensable.
Nearly 30 years since MacLeod launched Incompetech, he seems downcast that his approach to copyright hasn’t sparked a wider revolution. In his ideal world, there would be no copyright, or at least not a system as sluggish as in the U.S., where a music copyright lasts for the author’s life and an added 70 years. “You can’t do a cover of a piece of music that was written 70 years ago without paying half the money to the heirs of a person who died 50 years ago. That’s all locked up in this rolling time vault that we’re slowly getting access to,” MacLeod groans to me over a call. “It’s really sad to watch entire generations of creativity just not be able to be built on.”
After maintaining a prolific release schedule for decades, MacLeod’s drops have become increasingly infrequent. He’s also become obsessed with the potential of AI for music and beyond, even as the generators threaten to replace the market demand for his own tracks. He fantasizes about a day when he’ll be able to jam with synthetic instrumentalists who can improv off of him in live-time, or when he can buy a trio of robots who he will order to produce “lutes with chisels and hand drills, because of course they’ll be able to do it.”
But MacLeod also seems genuinely concerned about how AI will displace workers, worsening an already bleak economic situation where “people with goddamn master’s degrees can’t get a job and afford an apartment in the city that they’re living in.”
“Believe me, my optimism is tenuous,” he says. “The world is kind of shit, but I hold onto it anyway. There’s no way we will have [our basic everyday] problems in 500 years. Everything’s gonna be solved. How we get there is gonna hurt, and not everyone’s gonna come out OK.”
MacLeod grew up in Sobieski, a tiny town in Wisconsin. His dad worked in a paper mill and has collected tractors. As a kid, MacLeod noodled on the piano; his brother bought him a Casio keyboard from a pawn shop when he was 9, which he hooked up to his PC to record.
In 2000, he started releasing tracks for free on Incompetech. This was in the era of mail-order CD clubs, when radio stations would pay $100 a month for one or two CDs full of background music to produce ads or stings. “I was like, How about $0?” MacLeod says. Since the start, he’s relished the idea of making something that puts other people out of business.
Often, compositions came from MacLeod watching a YouTube video, thinking the music sucked, then trying to make something more suitable. He would email the themes to the video makers. The popular 2014 tune “Carefree” spawned because MacLeod noticed nearly all the themes on the royalty-free site AudioJungle had ukulele, marimba, and kumbaya vibes. He thought it’d be funny to make a kind of noxiously happy nothing-song: “I was making fun of 80 people simultaneously.”
Royalty free music was such a thing in the early 2010s. Anyone who was a tween around this time remembers the blandly euphoric drops of NoCopyrightSounds, even if you can’t put a name to them, like the classic royalty-freEDM anthem “My Heart.” MacLeod came to dominate the instrumental space in this era through quality, name recognition, and sheer volume; he released so many tunes that at one point he started paying Fiverr freelancers to title them. The new fans were matched by a swarm of new haters upset at how he was devaluing music online and making it harder for composers to charge for their work.
The main way MacLeod stayed afloat through tossing off all this music for free was by developing a tool on his website to generate PDFs of graph paper for free. So many people relished his graph paper generator that the Google Ad revenue he earned from site visitors allowed him to move from Wisconsin to New York. These were his most formative years—he was living in Bed-Stuy with four talented, workaholic composers that forced him to level up his music. The novel intensity of New York eventually began to fade, and MacLeod lived alone in Manhattan, barely leaving his apartment. “I was just sitting at home, avoiding people.” He decided to move to Tampa, Florida, where he currently lives.
MacLeod’s revulsion toward copyright comes from frustration, and a desire to divorce art from capital incentives. He brushes aside the usual concerns about a copyright-free landscape: that it would stop artists from feeling the need to create original art; that an outbreak of clones could steal peoples’ work and businesses could use it without anything going back to the artists. “There’s so many problems with copyright, and you can try to address each one of them in a fair manner, but honestly, we just get rid of it and we’ll be fine,” he sighs. “The people who are in the music business just for the money, they may realize it’s probably easier working in food service to make money than in music… I think about music that was made 80,000 years ago. We’ve got instruments going that far back. Well, they didn’t have copyright then. Why were they playing music? Because we’re humans, and that’s what we do.”
Still, he seems to realize that today’s shitty economic reality makes this tricky. Many musicians already have jobs in food service or retail to get by. Asking them to ditch their money-making instincts, or their wish to turn artmaking into their career, is tough without any societal safety net. “We have to make sure that everyone has an income and everyone can survive, and the artists will emerge,” he says. Later on, he throws his hands up. “My god, I hate the world so much right now. Just so much on so many levels. The amount of people scrapping just to exist.”
