Tunecore rejects music made by NI - Damage Rhythmic Suits (Resolved -Incorrect Reaction by TuneCore)

Wow, that title is alarming as heck, you almost scared me there for a sec I thought something had drastically changed.

Tunecore is just a distributor, the AI is there just to prevent people from uploading copyrighted or plagiarized content. Online platforms are always vague when it comes to copyright claims, I think they do this on purpose as a deterrent. Any professional will fight the claim but since most aren't they just accept it without contesting it, this diminishes the amount of stuff they have to deal with. A claim is often nothing, it's when you escalate it that things can start to get real.

To be clear you're free to use any NI stuff for commercial use, terms might change a bit with instruments done with 3rd parties but basically, the only thing you can't do is repackage content, and this is not something TuneCore, DistroKid, etc, care about.

To give some perspective there are millions of songs using default presets that aren't tweaked even a tiny bit, and it's fine, also no one cares what DAW you used for legal stuff, now if you use a very similar sound with a very similar melody then you might get into problems, the only case I know like this is Katy Perry losing 3 million over an ostinato, a case where a jury that knew nothing about music decided that the songs "were too similar" :

For that stuff to happen and have serious repercussions there needs to be a lot of money to be gained, so I guess for a real professional composer your worst nightmare would be to score a huge movie and realize later that you used a melody+sound very similar to something else that already exists, it can happen by accident to anyone but you need it to be really big to get into actual legal problems. Similarly, Marvin Gaye also won a lawsuit VS Pharrell over a similar chord progression, there are literally millions of songs with that same chord progression, he still won but again... major money is involved here.

Anyway, the charts are filled with literally whatever is the most popular 808 kick/bass that year, nowadays people are screen capping twitch streams to get exactly the sounds popular producers use and it's all good because the sounds themselves don't matter, its more about how they're used.

If you read the above then: No, it's not that simple. What matters most is how similar the song is overall and/or how important in the song is the particular part that is claimed to be "copied" is.

If I make a song with a free loop that is the center of the song and extremely recognizable release it then you use it too also in an extremely recognizable way I might win if I or whoever handles my publishing decides to go after you... If I don't own the Master and a big label does then I don't even have a say in it, they will chase you with an expensive legal team and you will probably lose.

No offense taken my friend but there's a big difference between what we imagine should logically happen and reality no matter how much sense your assumptions actually make.

I also couldn't imagine that a jury that doesn't know where a C note is on a piano to be making decisions worth 3millions, yet... it happened; it's not an assumption or hypothetical, it happened. What is factual is non-debatable. A free loop is not anyone's intellectual property but the song made with it is. People can't own ostinatos just like they cant own free loops yet Katy lost, people also cant own chord progressions yet Pharel lost...

You also have to realize it's rarely the artist chasing you... It's the team, the team has no clue what is a free loop, synth preset, or whatever, all they know is it sounds similar and smells like money. You can personally view a free loop as being a "free-for-all" sort of thing, but from the moment someone uses it, it's not unless you use it very differently or no one ever finds out.

Future and Juice WRLD used this free loop to make this song, if you go and make a hit with it too good luck fighting the label's legal team, I guess u could try uploading it to tunecore to see what happens.

In that particular case you're safe because after 50-70 years of the author's death (depending on the country) anything copyrighted falls under the public domain and it's free to use, this is true for books, paintings, invention patents, etc... An automated service like tunecore or distrokid might still auto flag it but should be easy to dispute.

In the world of film scoring music tends to have a much higher complexity compared to more pop or urban 'beat' based genres so I assume issues should be far less common. At the end of the day its like you said, this is all very subjective when it cames to creative work, I wouldn't worry much about it unless an actual problem happens.