About Toucan Music

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The Toucan Music mission

Toucan Music netlabel Toucan Music is a UK electronic dance music label specialising in royalty free electronic music, particularly house, trance, techno and chillout with occasional forays into dubstep and breaks. Our mission is to keep the UK dance sound of the 1990s and 2000s alive, providing original, high quality, tracks to download under a licence that permits free and legal re-use in DJ mixes and podcasts.

Our music covers a broad range of styles, with some of our artists producing tracks with a commercial influence, and others producing harder, more experimental or minimal music. The Toucan Music vibe is generally upbeat and melodic, with strong lead sounds and catchy hook in many of our tracks. With origins in the UK rave scene, Toucan Music launched on 1st January 2004 as a successor to the Frantik Music website, which went online in October 1997 and first made full tracks available to download in MP3 format in December 1999.

Our free-to-download EP releases started in 2005, and ran until 2020. In 2022 our singles series launched, which are available for direct download on this site, for streaming through all popular music services, and with extended, high quality WAV versions available from DJ stores such as Beatport. Since 2008 we have also released occasional albums, both from our artists and feature-length compilations in our popular Best Bytes series.

Read more about the The Toucan Music story


What is a Netlabel?

Our definition

A netlabel (also known as a web label or internet label) is the online equivalent of a record label; a music label providing tracks that are downloadable from the internet, instead of, or as well as, on CD, tape or vinyl. The majority of netlabels provide a large amount of royalty free material, which can be often be distributed legally free of charge via a Creative Commons Licence.

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Using our podsafe music - the legal bit

Creative CommonsMost of the music you'll find on this website is podsafe, and licenced under royalty free Creative Commons licences for personal use, which not only gives you the chance to include it in your DJ sets, YouTube or Vimeo videos, and podcasts, but also sometimes gives you the chance to remix it, sample it or do with it as you wish! Each release can have a different licence, so where you see a CC symbol such as the one shown here, click on it to find out exactly how you can use the tracks. Commercial licences are also available - for more details, check out our music licensing page.

The one thing we do ask is that, if you use any Toucan Music tracks, please put a link to www.toucanmusic.com on your website, podcast, social media or wherever else you list your credits. Thanks for reading and enjoy the music!