Design platform Canva have added a massive commercial music library for use in users creations, but what for?

Canva is a platform for creating easy templates, visual designs, social media imagery, and other sorts of graphic design. So what on earth do they need music for?

Canva have just launched their music library with over 500,000 tracks. The library includes current chart-topping hits down to classics, covering all genres. Canva Pro and Education users can now explore the library and add music to their designs. Free users can browse the songs but aren’t able to add them to their content.

Earlier in the year, Canva partnered with Warner Music Group and Merlin. At the time, they explained that artists “will earn royalties when clips of their songs are used in published Canva designs”. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The bizarre thing about the music library is, you can’t use it for commercial purposes. You can only add music to your designs for personal use. Of course, if you want to publish content with music, you’ll need sync licenses.

So what counts as personal use? Home videos, travel vlogs, and social media content to personal accounts are all okay. However, if you’re a brand or company using Canva then you can’t publish Canva designs using their music library.

Platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts allow you to add music to your content. They can then compensate artists based on the your performance with a direct link to the artist and track details. When exporting from a third-party like Canva, it’s much more difficult to recognise the music and license it.

So, what’s the point for their commercial audience? Canva propose using their music library to line up your content in time with tracks. Using their Beat Sync feature, they will automatically line up your content with the song. This can help with editing and you can then upload that song to platforms like YouTube Shorts and TikTok and apply the same song from their library.

It allows you to vibe check music alongside your designs with ease as well. Canva is popularly used by companies to easily align their content output. It seems a shame that such a large portion of their audience can’t properly use this new feature.

Perhaps there are more plans for music on Canva to come.