Background music for travel videos, sorted by the shot you actually filmed: cinematic establishing shots, upbeat adventure montages, chill lofi for wandering, tropical beach tracks, road trip music, and destination flavor that sounds like where you are. All free to download.
A travel video is really five or six different videos stitched together. The drone shot over the coastline, the fast montage of the hike, the slow walk through a market, the flop onto the hotel bed, the long drive out. They do not all want the same song.
So instead of one long list, here is background music for travel videos sorted by the shot you actually filmed. Every track below is free to download from the Free To Use library, and there is a section at the end on what changes when your trip is sponsored.
This is the opening. The wide drone pull-back, the plane wing above the clouds, the first look at the valley. These four all start small and build, which is what you want under a shot that reveals something slowly. Strings and orchestral layers do most of the work.
If aerial footage is a big part of what you shoot, there is a full list of it in the drone and aerial music post.
The montage is where the trip actually happens. Boarding, walking, jumping into water, eating something you cannot pronounce, all cut to the beat. These are bright and energetic, mostly with a tropical-leaning dance feel that suits fast cuts without getting exhausting over two minutes. The last one swaps that out for live drums if you want something with more punch under a hike or a climb.
These sit close to general vlog music, so the vlog music roundup is worth a look if your travel content is mostly day-in-the-life.
Not every part of a trip has energy. Walking a side street with no plan, sitting on a train, waiting out rain in a café. These are gentle beats that sit under narration or ambient sound without pulling focus. One of them is literally tagged for walking, and the last one is built for the evening end of the day.
For more in this vein, the lofi beats roundup has a much deeper selection.
Warm, slow and unhurried. Acoustic guitar and banjo, one afro-latin groove to keep the section from getting sleepy, and a breezy sunset track for golden hour. These are for the coastline stretch of the edit, where nothing dramatic is happening and nothing needs to. They range from an upbeat dance feel to something you would barely notice, so pick by how busy your footage is.
This is the section most travel music lists skip, and it is the one that makes an edit feel like it belongs somewhere specific. An accordion under a Paris street scene, a guzheng under a temple courtyard, hand percussion under a safari drive, a hornpipe under a Highland road. The instruments carry the location before you say a word about it.
A word of judgment here: use it as a light touch, not a costume. One of these under the arrival sequence, then back to your normal bed, is usually enough. Laid over the entire video it starts to feel like a theme park.
Windows down, empty highway, the bit between two places. Acoustic guitar and a steady rhythm do most of the job here. Two of these are tagged for road trips outright, and the last one runs nearly four minutes, which is useful when you have a long driving sequence and do not want to loop anything.
Travel is one of the niches where free music rules get tested, because so many trips are paid for by someone. That changes which license you need.
Under the Free To Use license, you can use non-premium tracks in your own videos and monetize them, as long as you credit the track properly in your description. That covers most personal travel vlogging.
Where it shifts is sponsored work. Content published to promote a business, product, brand or service – a hotel collaboration, a tourism board trip, an airline partnership – is treated as commercial content, and that generally needs a Commercial Plan rather than the free license. Some tracks are also marked premium with a purple star or bookmark, and those need a paid plan for monetized or commercial use regardless.
The short version: filming your own holiday, credit the artist and you are fine. Filming someone else’s brand, check the plan first.
Most travel edits are scored the wrong way round. You finish the video, then hunt for a single track that somehow covers a flight, a hike, a market and a sunset, and you end up with something that fits none of them properly.
Pick per sequence instead. Background music for travel videos works better chosen in pieces: a cinematic build under the establishing shot, something bright under the montage, something quiet under the wandering, and one local instrument at the moment you arrive. Four decisions, each of them easy, and the trip finally sounds like it moved.