Why pay for sound effects when you can download completely free sounds?

We got an email today from a person who had seen some gun sound effects on our site for a couple of dollars, and he didn't understand why we felt that it was right to charge money for our sounds, when he was in fact able to find completely free gun sounds and free sound effects for download on a different site. Who do we think we are? Charging for something that can be gotten for free somewhere else?

My short answer would probably be: Hey, if you look in the dumpsters, you can most likely find free bread! Yet, every day millions of people actually buy bread in the supermarket. Despite the availability of free bread, they prefer bread that (a) is better, and (b) they know where it came from.

Yes, there are sites where you can find completely free sounds and download them for free. The problem is: You don't know where they came from. The sites offering completely free sounds most likely just downloaded them free from some other "free wav sounds" site, at some point. And they figured, hey, we downloaded these for free, they are freely available on the internet already, so we'll share them for free as well.

Free river sounds can be found

Some sounds could of course be entirely legal, created by somebody who wanted them to be shared freely. That is possible. However, more often these sounds have at some point been ripped from a DVD movie, or from a video game, or from some other source that was actually copyrighted. The problem is, you don't know. And do you really want to risk legal action or threats of legal action, licensing problems, possibly having to remove the sounds from your project at a later date, because it ultimately turned out that the sound originally came from a copyrighted source? For the sake of saving 3 dollars?

I didn't think so.

And this is of course why people are willing to pay a few dollars for sound effects on a site such as ours. Not only is the sound quality much more consistent. The free sounds you can find range from "awful" to "great" in sound quality. On our site, the sounds are all professionally created, all 100% legally sourced and licensed, created by us and our contracted professional sound engineers, and legally licensed to you, or your company, for use in your projects.

For some, this is worth a few dollars.

On a side note, we too offer some of our sounds completely free. If you join up with us with a free user account, you'll find 5 completely free sounds - all completely legal and professionally created - available to download from within your user account. 5 new sounds are chosen at random, each week.