Crediting a hundred tracks in one description

You have a hundred tracks. Some are CC BY, some are CC BY-NC, a few came out of the YouTube Audio Library and you could not say which licence they carry. The playlist runs for days and then starts again. YouTube gives you one description field.

The guidance you will find is written for a video with one song in it. The worked examples credit a single track by name, in a sentence, in the description box. None of that scales to a hundred, and the useful surprise is that the licence has already thought about it.

This is not legal advice, and we are not lawyers. Every document is linked so you can check the wording yourself. The licence itself opens by saying Creative Commons “is not a law firm and does not provide legal services or legal advice”, and YouTube tells its own users that “If you have questions about your use of music, you may wish to consult a qualified lawyer.”

The short version. Put your credits on a web page and link to it from the description. The licence names this as a way to meet the requirement, and the box is nowhere near big enough to do it any other way. Each credit needs the title, the artist’s chosen name, where you found it, and which licence and version it carries. Leave out anything marked ND. Whether ads break a NonCommercial licence is the one question nobody has answered.

What has to go in each credit?

The duty starts when you make the music public, not while you are building the playlist on your own computer. Creative Commons draws that line in its FAQ: use material privately and you owe nobody a credit, share it and you do.

A credit under CC BY 4.0 carries six things, and five come with a condition. The five are the creator’s name and anyone else they name for attribution, a copyright notice, a notice pointing at the licence, a notice pointing at the disclaimer of warranties, and a link to the track. You owe those only if the artist supplied them: “Where an element of attribution information is not provided by the licensor, the licensee is not required to provide it.” A track whose artist page went offline years ago does not put you in an impossible position.

The sixth is on you either way. You must say which licence the track carries “and include the text of, or the URI or hyperlink to, this Public License”, whether or not anybody handed it to you. So a description box saying only “Creative Commons music” is never a complete credit, and Creative Commons uses that exact line as its example of how not to do it.

What a finished credit looks like

Creative Commons recommends a shape it calls TASL: “Whenever you are reusing CC licensed works, we recommend that the attribution include the Title, Author, Source, and License.” Note recommend. TASL is guidance rather than licence text, and the two come apart on the T: “The title is not required for proper attribution in the 4.0 licenses. It is required in all earlier versions.” List titles anyway, so listeners can find the tracks. Its own model credit is worth copying:

Theme music: “Day Bird” by Broke for Free (brokeforfree.com). Available for use under the CC BY 3.0 license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), at Free Music Archive.

Why a hundred credits will not fit in the box

YouTube’s guidance on descriptions says “The description allows a maximum of 5000 characters.” Across a hundred tracks that is fifty characters each, for a title, an artist, a link to the track and a link to the licence. It does not fit, and it is not close. That limit is documented for video descriptions. We found no YouTube page stating the limit for a live stream’s, so the figure for videos is the best there is.

Link to a credits page instead

You do not need a workaround, because the licence names the answer:

You may satisfy the conditions in Section 3(a)(1) in any reasonable manner based on the medium, means, and context in which You Share the Licensed Material. For example, it may be reasonable to satisfy the conditions by providing a URI or hyperlink to a resource that includes the required information.

That is not a clever reading of the licence. It is the example the licence itself gives. The FAQ agrees, that “you may satisfy the attribution requirement by providing a link to a place where the attribution information may be found”, and the attribution guidance recommends it for your medium: “For media such as offline materials, video, audio, and images, consider publishing a web page with attribution information.”

One word there is easy to skip. It says it may be reasonable, not that it is. The clause lets you exercise judgement about your medium; it does not hand you a guarantee.

Mistakes that cost a hundred edits to fix later

Credit the artist by the name they chose: “always give attribution to the name the author has specified, even if it is a pseudonym.”

Crediting the place you found the music is not crediting the artist. Creative Commons puts this under common pitfalls: “Unless an author specifically requests users to only credit a site, crediting the site where you have found the material cannot substitute crediting the author.” So “Music from the YouTube Audio Library” is not attribution. Neither are the tags buried in your files, since the same page warns that “many users are likely not aware of, and will never see, attribution information included in metadata”.

