Yes. As long as the pack is royalty-free (which nearly every commercial preset pack is, all of ours included), the music you make with it is yours to sell, stream, sync into ads, play live, whatever you like. No extra fees, no credits, no asking anyone’s permission.
Still, give the details ten minutes. “Royalty-free” carries a precise meaning, every license has exactly one real restriction, and samples behave differently from presets in a way you’ll want to understand.
What royalty-free actually means
Not the same as free of charge. It means one payment up front, and from then on nothing you create with the product owes any royalties. Rack up a million streams on music built from the pack: the preset maker sees nothing past the original price, and both sides agreed to exactly that.
What you actually bought is a license, not ownership of the presets. Sounds like a lawyer’s distinction, but everything below flows from it: your music belongs to you outright, while the tools are only yours to use.
Why presets are the easy case
A preset is essentially a recipe, a set of parameter values the synth follows to produce sound in real time. When your track renders, the audio comes from your copy of Serum 2 playing your MIDI. The preset maker’s creative contribution, the patch design, never lands in your song as a fixed recording; it shows up as an instrument being performed.
Which is why preset licensing stays simple and drama-free: your recording is your recording. The recipe-versus-recording idea gets a fuller treatment in what’s inside a Serum preset; the licensing follows from the same distinction.
Samples are the different story
A sample is finished audio somebody else made. The moment you use one, their actual recording is baked into yours. Royalty-free sample packs handle this cleanly too (that’s what the license is for), but the stakes shift:
- Lifting audio from records, YouTube or stem-split tracks without clearance is a genuine legal problem, and no amount of chopping fixes it.
- A loop used nearly raw can show up note-for-note in strangers’ releases, which is legal but awkward on streaming platforms.
Presets carry neither risk. A thousand producers can own the same pack, yet each renders their own audio from their own notes with their own processing. Same preset, two tracks: still two entirely different recordings.
The one thing every license forbids
Redistributing the presets themselves. No reselling, no sending the files to a friend, no rolling them into your own “free pack,” no forum uploads. The license covers music made WITH the tools; handing on the tools is never included.
One subtlety worth flagging: bouncing a preset to audio loops and selling those loops as a sample pack is redistribution wearing a costume: you’d be selling the sound designer’s work as your own product, and licenses (ours among them) forbid it. Music: yes. Tool-shaped products: no. That’s the entire fence.
What to check before you buy any pack
- The words royalty-free on the product page or inside the license file. Standard practice anywhere serious, but verify it.
- Commercial use allowed, as opposed to “personal use only.” Personal-only terms rarely appear on paid packs, though some free downloads carry them.
- Whether the free packs carry the same license as the paid ones. Ours do: the free Serum 2 presets are royalty-free for commercial releases, identical terms to everything we sell.
- Any credit requirement. Attribution demands are nearly extinct, but the occasional free pack still has one; better discovered before the album ships than after.
Side note: keep receipts and license files together in one folder. In all these years nobody has asked me for proof of license, but the day a distributor or sync agency does, you want it answered in a two-minute email.
Streaming, labels, sync — anything special?
No. Royalty-free grants the same permission everywhere: Spotify, Bandcamp, label releases, game soundtracks, ad syncs. Labels genuinely don’t mind presets; as I wrote in the preset packs piece, most of the industry is built on them. What keeps labels up at night is uncleared samples lurking in a track, and presets happen to be the one ingredient incapable of creating that problem.
Building a release library across a few genres? The Serum 2 preset bundles come under the same royalty-free terms and give the best per-pack value we offer: one license story covering your whole toolkit.
FAQ
Can I sell music made with free preset packs?
Usually, yes, but read the terms, since free downloads sometimes come with personal-use-only strings. Ours are royalty-free, commercial release included.
Do I need to credit the preset maker?
Hardly ever. It’s a kind gesture, but under standard royalty-free terms it’s legally unnecessary.
Can I use presets in music for a client or a game?
Yes. The audio you render is your work product, and the royalty-free license extends to commercial use, work-for-hire and sync included. That holds for everything in our Serum 2 preset catalog, free packs too.
Can I share a preset with a collaborator?
Technically they need their own copy; licensing is per person. In practice, the clean workaround is printing your synth parts to audio before the collaboration session.
So go sell the music. That’s the whole point of the license, and every preset maker is rooting for it: your releases are the best advertising we get. One rule to remember: the music goes out, the tools stay home.
I run Monosounds.studio and make the packs myself. Ten-plus years of producing, 97+ releases, 16,000+ downloads. Every Serum 2 preset we ship passes a CPU check on a mid-range laptop and gets used in a real track before release. If it does not survive a mix, it does not go in the pack.
More about Maxim & the studio →
