Howdy y’all,

I’ve been working on a community by the name of NC-SA Bops. This isn’t self-promotion, but basically it’s a community to showcase music licensed under the BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license. However, things have gotten a little confusing, and I’m hoping to see if I can get them cleared up.

There’s a number of circumstances I need to deal with regularly. First off is what to do when the license is mismatched across multiple platforms. Sometimes I’ll see a song posted to Soundcloud stating the work is BY-NC-SA, only to have it marked as “All Rights Reserved” or “BY-SA” on other platforms like BandCamp. I was curious what I should do in these situations. Do I assume most or least restrictive?

Also sometimes I’ll come across something where in the description it’ll mark the track as BY-NC-SA, but the Creative Commons link showcases another license such as “BY-SA” or “BY-NC-ND”. In these cases would I assume based on the description, or the linked license?

Sometimes I’ll come across some music released through a record label that’ll have the BY-NC-SA license applied to the track. However I was curious if the record labels have this right, or if I should avoid sourcing tracks from labels and publishers.

Lastly, if a musician has a song included in a release involving multiple artists, with a publisher or label, does the musician themselves have the right to mark their work in the Creative Commons, or would that be up to the publishers or labels?

Thanks in advance. This would help me greatly in how to appropriately source tracks for the community I’m building.