sound track you tube videos warning.

[BoilerDown]

YouTube itself has agreements with most music you can find, in most countries, to allow anyone to upload videos using that music, with no legal problems for the uploader.  Thus, it isn't against the law, YouTube has covered it for us.

These music companies can then play ads before your video and take the revenue from it, in exchange for them allowing YouTube to permit you to upload the video with music that is theirs and not yours.

The best thing to do, especially if you intend to spend a lot of effort syncing the video and the music for a nice effect, is to upload the music with a dummy video first, and see if it gets blocked, or if you can just acknowledge that its someone else's music and be permitted to keep the video public.  If that checks out, go ahead and make your video with that music.  If it gets blocked, then choose another song and delete the dummy video.

And don't challenge YouTube's decision just to get the video to play for a day.  Unless you really are using fair use or there really was a mis-identification of music rights, you'll just get your account dinged.  Better to simply acknowledge that its not your music and let YouTube take care of the rest.

[Skuzzy]

That is not exactly correct.  What Youtube has done is made it easier for those who hold copyrights to find the videos that their works are being used in.  Then the copyright holder can make a determination as to what they want done.

It has also caused a storm of legal problems with many videographers.  For example, I know one wedding videographer who is at the end of a legal battle for using copyrighted music in his videos which got uploaded by the person who paid for the video, to Youtube.

Once they found the video on Youtube, via the "Content ID System", they then were able to find the videographer.

Now, the videographer is in the wrong, but he probably would have gotten away with it had it not been for Youtube's system.

Regardless, it is still illegal to use copyrighted works in your video, without permission.  You role the dice with Youtube as you do not know how the copyright holder is going to react.  It may be as simple as a take down, or as complex as a legal battle.  There are no guarantees.

That said, yes, it is probably a good idea to test the waters.  However, the reaction to the use of the work may not be consistent as it could be related to the video the music is being used with.  You can make use of the search feature in the "Audio Library" to see what might happen if you use a song.