• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 25, 2013

Music makes video more memorable. Through Google's YouTube service, content creators can now use more than 100 tunes as background music for free. Not just in YouTube videos, but for any creative purpose. The move aims to give content creators the tools to enhance their message and simplify the process.

The YouTube Audio Library gives any YouTube creator access to more than 150 royalty-free instrumental music tracks to play in videos. Creators can find the link to the library in the video manager. It allows users to browse tracks by mood, genre, instrument and duration by category such as Dance & Electronics, Rock, Jazz & Blues, and Rock. The tool also helps creators pick an instrumental through other categories like Mood, Instrument, and Duration.

Aside from free music, Google turned comments into conversations by making improvements to YouTube's moderator tool. Comments that fans care about will rise to the top of the conversation. Moderators will have an option to block specific keywords, banish unwelcome voices and pre-approve people who contribute to meaningful discussions.

YouTube channels can access the features in the discussion tab today, but will also roll out to all watch pages and mobile by the end of the year. Brett Hobbs, YouTube software engineer, explains that getting started means connecting the YouTube account with a Google+ page or profile. Enable the discussion tab on the channel, and try the features by mentioning them in comments using the "+" symbol -- similar to the way "@" gets the attention of Twitter users, or sharing video links.

Despite Google's ambitions to provide creators with tools to make content creation easier, spam remains a drawback that some believe the company overlooks. Nexgate, which this week published the 2013 State of Social Spam report, suggests YouTube contains the highest number of risky content, or content containing profanity, threats, hates speech, and insults. For every one piece of risky content found on other social media networks, there are five pieces of risky content on YouTube, per the report.