can I upload royalty free music into iMovie?

“Royalty Free” does not necessarily mean “Copyright Free”. Copyrighted songs are "protected" songs, with DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection. They cannot be used in iMovie. All Apple Music songs are "protected" with DRM, thus cannot be used in iMovie. Downloading Apple Music Songs to iTunes will not remove the DRM protection. Songs purchased from iTunes after year 2009 generally do not carry DRM protection, and can be used in iMovie. You can just drag the song into the audio well of the timeline of an iMovie project. Or access the song fro the iMovie media sidebar of an iMovie project.

If the above does not describe your situation, then you can post back with more details of what you mean. When you say that iMovie will not allow the songs, can you describe how you are trying to import it and what you are seeing when you try?

-- Rich

Hi Kelliermb,

Welcome to the Apple Community, where some of us do our best to help each other.

Apple have a page on how to add music to iMove:

https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/imovie/mov91a895a64/mac

The above link is fromApple's iMovie User Guide that you can find online.

The guide has lots of useful tips. Just click on Table of Contents:

https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/imovie/welcome/mac

Hope this helps you :)