MAKING ‘FREE’ PAY Marcel Gnauk: Free To Use Sounds
It was less than two years ago when the name ‘Marcel Gnauk’ started popping up on numerous audio-related groups on social media, offering free sounds for people to download and use. Coming out of nowhere, he quickly became a regular; posting daily updates of his sound recording adventures and offering entirely new libraries of free-to-use sounds almost every week. Through clever and consistent internet marketing, his website – freetousesounds.com – now gets over 30,000 page views per month, and is one of the first that comes up in Google searches for free sounds. It also supports his lifestyle of continual travelling and recording. In this interview, Marcel talks about how he got started, how he took freetousesounds. com to the forefront of Google searches – and people’s minds – in less than two years, and how he makes a living from giving sounds away.
STARTING OUT: FOR THE LOVE
Greg Simmons: How did you get started doing sound recordings?
In 2017 I was in Cambodia with Libby — my partner — and we were working on a video for an NGO [Non Government Organisation]. We’d filmed some birds flying and Libby said, “we should add some bird sounds”, so we looked on the internet but couldn’t find anything suitable that fitted our meagre budget. Then we went to Youtube and discovered several videos of a pigeon flapping. We couldn’t believe how many people were searching for and viewing these videos! While most of the sounds were low quality and unusable, they were still free. Not being able to access quality sounds free of
