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Frequently asked questions
Common questions about Suede: registration vs copyright, costs, AI training permissions, wallets and USDC, vaults, and what happens to your work.
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These are the questions that actually arrive, answered the way we would answer them in person. If your question is not here, the contact page works, and the product docs in this section go deeper on each surface.
Is registering with Suede the same as copyright registration?
No, and we will not pretend otherwise. A Suede registration is a timestamped, fingerprinted claim with contributors and machine-readable permissions: strong evidence and working infrastructure. Statutory copyright registration, where your jurisdiction offers it, carries distinct legal advantages and is worth doing for commercially important work. The layers stack; do both for work that matters.
Do I need a crypto wallet to use Suede?
Not to start. You can create an account, register works, set contributors and permissions without one. A wallet becomes relevant on the payment side: receiving routed royalties, participating in vaults, or selling through x402 endpoints, where settlement happens in USDC on Base.
What does it cost?
The Workspace has free and paid tiers; the pricing section on the homepage and the subscription page at app.suedeai.ai carry the current numbers, and those pages are canonical over anything written here. Agent endpoints are pay-per-call, priced by whoever publishes them.
Can I stop AI companies from training on my music?
You can state your position in machine-readable form, which is materially better than silence: crawlers and licensing agents that check permissions get an explicit answer, and you have a documented, timestamped statement of non-consent for those that do not. No registry can physically prevent a bad actor from ingesting a public file. What Suede changes is that permission stops being ambiguous, and priced consent becomes possible: you can say no, or you can say yes at a price, and a machine can act on either.
Who owns the work I register?
You do. Registration records your claim; it does not transfer anything to Suede. The same holds across the surfaces: posting on Suede Social, opening a vault, or publishing an agent flow does not move ownership. Vaults wrap rights with published revenue-share terms; the registration and splits underneath stay yours.
What happens to my records if Suede disappears?
Registry infrastructure is anchored onchain, with Base as the primary environment, precisely so records are not hostage to one company's uptime. A public, append-only anchor is hard to quietly edit or delete, including by us. Keep your own archive of source files regardless; that is good practice under any registry.
Is Suede only for musicians?
Musicians are the first and deepest audience, and the product language reflects that. The infrastructure itself, fingerprint, timestamp, contributors, permissions, routing, applies to creative work generally, and likeness and voice protection extend it to identity. If you make things and want them on the record, it is for you.
What is x402, in one paragraph?
An open standard for paying over HTTP: a server can respond to a request with machine-readable payment requirements, and the caller can settle them with a signed stablecoin payment and retry. It exists so software agents can buy things without accounts, invoices, or humans. Suede uses it as the payment rail for agent commerce, with USDC on Base as the settlement asset.
Are vault returns guaranteed?
No. A vault is participation in a creative project's revenue under published terms: share, term, cap, cadence. Published terms mean you know exactly what you are participating in; they do not mean the project's revenue is certain. Read the terms, read the project, and treat participation as support with defined economics.
How is Suede different from a distributor like DistroKid, or a protocol like Story?
Distributors move files to stores; they are not rights infrastructure, and their records say little about ownership. IP protocols build onchain rights primitives but mostly leave the creator-facing product to others. Suede is vertically integrated on purpose: the registry, the creator surfaces, the social layer, and the agent payment rail are one stack, so the record travels with the work everywhere the work goes. The comparison pages under /vs on this site go feature by feature.