And no, an artist cannot tell you where to put the credit. The FAQ is direct: “Can I insist on the exact placement of the attribution credit? No.” They can ask to be credited under a particular name, and they can ask you to take their credit down, which the licence says you must do as far as is reasonably practicable. The obligation to name the licence does not come off with the rest.

Which tracks to leave out of the playlist

Anything marked ND. Playing a track under a picture makes an adaptation, and ND means no adaptations. The licence says so in the one place that governs, its own definition of Adapted Material:

For purposes of this Public License, where the Licensed Material is a musical work, performance, or sound recording, Adapted Material is always produced where the Licensed Material is synched in timed relation with a moving image.

The word is always, and the clause makes no exception for tracks that stay whole.

This catches careful readers out, because Creative Commons’ own guidance appears to say the opposite: “When you re-use music without adding new elements to it, you are not making an adaptation.” A hundred whole tracks played end to end look exactly like that. That reading loses anyway, because one of these is the licence you agreed to and the other is a guidance page. The versions page says the sync rule bites “regardless of whether the new work would be considered an adaptation under the relevant copyright law”, and the guidance page carries the warning itself: “Licenses with ‘ND’ do not allow for adaptations. Your use of CC-licensed music is often an adaptation!”

Under 4.0 you may make the synched work but not share it, and sharing it is the point of a broadcast. Under earlier versions you may not even make it.

Leave SA tracks out too. ShareAlike drags its obligations onto what you broadcast, and working out what licence the result carries is a question for Creative Commons.

One thing that is not an adaptation: converting your files so they will play down a stream. The licence allows “technical modifications necessary” to use the music in any format, and says doing so “never produces Adapted Material”.

Can you monetise a channel with NC tracks on it?

Nobody knows, and the people who would be in a position to say have declined.

The licence defines NonCommercial as “not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation”. Creative Commons explains the hedge: “it is only the primary purpose of the reuse that needs to be considered”. The same page kills two assumptions: “The definition of NonCommercial depends on the primary purpose for which the work is used, not on the category or class of reuser.” Being an individual does not put you in the clear, and having a company does not put you out of it.

Then it stops: “CC cannot advise you on what is and is not commercial use. If you are unsure, you should either contact the rights holder for clarification, or search for works that permit commercial uses.”

So whether ad revenue makes a use commercial is not published. Not by Creative Commons, which says in terms that it will not say. And not by YouTube, which states a conditional and leaves you to apply it: “You can monetize royalty-free or Creative Commons content when the license agreement grants you rights to use it commercially.” Across the seven YouTube Help pages cited at the foot of this post, which cover monetisation, licence types, the Audio Library and live streams, we did not find the letters NC. Anyone who answers this one with confidence has made it up.

Can you quarantine the NC tracks?

No. One NC track puts the question to the whole broadcast rather than to that track. Creative Commons’ worked example is close to your situation, a track under NC paired with separately licensed visuals: “When the music video is distributed as a whole, it may not be used commercially because of the NC license of the song.” The restriction applies “when the work is used in a collection or when it is adapted”, so neither framing gets you out.

Of the two courses Creative Commons offers, the second is the realistic one. Filtering for tracks that permit commercial use is a decision you make once. Emailing a hundred artists is not.

If your tracks came from the YouTube Audio Library

There is a real shortcut. The library holds two kinds of track and only one needs a credit: “If you’re using a track with a Creative Commons license, you must credit the artist in your video’s description.” It has filters named “Attribution required” and “Attribution not required”. Filter to the second and the problem disappears before you have a hundred credits to write. For the Creative Commons ones, YouTube writes the credit for you: click the Creative Commons icon in the “License type” column, “click Copy to copy the attribution text”, paste it in.

The shortcut that is not one is the panel YouTube adds under your video: “Keep in mind that if your video uses music with a Creative Commons license, the attribution info is still required in your video’s description.”

The library’s other advantage is the only protection from a Content ID claim in this post. YouTube says its downloads “won’t be claimed by a rights holder through the Content ID system”, and that “Only music and sound effects from the Audio Library are known to YouTube to be copyright-safe”.

