You are free to share your Sing! performances as links pointing to your song on Smule.com, but even though you sang the song, it doesn’t mean that it is all yours. You still used someone else’s lyrics and someone else’s musical composition. It’s someone else’s piece of art and the actual copyright owners have the right to decide how their art is being used (i.e. where it is used, what people need to pay to use it and so on). And so they might not agree to their songs being distributed for free on social networks for example—Karaoke version or not. Or they might not even allow it to be used in the Sing! app, once they learn that it was uploaded there.Â
It is important to understand that there are two types of songs in the Sing! app:Â Songs from the official songbook, and community songbook songs. The official songs are new recordings and Smule has negotiated the rights to use the songs within the app. Sharing these songs is usually not a problem.Â
The community songs however are uploaded by users of the app without any rights negotiations. If they have recorded these songs themselves (e.g. as acoustic version) sharing (e.g. as video on Facebook) also usually works without problems. But other songs might just be ripped from albums, YouTube channels and other sources. If you share a video based on such a song on Facebook, the original songs might get detected automatically and Facebook might instantly remove the video. This is not a mistake. The copyright owners have the right to enforce this and we, as people who sing their songs and love their music, should also respect that. It’s their profession and they can rightfully choose to not have their art used without licenses (i.e. payments).Â
If your Smule performance got taken down after being uploaded to Facebook, you can usually appeal and get the upload published again, but be careful! Your rights to upload videos might get revoked if you continue to upload copyrighted songs. The only safe option is to share links to smule.com instead of uploading the video, because only the latter is a redistribution of potentially copyrighted material. The downside is that linked songs don’t play automatically in the timeline or on your profile, but the advantage is that the audio and video quality is much better.Â