YouTube Label NCS Reaches 1 Million Sales Despite Offering Free Downloads
By now you’ve probably heard of NoCopyrightSounds. Whether you’ve heard of them from our copyright free music article, or have seen the famed YouTube channel around since 2011, NCS is a staple in the dance music industry.
Despite giving away free downloads and offering copyright-free music, the UK label NCS (NoCopyrightSounds) reached a unique milestone that month, racking up over 1 million sales on iTunes.
Related: Most Viewed YouTube Videos & YouTube to GIF: A How To
Starting as a YouTube channel, the brand rapidly grew into a global music brand and label with millions of listeners and over 13 million subscribers on YouTube. “I’m immensely proud to have reached 1 million paid downloads, and believe this shows the growth and strength NCS has built over the years,” said NCS founder Billy Woodford.
From Free Downloads to Launching Careers
This milestone said as much about NCS’s business model as it did about its popularity. By offering royalty-free music that YouTubers and independent creators could use without copyright strikes, NCS built an enormous, loyal audience of both listeners and content creators who relied on the channel — and that audience proved willing to pay for music directly when given the option, even though free downloads remained available. The label also became a genuine launching pad for artist careers: Alan Walker’s “Fade” first reached listeners as an NCS release years before its vocal version, “Faded,” became a global smash, illustrating how the platform functioned as a talent pipeline as much as a free-music resource.
A Model That Only Kept Growing
In the years following this milestone, NCS continued expanding well beyond its original YouTube roots, eventually amassing billions of combined streams and becoming one of the most influential independent outlets for discovering new dance music talent. The million-sales achievement captured here marked an early, important proof point that free-to-use music and commercial success weren’t mutually exclusive — a lesson that shaped how numerous royalty-free and creator-focused music platforms would approach their own business models in the years that followed.
Why Content Creators Made NCS Essential
Beyond the artist side, NCS solved a genuinely practical problem for the exploding population of YouTubers, streamers, and video editors of the mid-2010s: finding energetic, high-quality background music that wouldn’t trigger a copyright claim. That utility, more than any single hit song, is what turned casual viewers into a massive, engaged subscriber base, and it’s a big part of why the channel’s growth curve looked so different from a typical record label’s — the audience needed NCS as a tool, not just as entertainment.
