For the Spieluhr app I wanted to keep things simple. Nine lullabies, all ancient: Fr\u00e8re Jacques and other nursery songs our great-grandparents already sang. The melodies have long been in the public domain. What could possibly go wrong?<\/p>\n
The plan was simple. In a stock music library I had found lovely music box recordings with exactly the right sound. Buy a licence, build it in, done.<\/p>\n
And it said quite clearly: I may use the music as background. In a video, a podcast, as background in a game. What I may not do is play it unchanged and on its own.<\/p>\n
But in a music box app, that is exactly the core. You tap the felt animal, and the song plays. Pure, with nothing else. The music isn\u2019t the accompaniment to the product, it is the product. To the platform, that looks like redistributing their recordings, and that\u2019s exactly what they want to prevent. I even understand it.<\/p>\n
My real lesson: a public-domain melody doesn\u2019t mean every recording of it is free. Arrangement and performance have their own rights. I sort of knew that, but I hadn\u2019t thought it through.<\/p>\n
The whole app was built with a lot of vibe coding, with AI as a sparring partner in the code. So the question was obvious: why not the music too?<\/p>\n
So I simply had an AI regenerate the old melodies as music box pieces. The same songs, new recordings that didn\u2019t exist before. The result sounds the way a music box should.<\/p>\n
Honestly, I was surprised how well it works. And it turns the situation around: the library wanted to prevent exactly this use. Now I have my own pieces, built on melodies that no longer belong to anyone. For us, that\u2019s the cleanest licensing solution there is.<\/p>\n
I find this development exciting. A few years ago I would have had to hire someone for something like this, or sit at the keyboard for hours myself. Today, a few good prompts and a bit of patience are enough.<\/p>\n