Music
The Tailor Chapters team
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This question stops more families than it should. The short answer is that playing a song you own at a private service is what almost everyone does, and it is not the part worth worrying about. What changes the answer is what happens to the video afterwards.
This is general information, not legal advice, and the details differ by country. If a venue or a platform gives you a rule, that rule wins over anything here.
The service itself
A funeral or a memorial service held for family and invited guests is a private gathering. Playing a recording you own during it is ordinary practice, and it is what funeral directors expect. Venues that host services regularly, including crematoria and funeral homes, generally hold the licences that cover music played on their premises.
If you want certainty for a particular venue, one question to the funeral director settles it: “are you covered for recorded music during the service?” They are asked this often enough that the answer comes back immediately.
Nobody has ever been pursued for playing a song at a funeral. It is worth saying plainly, because the anxiety around this question is out of proportion to the risk.
Where it actually changes
The video is a different object from the service. Once it exists as a file, what you do with it matters more than what song is in it.
Keeping it and sharing it privately. Sending the file to family, putting it on a private link, keeping it on a hard drive: no practical issue. This is the ordinary use, and it is what most families do.
Posting it publicly. Uploading to a public social account is where copyright systems come into play. They are automated, and they do not know or care that the video is a memorial.
What actually happens on public platforms
It is worth knowing what the outcome usually is, because it is rarely what people fear.
On YouTube, a video containing a commercial recording is normally identified automatically. In most cases the copyright holder chooses to run advertising against it rather than remove it. The video stays up, and someone else earns from it. Occasionally a rights holder blocks the video in certain countries.
On Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, the common outcome is that the audio is muted, or that the video is blocked in some regions. The picture stays, the sound goes.
Neither outcome puts you at risk personally. Both are a poor result for a memorial, because a silent tribute video is not a tribute video.
What to do instead, if you plan to post it
Three options, in the order most families find useful.
Keep two versions. One with the song, for the service and for the family. One with different music, for anywhere public. This is the approach that gives up the least.
Use an instrumental or a cover. The association with the melody survives, and a licensed instrumental recording avoids the automated systems that flag the commercial original. Note that a cover version is still a separate recording with its own rights, so a licensed one is what you want, not any recording that happens to be a cover.
Use music that was written to be reused. Production libraries exist for exactly this. It is a compromise on the personal connection, and worth it only if posting publicly matters more than the specific song.
The song nobody can flag
There is a fourth option that families often do not know exists: a song written for the person.
Tailor Tune, of which Tailor Chapters is part, writes original songs from what you tell us about someone. Because the recording is made for you, there is no rights holder to flag it and no version of it anywhere else. It can be played at the service, kept, and posted publicly without any of the above applying.
It is not the right answer for every family. A song someone actually listened to for thirty years carries something an original cannot. But when the plan involves sharing the video widely, it removes the problem entirely rather than working around it.
Questions families ask
Does it matter that we bought the song? Buying a track gives you the right to listen to it. It does not transfer the right to broadcast or publish it. This surprises people, and it is the single most common misunderstanding on this topic.
What if the video is unlisted rather than public? An unlisted video on YouTube is still scanned automatically. Unlisted controls who can find it, not whether the platform inspects it.
Can we use a song the person wrote or performed? If they held the rights and those rights passed to the family, then yes, and it is the strongest option available. Worth confirming if there was ever a publishing arrangement.
Does any of this apply to the slideshow we play at home? No. Watching a video you made, at home, with your family, is not something copyright is concerned with.
In practice
For the service: use the song. It is what everyone does and what venues are set up for.
For anywhere public: swap the audio, or use something written to be reused.
If you send us your photographs and the song you have chosen, the video comes back in minutes. Tell us if you plan to post it publicly and we will flag anything worth knowing before you do.
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