A few places I know of for PD or royalty-free music::

• https://www.openmusicarchive.org/
• https://musopen.org/music/
• https://pixabay.com/music/search/cc0/
• https://incompetech.com/...

I suggest you focus on making your game first using PD or RF music. Then after you've got people playing it, do a music update only when you have profits. I'd suggest the same thing in graphic assets, too. PD/CC0/RF first. Graphics might be nice, but good gameplay wins every time.

Open Game Art has a music category

ThoughtPunks (open TTRPG group) list a handful of places for creative commons music.

If you're making a game for sale, I highly recommend you find an artist you like (possibly through Creative Commons contributions) and reach out to that specific artist you make something meaningful for your game

An idea: Play indie games on like itch.io or something, see if there's any where you like the music and where there's a credited author for it, and reach out? Or if the dev themself made the music, reach out, maybe they could use some additional funds!

Some days ago I met Nicole Marie T @musicvsartstuff@techhub.social on Mastodon:

#Composer for games/projects: Ghoulboy, Nevergrind Online, Alex Kidd 2 & 3, Around The Clock At Bikini Bottom (Doodle Patrick Boss), Idosra: The Electric Renaissance...

#retro #chiptune #cinematic #electronic #music for #gamedevs #gaming message me for music requests; I am always available to make some music! 😎🎧

I love to support the #gamedev community and other fellow creatives 💜 some more #games I have done music for can be found on my #Ko-Fi (via website pinned post)

She is really nice! Maybe she can help you?

https://nicolemakesmusic.wixsite.com/nicolemariet

When you go through a website to get royalty free music make sure to document everything with screenshots or print outs or so.

The song I used in my game was supposed to be completely free but the composer has since pulled it from that site and is instead monetising it aggressively on YouTube and other places. I asked them directly for permission again and can luckily still use it as long as I don't put it on Facebook.

Fiverr and Airgigs are the only two I know of off-hand, but I haven't used them.

I have used something called Jummbox, which is a bit like BeepBox but with additional features added. You can make some neat tunes with it, you put in beats in the player and can tweak all sorts of stuff.

If you want to look for others to make music for your game, I would check out various online forums for finding teams. Often times, you will see somebody wanting to make music for a game jam or similar. That's how I was able to get a team for a jam when I first began game development. Unfortunately, the artist ghosted us midway, so it was pretty much like that joke of the combined horse drawing with really clean looking graphics and my horrible creations. The quality of the music was far too good for how the rest of the game turned out...

I think you can find assets in both Itchio and DLsite. Just be mindful of their licenses, and that DLsite is primarily NSFW.

Alternatively, there are gamedev forums (or adjacent) that allow recruiting people to your projects, so maybe you could ask in those if anyone would want to do music commissions for a game. Two forums with recruitment threads/boards I know are Fuwanovel and RPG Maker's. Plus you can probably find communities that allow recruitment, game assets commissions, and/or music commissions around here in the fediverse.

you have a specific style you're looking for? i'm a musician and know a lot of musicians if you want specific reqs

You can ask people on Newgrounds

I know some people that will do pretty professional stuff for 500-1000 (professional producers from developing countries) DM me if you want.