Can You Use AI-Generated Songs Commercially? Spotify, YouTube, Ads and Clients, Answered

What “commercial use” covers in practice

Commercial use is any use where money is involved, directly or indirectly. It is a wider category than most people expect, and the line is not “am I selling the song” but “is this part of something that earns”.

• Selling or streaming the song itself: Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon, Bandcamp, a paid download on your own site.
• Monetised videos: a YouTube channel in the Partner Program, TikTok or Reels with brand deals, Twitch streams with subscriptions.
• Advertising and promotion: a jingle for a shop, a product launch video, a real-estate walkthrough, a podcast intro, a trade-show loop.
• Client work: an agency or freelancer delivering a video, an app, a game or a presentation that includes the song.
• Background music in a business: a café playlist, a waiting room, an event, a class you charge for.
• Things a commercial licence does not give you: exclusive ownership of the recording, the right to imitate a real singer's voice, or the right to use lyrics or melodies that belong to someone else.

What the Tunely licence actually says

Every paid song on Tunely carries a written licence, not a line in the terms. The wording matters if a platform or a client ever asks for proof, so here is what it grants, in the order it appears on the certificate.

• A worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive licence to use the track for personal and commercial purposes.
• The right to sell it, monetise it, or publish it for business.
• The right to sync it with video: YouTube, TikTok, Reels, ads, films, games, podcasts and presentations.
• The right to distribute it on streaming and social platforms and keep any revenue it earns.
• It does not expire and stays valid even if you later change or cancel your plan.

The conditions are short: disclose that a track was AI-made where a platform or the law requires it, don't use it for unlawful, hateful, deceptive or infringing purposes or to impersonate a real person, and understand that the licence covers that specific track (regenerating makes a new track with its own licence). Like every generative-audio service, we can't guarantee that an output is wholly unique, and the licence says so.

You'll find the same wording in section 6 of our Terms of Service. The certificate is the practical version: open your Library, tap the song's “…” menu, choose Commercial license, then Download / Print. It saves as a one-page PDF with the licensee (your account name or email), the track title and ID, the plan, the issue date and the licence code in the format TNLY-XXXXXXX-XXXXXXX. The code is derived from the song's ID, so every song gets a different one, and the same song always gets the same one.

Songs you made on the free plan before upgrading

This is the question from the email, and the one where our rule changed in September 2026. It used to be judged song by song: a song made on the free plan stayed personal-use forever, even after you upgraded. That forced people to regenerate songs they were already attached to, and an AI regeneration is not the same recording; it is a new song that happens to share the lyrics.

The rule now: while you are a Pro or Ultra member, every song in your library is licensed for commercial use, including the ones you first made on the free plan. Their certificates say so in the “basis” line at the bottom, which reads “issued to a Tunely Pro/Ultra member”. Nothing to regenerate, nothing to re-download.

If you cancel later, certificates that were already issued stay valid, because the licence is perpetual. Songs you make after returning to the free plan are personal-use again until you upgrade the next time.

Releasing to Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music through a distributor

Streaming services don't take uploads from individuals; you go through a distributor such as DistroKid, TuneCore, CD Baby or Amuse. The distributor assigns the ISRC codes, delivers the audio and artwork to each store, and collects the royalties. Here is what they will ask you for, and what the stores themselves do with AI music as of September 2026.

Two practical notes from the same email. First, formats: distributors accept MP3, although some recommend WAV. Every Tunely song downloads as a studio-quality MP3; songs made on our current engine also offer lossless WAV from the download menu, and older songs made before that engine are MP3 only. MP3 is accepted by DistroKid and every major store, so an older song does not need to be remade for release. Second, the artwork: cover art must not contain a real artist's name or likeness, and the same goes for song titles and descriptions. Paid plans include AI cover art from the song menu if you need something quickly.

YouTube, TikTok and Reels: monetisation, disclosure and Content ID

An original AI song is not someone else's recording, so it doesn't trigger the automatic Content ID claim that a chart hit would. You can use it in monetised videos under your licence. Two things trip people up.

Disclosure. YouTube requires creators to flag “realistic” altered or synthetic content: someone appearing to say or do something they didn't, altered footage of real events, realistic scenes that never happened. Using an AI-made song as a soundtrack isn't on that list, and YouTube states that disclosing AI use doesn't limit reach or affect a video's eligibility to earn money. Our licence asks you to disclose where a platform requires it, so if in doubt, tick the box; it costs you nothing.

