Licence once, keep forever: how the SONICHAOS perpetual track licence actually works

A working creator does not have time to read a 14-page music licence. The SONICHAOS licence is short on purpose, and the money behind it routes through systems your accountant already trusts. This post is the plain version: scope, term, contributor split, and where the signed PDF lives.

The scope, in one paragraph

Every track on SONICHAOS comes with a worldwide, all-platform, perpetual licence on download. That covers YouTube, TikTok, Instagram Reels, X videos, Vimeo (free and paid), client deliverables, branded content, podcasts on every host, live streams on Twitch and Kick, and indie game soundtracks shipped under a royalty-free arrangement. If you can publish audio there, the licence covers it.

"Perpetual on download" — what that phrase does

The licence attaches to the published work, not to your subscription. You download a track today; you publish a video using it next month; you cancel your subscription a year later. The video stays licensed. The licence does not lapse.

Two rules sit underneath that promise:

• The download is the trigger. Auditioning a track in the player does not licence anything. The licence attaches when the WAV reaches your disk and the receipt is generated.
• The receipt is the audit trail. Every download writes a PDF signed with an ed25519 key. The signature covers the asset_id, the download time, the user_id, and the licence terms in force at that moment. If we change the terms in 2027, your 2026 download still rides on the 2026 terms.

Subscription lapses do not back-date. The video you published last month is fine. The new project you start tomorrow needs an active subscription to download fresh tracks.

What you cannot do

The licence is broad, not infinite. Three categories sit outside it:

• You cannot resell raw stems as a sample pack. Buying a SONICHAOS track gives you the right to publish it inside your work. It does not give you the right to chop it up, label it "SONICHAOS Stems Vol. 1," and sell it on Splice. Every contributor signs an exclusive deal with us; the resale path would void that.
• You cannot sub-licence to a third-party music library. Same reason.
• You cannot use a track in works that promote violence, hate, or harassment. This is in the licence in plain English; the contributor signed knowing their work would not appear in those contexts.

If you are unsure whether a use case fits, the support address answers inside one business day. Most "is this allowed" questions are some flavour of "yes, that's standard" — but it's better to ask than to push through a blocker mid-edit.

How contributor royalties work

This is the part most platforms keep behind a curtain. We do not.

• Every contributor signs an exclusive licensing deal. Their tracks are not on Splice, Artlist, Soundstripe, or Epidemic.
• Royalties pay through Stripe Connect. The contributor sets up a Connect account on signup; payouts arrive on the 7th of every month.
• The split is 60/40 on every download. Sixty percent to the contributor, forty to SONICHAOS. The split is not tiered; volume does not change it.
• Subscription revenue is pooled monthly and allocated by play-weighted share. A track that gets downloaded 1,000 times in May earns ten times what a track downloaded 100 times earns. The pool resets at the end of every month so a slow March does not penalise an artist who uploaded in April.

Currency conversion runs through Wise. Contributors in countries Stripe Connect does not cover (the list shrinks every quarter) get paid through Wise directly, with a 0.5% conversion fee absorbed by SONICHAOS.

The contributor dashboard shows the same numbers we use to compute the payout: download counts, revenue allocation, and the running balance for the current month. The numbers reconcile against Stripe's own ledger inside 24 hours of every payout.

Where the receipt lives

The signed PDF receipt for every download lives in two places:

• In your account, under /account/receipts. The receipts page filters by month, project, and track. You can re-download the PDF at any time.
• In your email inbox. A copy lands at the email on your account inside ten minutes of the download.

The receipt is the document your client's legal team will ask for. It includes the licence terms, the track ID, the contributor name, the purchase order number (if you set one), and the signature. Any auditor who checks the signature against the public key on /license will get a clean verification.

When something changes

Three changes have happened to the SONICHAOS licence in two years. Each one was published as a dated changelog entry and applied prospectively only. The receipt model means your old downloads keep the old terms; your new downloads get the new terms with the dated diff in the PDF.

If we ever introduce a breaking change — like removing a class of permitted use — every active subscriber gets 90 days' notice through email, the in-app banner, and the changelog. The receipts already issued under the old terms are unchanged.

A short FAQ

Can I use a track in a paid client deliverable? Yes. The licence covers branded content and client work; you do not need a separate "commercial" tier.

Can I use the same track in two different videos? Yes. The licence is per-track and per-publisher, not per-use.

Do I need a separate licence for monetised YouTube? No. Monetised YouTube is covered. The licence's worldwide and all-platform clauses include monetised channels.

What about content ID claims? We register every track with YouTube Content ID through our own publisher account, then immediately whitelist SONICHAOS subscribers. If a track of ours flags your video, open the dispute and reference your licence receipt; the claim resolves inside 24 hours.

The full licence document is short enough to read in five minutes. The license page has the canonical version, dated, and the public key for receipt verification.