Uppbeat

Uppbeat

Uppbeat (uppbeat.io) is a royalty-free music and SFX subscription platform for content creators, run by the licensing company Music Vine. It is a website with human-driven search and download — no npm package, no public API, no CLI. A human browses, previews, downloads an audio file, and (on the free tier) receives an attribution snippet. What you get is a license to use the track in your content, never ownership of the file.

This skill owns two things: what the license actually permits per tier (details and exact figures in references/licensing.md) and integration restraint — what audio is allowed to do on a web page, and the asset pipeline when it earns its place (references/pipeline.md).

Licensing in one honest paragraph

As of Aug 2026 (verify at uppbeat.io/pricing before anything invoiced): the free tier gives 3 downloads/month from roughly a quarter of the catalog, and every download requires pasting that track's unique Uppbeat Credit into the description of the one video it clears — monetized personal YouTube is fine, forgetting the credit means copyright claims. Premium (~$6.99/month billed yearly) unlocks the catalog, drops attribution, and safelists your connected channels against Content ID. Client work and paid advertising are NOT covered by free or Premium — that requires the business tier. No subscription covers broadcast TV/radio, cinema, or events, and nothing ever permits redistributing the audio files themselves — which includes committing raw downloads to a public repo or re-hosting tracks as a site's downloadable assets. Full tier table, edge cases, and the credit mechanics: references/licensing.md.

The restraint rules — audio on a launch page

Audio on the web is the autoplay-video problem with less tolerance. The rules, parallel to how prefers-reduced-motion governs motion:

1. Nothing autoplays with sound. Ever. Browsers block it, users hate it, and it torpedoes the credibility a launch page exists to build.
2. Sound is user-initiated and user-terminated. An explicit unmute/play control, visible state, and it stops when the element leaves the viewport.
3. Muted-by-default is the only default. A demo loop is <video muted loop playsinline autoplay> — the soundtrack exists for the users who opt in.
4. Respect prefers-reduced-motion as a proxy for sensory restraint — a user asking for less motion should not get a pulsing equalizer either.
5. Music is not polish. If a page "feels flat", the fix is motion, typography, or content — see motion-primitives, frontend-design, taste-skill — not a background track. There is no legitimate ambient soundtrack for a marketing page.

Legitimate uses in a web/launch context

• Product demo videos — a track under a screen-capture walkthrough, mixed low (dialog/VO −6 to −12 LUFS above music).
• Launch trailers — published to YouTube/socials, embedded on the page.
• Recorded walkthroughs and tutorials — consistent bed music across a series reads as production value; pick one artist/mood and stay there.
• Podcast intros/beds — podcasts are a permitted medium.
• SFX in produced video — whooshes and UI clicks inside a video. Not sitewide UI sounds on the page itself; the web stopped doing that for a reason.

The pipeline for all of these — download, loudness-normalize, compress, mux into the video, embed with the right attributes, weight budgets — is in references/pipeline.md.

When not to use Uppbeat

• Paid ad campaigns or client deliverables on a personal tier — that's a license breach with a client's name on it. Upgrade tier or use properly licensed commissioned music.
• Broadcast, cinema, events — outside every Uppbeat subscription; Music Vine sells those licenses separately.
• When silence works. Most launch pages ship zero audio and lose nothing.
• Music as a product feature (meditation app beds, game soundtracks shipped in-app): "online games or applications" appear in permitted media, but shipping extractable audio files inside an app edges into redistribution — read references/licensing.md and when in doubt ask Uppbeat support in writing.
• AI training or audio remix/resale of any kind — redistribution, never allowed.

Anti-patterns

• Committing downloaded .wav/.mp3 masters to a git repo (public repo = redistribution; any repo = bloat — keep sources in asset storage, ship only the compressed, muxed output).
• Hotlinking Uppbeat's CDN URLs instead of self-hosting your licensed, compressed derivative inside your content.
• Free-tier track in a video, credit line forgotten — the claim lands on the client's channel, not yours.
• An unmuted autoplay attribute anywhere. Browsers will block it and the fallback behavior differs per engine; design for muted-first instead.
• Swapping tracks per section of one video/page: one bed, one mood — see the selection notes in references/pipeline.md.