Part of MacLeod’s attitude toward copyright may also come from the fact that his music is designed to be auxiliary and subordinate, an invisible lubricant for whatever media it’s paired with. There are no lyrics, no mixing inconsistencies, no jolts of experimental hiss. The most memorable tunes have a delightful peppiness; they’re characterfully inoffensive, like the seal-speak of “Cipher” and the bongo traffic gridlock of “Jaunty Gumption.” MacLeod’s trove basically has everything: thumping ska, arcade chiptune, brostep sleaze. Need a baleful drone for your “3 A.M. OUIJA BOARD DISASTER (GONE WRONG)” video? Instead of risking a takedown by using a John Carpenter song, try MacLeod’s liminal “Aftermath.” Want something more punishing yet faintly angelic? Hit “Unrelenting.” It was AI’s infinite music before Suno was even an idea.
These days, MacLeod says, “there are very few [of my] tracks that I still listen to and enjoy.” MacLeod has a bizarre relationship with music. He says he doesn’t listen to music for fun, “ever.” This may be a result of him overdoing it while studying music education in college (“Music became a lot less fun after I learned that much more about it. You can’t walk through a grocery store without picking apart the melody lines and chordal structures”) but also a kind of ineluctable byproduct of how his brain works. He tells me he doesn’t “understand how most people listen to music” and that he has never connected with songs lyrically. “The singer-songwriter is a crazy animal that I cannot understand. I don’t have anything that I want to express. I want to help people express what they want to express.”
MacLeod wields AI now as a kind of plaything. He uses AI daily, usually to do things like turn a virtual trumpet into a saxophone line or create a rhythm section to accompany his hurdy-gurdy practice, but he has rarely released the songs publicly on Incompetech. He’s been most impressed by generators that seem to problem-solve like his own brain would, decompiling stems and tweaking the equalizer to achieve the desired mix. “This is what music looks like in the future,” he says with awe.
Usually, AI glazers are accounts with Bored Ape PFPs and “disruptor” in their bios, not someone who raves to me about his classical GOATs (Satie, Rachmaninoff, Holst; he’s not that keen on Mozart). Many of MacLeod’s fans were enraged and disheartened about his AI use online. But it makes sense that a guy fixated on streamlining the music production process and obliterating costs would latch onto this tech. He speaks with a MrBeastian fervor about an optimized future where “ideally, you go to a restaurant or a club and all the music is made on the spot for that audience. It’s gonna try to figure out the audience via data. If a lot of people are coming in with the same T-shirts with the same band, it’s gonna quote that band. It’s gonna make them happy.”
All this is predicated on the idea that a crowd of hungry patrons will be happy when they hear a robot puking out lyrics about their Geese shirts, or that AI is capable of producing something poignant. MacLeod’s faith can be traced back to an afternoon in the Minneapolis Airport in the ‘90s when a demo of a new virtual instrument’s clarinet concerto made him tear up. “I knew 100% there was not a person blowing into an instrument, but it made me cry. That’s the only thing I care about. What is the emotional impact? And Suno has made music that made me cry.”
MacLeod elaborates: “If you’re 116 hours into an RPG, then you go into a bar [in the game] and there’s a bard singing about the tales that you had done 40 hours earlier, that would have to be made in real-time because nobody knew exactly what you did in those games. You would have an immense connection to the song being sung literally about you. Can we take that song and make it a hit? No way, it wouldn’t be useful to anybody else. But could it make you cry? Probably.”
In a way, MacLeod is cheering for his own obsolescence; AI output is as proficient as most royalty-free music. No one will need to surf MacLeod playlists if they can comfortably generate their own perfect scores. Part of the reason why MacLeod has dropped off from releasing tracks is because YouTube background music is so much more pristine than it was in the 2000s and 2010s. The need for someone like him, he admits, has “diminished considerably in the last five years.” Instead, MacLeod has turned to other pursuits. He’s working on a website to 3D print instruments. He’s become consumed by trying to solve theatrical lighting—essentially, creating ultra-cheap audience-reactive lightshows for coffee shops and small venues. The idea would never be to hawk the rig on Shark Tank or sell it; he just wants to offer a free guide. He assumes someone else would turn it into a company. “I do not wanna be involved in the logistics chain. I’m trying to put other people out of business. I’ve always been trying to do that.”
MacLeod isn’t completely out of the music game; he still produces commissions for filmmakers (his IMDb credits tally at 5,400, with 64 upcoming), and he nets an annual revenue in the millions from these private commissions and other sources like TikTok payouts and people using his music in countries with stricter copyright regulations such as Germany. In fact, he may be more in the game than ever. Years ago, MacLeod offered his catalog of thousands of songs (along with the stems and MIDI files) to any AI researchers looking for free training data. A handful of university researchers took it, along with major players like Google—he’s not sure about Suno. He revels in the idea that his DNA could be laced all over the future. “I get embedded in another generation,” he says, “because it learned my composition and mixing style.”