Every Song Has a Name

This essay was first published on the Zyaku blog.

Say you've just filmed a short clip of your mother's kitchen on a festival morning. Steam off the pan, her hands moving faster than the camera can follow, a radio somewhere in the back. You want a song under it. Not any song. The one that sounds like that morning.

You open the music picker, find a track, and post. Your cousin in another city watches it on her phone. The song plays. Under the clip, in small letters, is the name of the song and the name of the person who made it.

That last line is the part I want to write about. This week, music started playing under clips, stories and live broadcasts on Zyaku. Every track you can choose carries its artist's name, its licence, and a link back to where it came from. Viewers see the name. They can also turn the music off.

It sounds like a small thing. It took us longer to get right than the part where the music plays.

A small clip deserves the right song, and the song deserves its maker's name.

The name under the clip

Somebody made every track you hear.

Most of the music you hear under short videos on the internet arrives without a name. Someone heard it somewhere, added it, and it travelled. By the time it reaches you, the person who wrote it has fallen off the end of the chain.

I didn't want Zyaku to work like that. Zyaku is meant to be a place where people get paid for what they make, readers pay for the chapter they unlock, and the work carries its maker with it. It would be a strange kind of platform that asked you to respect a comic artist and then let a musician vanish from the bottom of every clip.

So our music library holds only openly licensed tracks, the kind whose licence lets you put the song under a picture and share the result, as long as you credit the person who made it. Songs whose licence says no to that are left out, even when they're good. Every track keeps four things wherever it goes: its title, its artist, its licence, and a link to the original page.

When I explain this to people, the usual question is why we didn't just license a big catalogue of famous songs. The honest answer is that we're a young company and we don't buy what we can't pay for. The better answer is that I'd rather offer fewer songs that are really yours to use than more songs that might be taken down from under you later.

What an auditor taught me

Every line in the books points back to a piece of paper.

Before I built software, I spent years in finance. The lesson that comes back to me most often this week isn't about money moving. It's about where a number comes from.

An auditor doesn't start by asking whether a figure looks right. They ask for the voucher. Show me the invoice behind this line, the receipt, the contract. A number with a document behind it is a fact. A number without one is a question, however confident it looks on the page.

I think about content the same way now. A song under a clip is a line in a ledger. The credit is its voucher. Strip the credit off and the song is still there, still playing, still pleasant, but nobody can say where it came from or who should be thanked for it.

That idea has been quietly spreading through Zyaku for a while. The technology section of News now includes top stories from Hacker News, and each one links to the original article rather than a copy of it. Discover shows a story's picture only where the publisher provides one. And an article on Zyaku can show Independently checked only after a Zyaku reviewer, never the author, confirms it against a public source. Readers can open that source and read what was checked. Different features, same rule. If we show you something, you should be able to follow it back to where it started.

Songs people actually play

The shelf should sound like the people using it.

I'll admit something that isn't flattering. For a while, our music picker was searching a place that didn't exist. Every shelf was empty, and nobody outside the team would have known why. We rebuilt it around our own catalogue, and the picker finally opened on a shelf of real tracks.

Then we looked at what people would actually search for. Hindi. Punjabi. Workout. The shelves came back nearly bare. A music library that can't answer "Punjabi" isn't much use to a creator in Ludhiana, or to anyone in the diaspora making a clip for a wedding.

So this week the library started bringing in Hindi, Punjabi, Bollywood, devotional and workout tracks, and Trending gained Workout, Romantic, Happy and Devotional rows. It's still openly licensed music, so you won't find the latest film hit there. You will find people playing the harmonium, the dhol and the flute who chose to let others build on their work, with their names attached.

This matters to me beyond music. Zyaku already tries to meet people in the language they think in: our Offline Emergency Assistant speaks Hindi and Hinglish because in a frightening moment nobody should have to translate in their head. A creator choosing a song for their sister's sangeet deserves the same respect, even if the stakes are lower.

When we get it wrong

If we take something down, you should be able to answer.

Credit has another side. Sometimes the trouble runs the other way: someone says a piece of work belongs to them when it doesn't, or a platform removes the wrong thing.

Since last week, if something you posted is removed after a copyright notice, you can read that notice yourself and send a counter-notice from Settings, under Privacy, then Copyright notices. You don't need to find an email address or write a letter in legal English from scratch. If the person who sent the notice doesn't take it to court within the legal waiting period, your work comes back on its own. There's also a public page, zyaku.com/dmca, that explains how notices work, who receives them, and how to answer one if your own work was taken down by mistake.

I care about this because takedowns are where platforms tend to be least transparent. A post disappears, a vague email arrives, and the creator is left guessing. Zyaku already puts moderation decisions on a public ledger with a real window to appeal. Copyright deserves the same thing: if we remove your work, you should see why, and you should have a clear way to say we were wrong.

What isn't finished

Some of this works in the browser first. The apps are next.

There's plenty left.

The music plays in the browser today. Our phone apps don't play it yet; that comes with their next build, and I won't say it's there until it is. The catalogue is also smaller than anyone would like. It grows a little each day, but a creator looking for one particular sound will sometimes come up empty.

There's a harder question too. Openly licensed music is only as honest as the people who uploaded it. If someone shares a track they had no right to share, the licence label on it is wrong, and we would be passing that mistake along. The counter-notice flow helps when things go wrong. It doesn't stop them going wrong in the first place, and I don't have a perfect answer for that yet.

And credit isn't payment. Putting an artist's name under a clip is the least we can do, not the most. I'd like to get to a place where the people behind the music can be paid on Zyaku the way comic artists and journalists already can. We're not there, and I'd rather say so than dress up a credit line as something it isn't.

Pointing back

A name is the least a song is owed.

When I line up this week's changes, I see one stubborn habit. Every borrowed thing on Zyaku should point back to where it came from: a song to its artist, a headline to its publisher, a fact check to its source, a removed post to the notice that removed it.

It isn't the flashiest work we do. Nobody downloads an app because its credits are accurate. But I think trust gets built in exactly these places, in the small print people almost never read, and notice straight away when it's missing.

Back in that kitchen clip, the song plays, your cousin smiles, and somewhere a musician you'll never meet has their name on a screen in a city they've never visited. That seems like the right way round.

So here's my question for you. Is there a song, a drawing or a piece of writing you loved for years and never knew who made? I'd like to hear how you finally found out, or whether you're still looking.

Rohit Kashyap

Founder & CEO, Zyaku · Founder, TAMVEL

What's new on Zyaku · About the founder