Content ID. Registering a song with Content ID (directly or through an aggregator) usually requires exclusive rights to the recording. A Tunely licence is non-exclusive, and purely AI-generated audio may not carry a registrable copyright at all, so don't enrol Tunely songs in Content ID or in services that “claim” your music against other channels. The upside is symmetrical: nobody else can claim your video for using a song you generated.

Ads, jingles, client work and agencies

Roughly one in fifty songs made on Tunely over the last four months was made for a business: shop jingles, podcast intros, product launches, real-estate videos, a company anniversary. The licence covers all of that, and the workflow for client work is straightforward once you decide who holds the licence.

• The licensee is the account that generated the song. If you're an agency, that's you, and the licence explicitly covers using the track in ads, films, games, podcasts and presentations you deliver to clients.
• Hand the client three things: the MP3 or WAV, the certificate PDF, and one sentence in your contract saying the music is AI-generated and licensed non-exclusively. Clients want a track they can legally run; almost none need exclusivity, and you shouldn't promise it, because we can't grant it.
• If a client insists on holding the licence in their own name, the clean route is to generate the song from a Pro account in their name. The certificate is issued to whoever owns the account.
• Jingles with a brand name in the lyrics are fine. Jingles that copy an existing jingle's melody or lyrics are not; the licence never covers other people's material.

Who owns the copyright? (Licence and ownership are different questions)

The licence answers “may I use this and earn from it”. Copyright answers “can I stop others from using it”, and for AI music that answer is narrower than most people assume.

In January 2025 the US Copyright Office published Part 2 of its report on copyright and artificial intelligence, on copyrightability. Its position: output generated purely from a text prompt, with no human creative control over the result, is not protected by copyright; but human contributions are. Lyrics you wrote yourself are yours. Creative selection and arrangement, and modifications you make to AI output, can be protected to the extent of your contribution. A federal appeals court reached the same conclusion on human authorship in Thaler v. Perlmutter the same spring.

What that means for a release: you can sell and monetise the song under the licence, and you can register your own lyrics, but you probably can't stop another person from generating a similar-sounding track, and you shouldn't represent to a client that you own an enforceable copyright in the recording. If the strongest possible claim matters to you, write the lyrics yourself and shape the result; the paste-your-own-lyrics route is described in how to turn your lyrics into a song.

What goes wrong before release, from our own error logs

We looked at every failed generation from the last four months. Almost all of the “rights” problems happen at the moment of creation, not at the distributor, which is good news: the engine refuses to make the problem in the first place.

• Pasting the lyrics of an existing song. The engine rejects them with “your lyrics contain copyrighted material”. It is the single most common rights-related rejection we see. Write your own words; a licence never covers a cover of someone else's composition without a separate mechanical licence.
• Naming a real artist in the style, such as “like Drake” or “Linkin Park style”. The engine refuses to reference specific artists. Since September 2026 Tunely rewrites that automatically, replacing the name with a description of the sound, so the song still generates. On a commercial release you shouldn't name the artist anyway; distributors treat it as impersonation.
• Uploading other people's audio into the Remix tools. Cover, Extend, Mashup and Add Vocals are licensed the same way as any other paid song, but only when the audio you upload is yours. Remixing a copyrighted recording doesn't become legal because an AI touched it.
• Cloning a real singer's voice. Not possible on Tunely, and explicitly banned by Spotify's impersonation policy.

Checklist before you publish

Six things to tick off. They take a few minutes and prevent every problem in the section above.

• The song was made on a Pro or Ultra account, or the account holding it is currently Pro or Ultra. Open the certificate to confirm.
• Save the certificate PDF alongside the audio; quote the TNLY code if anyone asks.
• Lyrics are your own, or written by Tunely from your brief, not copied from an existing song.
• No real artist's name in the title, style, description or artwork; your own artist name on the release.
• Answer the AI-disclosure question truthfully at your distributor and on YouTube.
• Don't enrol the song in Content ID or any “exclusive rights” programme.

Not legal advice: we're describing our licence and the platform rules as published in September 2026. Platform policies on AI music have changed several times in the last two years, and each distributor's terms are the ones that bind your account.

What we changed after that email

Two things. The licence rule for free-plan songs now covers the whole library of a paid member, as described above. And the certificate prints on a single white page instead of splitting across two, because a two-page PDF with a dark second page is not something you want to forward to a distributor. If your question isn't answered here, write to hello@tunelyai.com from the address you signed up with; we usually reply within one business day.