Kevin MacLeod gave away 2,000 songs and ended up everywhere
If you have watched YouTube or scrolled TikTok, you have almost certainly heard Kevin MacLeod. The Wisconsin composer has released more than 2,000 pieces that anyone may use for free as long as they credit him, and his jaunty tune Monkeys Spinning Monkeys racked up over 31.6 billion TikTok plays in six months of 2021.
Born in Green Bay in 1972, MacLeod started piano at about four. At university he began in electrical engineering, disliked the chemistry requirements, and switched to music education within a month, though he never finished a degree. During the dot-com bubble he worked briefly as a programmer and noticed multimedia colleagues struggling to find usable music, so he started writing and posting his own.
His website, Incompetech, first earned ad money from a tool that printed graph paper. His catalogue uses a Creative Commons licence that requires attribution; people who would rather skip the credit can pay, starting at $30 for a single track. Beyond some streaming ad income, he leans on donations through Patreon, and he has said he wants to build a body of work that can compete with the conventional copyright system he dislikes.
The results are hard to escape. His pieces turn up in thousands of films, from Martin Scorsese's Hugo in 2011 to far less respectable productions, and since 2017 on a live Earth-viewing feed from the International Space Station. At the 2024 Golden Globes, Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig presented an award to his 2010 track Fluffing a Duck, which brought him a burst of attention. Glenn Kenny of The New York Times called him perhaps the most prolific composer nobody has heard of.
German web video creators gave him a lifetime honorary award in 2015, and a documentary about his career came out in 2020. Since then he has also experimented with music generated by the AI tool Suno, but keeps those tracks off his website and off streaming services.
Source: Kevin MacLeod