Two things it does not say. Which Creative Commons licences those tracks carry: the page refers only to “a track with a Creative Commons license”, naming no variant and no version anywhere we could find, so the NC question above cannot be settled here either. And whether the library may be used in a live stream, which the page never mentions. The ban you may have seen is about something else: “Tracks available for licensing or revenue sharing through Creator Music can only be used in long-form videos, not Shorts or live streams.” That is Creator Music, a separate category on that same page.

A credit will not stop your stream being interrupted

Everything above is between you and the artist. Content ID is between you and YouTube, and nothing in YouTube’s documentation connects the two. All live streams are scanned for matches to third-party content, and the remedy YouTube names is the sentence to sit with:

If you’ve licensed third-party content to use in your stream, ask the owner of the content to add your channel to their allowlist through Content ID. If your channel isn’t added to their allowlist, your live stream can be interrupted even if you’ve licensed the third-party content.

Not a credit. Not a licence you can point to. Perfect compliance and a stream that gets interrupted anyway are entirely compatible outcomes.

Alongside that, YouTube’s livestream terms make the streamer warrant they hold “music licensing rights from artists, record labels, publishers (including public performance licenses) and any other royalty participants”, on a page written for people contracting with Google under the Partner Program. Check how far that reaches before leaning on it.

Questions people ask next

What if the picture is one still photograph?

A gap in the documentation. The operative licence text says “moving image”, in 4.0 and in 3.0 alike, and a single photograph held for a week is not obviously one. Nothing we read defines the term: we went through the CC BY 4.0 legal code, the CC BY 3.0 legal code, the attribution guidance and the versions page in full, and searched the FAQ. Five documents, several of which state the sync rule, and not one says what a moving image is. A still image over an audio playlist is one of the two things our own product puts on screen, so that is the reading that would suit us, and we are still not taking it. Assume the sync rule applies and pick a different track.

Does the credit have to be on screen while the track plays?

The licences do not say it does. We read the CC BY 4.0 legal code, the CC BY-NC 4.0 legal code, the attribution guidance and the NonCommercial interpretation page in full and searched the FAQ, and none imposes a timing requirement. Creative Commons’ preference is still clear: “When reasonable to do so, we recommend that you include attribution both in the description box and in the podcast recording or the video recording itself.” An unattended stream may not meet that ideal, and the flexibility clause is written for the gap.

What about tracks under an older version of the licence?

Write the licence name and its address into the credit rather than relying on the link to carry it. Under CC BY 3.0 the requirement to include the licence sits outside the “reasonable manner” flexibility that 3.0 grants for the name, title and source, and the comparison chart says reasonableness under 3.0 applies to “All but license and copyright notices”, against “All” for 4.0. Creative Commons calls the 4.0 wording “a clarification rather than a change”, but that is the steward’s opinion rather than licence text. Writing it out satisfies both readings and costs nothing.

What happens if I get a credit wrong?

The licence ends by itself: “if You fail to comply with this Public License, then Your rights under this Public License terminate automatically.” Under 4.0 there is a way back, because it reinstates automatically “as of the date the violation is cured, provided it is cured within 30 days of Your discovery of the violation”. The clock runs from your discovery, so the day you notice a missing credit is the day the thirty days start. That second chance exists only in 4.0: under 1.0 through 3.0, “express permission from the licensor is required for licensees to regain their rights to use the work”. Which is why you record the version against every track, not just the licence family.

Whose rules apply, YouTube’s or Creative Commons’?

Both, because they bind you to two different people. The CC licence is between you and the artist. YouTube’s page on licence types and its library pages are YouTube telling users what it expects on its own platform. They do not conflict in practice, because YouTube’s instruction is narrower: Creative Commons allows “any reasonable manner”, YouTube says specifically “in your video’s description”. The mistake to avoid is conflating them. Creative Commons does not require attribution in the description. YouTube does, for its own library’s tracks.

One last habit, and it has nothing to do with the licence: whatever you use to run the stream, Streamhen included, the running order and the credits page are the same list of tracks kept in two places, and they drift apart the moment you edit one and not the other.