Why use a loop that isn’t royalty-free? Part 1 ft Karl Fowlkes, Esq

Start with the phrase, because the phrase is doing damage. “Royalty-free” describes the license you bought, not the song you are about to make with it. It means the seller will not come back for a recurring fee on the loop itself. It says nothing at all about who owns the composition that results.

Two separate rights sit inside every record. There is the master, which is the specific recording, and there is the composition, which is the underlying song. A loop you drop into a beat becomes part of the composition. Whoever wrote that loop has a claim on it regardless of the words printed on the download page, unless the paperwork explicitly says otherwise.

Where this actually bites

Nowhere, for a long time. An uncleared loop in a beat that nobody places is a problem that never surfaces. It surfaces at exactly the moment things go right: an artist wants the beat, their team runs clearance, and someone asks where the melody came from. Now you are renegotiating from the weakest position available, because the record already exists and everybody wants it out.

The alternative is not to avoid loops. It is to know the terms before you build on them. A loop with a stated, upfront split is a known quantity. A loop marked royalty-free by an anonymous seller on a forum is an unknown one, and the unknown only resolves when it is expensive.

What we do instead

Melody does not use the phrase. Every melody in the catalog comes with the terms settled in advance: the producer who made it keeps ten percent of the publishing and a writing credit, and that is it. No further negotiation, nothing to discover later. You can dislike the ten percent, but you will never be surprised by it.

Karl Fowlkes is an entertainment attorney and sits on the app's board of advisors. His version of this argument is in the video above, and part two continues it.