Music on posts: how licensed audio actually gets to the app

The problem music picks up

Music on user-generated video is a legal minefield. A creator picks a track that fits the mood; the platform embeds it; downstream, a rights-holder disputes the licence; the platform scrubs a swath of user content with no notice. Everyone involved is unhappy — the creator who lost their post, the audience who lost the material, the platform whose credibility took a hit, and the rights-holder whose brand associates with the removal.

The industry's answer to this is either "aggressive audio fingerprinting that catches unlicensed tracks at upload" or "a curated library where every track is pre-licensed." Both have costs. Fingerprinting is a whack-a-mole; a pre-licensed library shrinks creator choice.

Seldeo went with the pre-licensed library, sourced from a music-licensing partner. We accept the smaller library in exchange for two things: a strong assertion that every track on the system is licensed for the use to which it's being put, and a strong attribution model that respects the artists.

What our music licence covers

The licence Seldeo holds:

Covers synchronisation with user-generated video on the Seldeo platform.
Covers on-device playback during video editing and final render.
Covers cross-platform distribution — the same audio bed plays on iOS and Android.
Does not cover the sale of the track as a standalone audio file, or its use outside a Seldeo video.

For each track in the catalogue, we know:

The artist's name.
The track title.
The duration and BPM.
An internal track identifier for rights lookup.
The license terms in force at the time the track is attached to a piece of Seldeo content.

What "attribution" means on Seldeo

Every reel with a licensed track shows:

The track title and artist name below the video, in the same font weight as the caption.
A tap target on the track chip that opens the artist's Seldeo-hosted page — a small page with the artist's name, photo (if provided), a short bio, links back to their own channels, and a list of other tracks by the same artist in the Seldeo library.
A subtle "Music" chip in the reel composer that stays visible after the track is chosen so the creator knows, through the whole editing flow, which track they picked.

Attribution is not optional. There is no "hide track credit" toggle. This is deliberate: artists get real value from named attribution across a distributed audience, and it's a small courtesy in return for their work being embedded in ours.

The technical path from library to reel

Here's the end-to-end path of a licensed track through the Seldeo reels stack:

Composer opens the music library. The composer asks our backend for a paginated list of tracks. The library payload comes from a local mirror we maintain of the licensed catalogue, updated nightly.
User picks a track. The composer downloads the audio preview and starts letting the user trim, offset, and normalise the track against their video.
Trim + offset finalised. When the user hits "Next," the composer stitches the audio at the chosen offset, normalises to the platform's loudness target, and holds the intermediate in the app's temporary storage.
Publish. On publish, the reel and the trimmed audio bed are uploaded together. The server-side pipeline validates the track against the current licence for the user's region, embeds the audio into the final rendered video, and stores a rights-linkage row pointing back to the track's identifier.
View. When a viewer plays the reel, the client renders the "Music" chip from the rights linkage; the audio is part of the video file itself.

The client never touches raw catalogue data other than the subset we authorise for their region. The server never publishes a reel with a track whose licence has lapsed.

What happens if a track's licence changes

The scenario we most want to handle gracefully is the one where a track is later withdrawn from the licensed catalogue, or the licence terms change in a way that affects Seldeo's rights.

Our response:

The reel does not silently disappear. Nothing is auto-deleted.
Playback is muted forward. New viewers see the reel with a small "Music unavailable" notice in place of the Music chip. The video itself continues to play; only the audio bed is muted server-side.
The creator is notified. The reel's owner sees an in-app notice with the track title and the option to swap in a different track from the catalogue while preserving reactions and comments.
The archived version stays available for export. If the reel is exported through Data portability, the export includes the original track's licence metadata as it stood at publication time.

This mirrors how we handle music-industry rights events elsewhere on the site: preserve the historical record, minimise the surprise for the creator, and never quietly delete user content.

What's not on the roadmap

Uploaded music. Bring-your-own audio is not supported and, unless we get a very different rights regime, will not be supported. Uploaded music is a fingerprinting problem, not a library problem.
Music-on-posts (still photos). Music tracks attach only to reels — the video format. Photo posts don't get background music, at least in the current release.
In-app music sales. We don't sell tracks to users. Artists interested in commercial licensing outside a Seldeo reel can be reached through the artist page in the library.

Working with us

If you're a musician or a rights-holder and want to be represented in the Seldeo reels library, email music@seldeo.com and we'll route you to our licensing partner. If you're a rights-holder who believes a specific track is being used out of scope on our platform, the same address is our takedown route, and we treat those reports with the same seriousness we treat any other content-removal request. Details on the DMCA-specific flow are in the DMCA page.

What we still owe artists

Better track-page analytics. Artists whose tracks are in the Seldeo library deserve to see how their tracks are being used — how many reels feature them, how many views those reels have earned, and (with the artist's opt-in) the option to reach out to creators who used their tracks.
A featured-artist track. A small, well-curated "artist of the week" slot in the composer so a new artist has a path to visibility.
A cleaner catalogue mirror. A better sync process that ensures our local catalogue is in step with the licensed rights within hours, not by end of day.

Music on Seldeo should feel like it belongs there — that the artist chose to be there, that the platform is a good steward of their work, and that the creator using their track is supporting them by doing so. That is the standard we hold this part of the product to.