Official video is not a download

People say “YouTube music player” and mean two different machines. One machine embeds the official video and lets YouTube keep serving it. The other machine copies audio, hides the player, and pretends the file lives here. Only the first one is allowed on this site.

When you press play while signed in, Wave asks a match service for a video id. The channel has to be the artist, VEVO, or the official Topic page. The title has to be the same song, not a live from a different year, not a speed-up, not a “nightcore” edit. Karaoke and fan lyric channels are rejected even when they contain the artist name.

Why Topic and VEVO count

Topic channels are how many labels publish official audio on YouTube. VEVO is how many pop videos are cleared. Both are still YouTube pages. Wave does not download those files, does not restream them from our disk, and does not put a Wave ad on top of the clip. If Google’s player is unavailable, the song should fail closed — back to the licensed preview — not fail open into a copy.

What we will not add

We will not add a “download MP3” button. We will not add a third-party converter. We will not keep a cache of YouTube audio for offline. Offline on Wave is for files you uploaded yourself or a podcast you are allowed to cache. That line is how a listener-owned site stays a site, and not a piracy wrapper with nicer type.