A question if anyone knows about when TV and radio shows use popular music in the background. Its usuallyconsists of a few rifts or catchy verses without any lyrics. Do they make these themselves or are these readily available though some channel I do not know about or not very accessible to the general public?

Thanks if anyone knows

Green Day - Geek Stink Breath is an example of a song that I still hear used today

Not sure completely, but I suppose they either

a) Paid some royalties to the record company to get a vocal-less edited-down song
b) (the cheaper way) Paid some royalties to the record company for the rights, but got a couple studio musicians to lay down the riffs. That way they don't pay the recording royalty, only the music royalty, see?

i figured it was something like that, because i tried to make a few myself but i didn't work out that great, but i am no audio mixing engineer

i just wondered if there was some CD that came out every so many months with the popular rifts

Often they just loop a certain section of the song, usually sans vocals.

It's pretty hard to take a section of a song from the CD and edit it, you've got to be precise exactly down to the fraction of a beat (my experiments show that I'm personally sensitive to timing shifts of as little as 5 ms, though I'm a drummer =D), and really tweak the crossfades between sections of music. It really helps if the original was recorded to a click track.