The music problem: why your business account cannot use the trending song

Every bar owner has tried it. You make a nice clip of the Friday pour, go to add the song that is everywhere this month, and the app tells you this account can't use this audio. Or it lets you, and three days later the post is muted.

This is not a bug, and it is not a setting you missed.

What happens, platform by platform#

• Instagram and Facebook. A business account does not see the full music catalogue. What it gets is Meta's Sound Collection, a library of royalty-free tracks, plus whatever is marked for commercial use. A post that carries a song the account has no licence for can be muted or taken down by Meta's rights systems after it goes up.
• TikTok. A business account is limited to the Commercial Music Library. The trending sounds are visible and greyed out, with a note that they are not licensed for commercial use.
• Ads. Anything paid needs a licence for the music in it, with no exceptions.
• Your website and Google Business Profile. A song you could use inside one app does not travel. Download the video and post it somewhere else, and whatever licence applied is gone.

Why: the licences are for people, not businesses#

The platforms license music from the labels for personal posts. A restaurant promoting its Friday special is a commercial use, and commercial use of a recording is a separate licence (a sync licence) that the labels charge for, per track, per use. Nobody is going to clear a Bad Bunny song for a taqueria's Reel, so the platforms do the next thing: they wall it off.

What we do instead: a track for each video#

Every TownReels video has music written for it. Our pipeline composes and synthesises the track for each video, from an instrument set and a mood; there are no samples and no library tracks in it. That gives you four things a trending song cannot:

• Nobody can claim it. No mute, no takedown, no copyright notice in your inbox.
• It fits the length exactly. The track ends when the video ends, instead of fading out mid-phrase at 15 seconds.
• Your batch sounds like one place. Each video gets its own arrangement, so four videos do not share a loop, but they share a mood.
• It goes everywhere. The same file works on Instagram, TikTok, your Google profile, your website and the screen above the bar.

The four moods#

The mood is one choice in your business profile, and you can hear each before you choose. Twelve seconds of each, in the same instruments the videos use:

• Warm, for family places and comfort food.
• Upbeat, for offers and energy.
• Fresh, for bold, casual and quick.
• Late-night, for bars, cocktails and dim rooms.

Pick the one that sounds like your room at its best hour. You can change it between batches.

What you give up#

Trends. A trending sound can lift a post's reach for a week, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It also dates the video, and the sound can be pulled from under it. If you want to ride a trend on a particular post, the music in our videos is its own layer, so a version without it is a small ask; add the sound in the app, within whatever your account is allowed. For the videos that have to keep working next month, on every platform, the track that is yours is the one to use.