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When you add a song to your Instagram profile or a TikTok story, the background licensing is already sorted. Meta and ByteDance pay massive sums to record labels so you can legally use their music without a second thought.
Telegram didn't bother with any of that. When it launched its "Music on Profile" feature, it didn't connect to Spotify, Apple Music, or a licensed catalog. Instead, they just let users pin raw audio files directly from their personal chats onto their profiles.
On paper, Telegram plays the role of a neutral platform that simply provides an audio player. In reality, this design practically begs users to go find ripped MP3s. Since barely anyone actually buys digital music files anymore, the easiest way to get a song onto your page is to run it through a YouTube downloader or a sketchy piracy bot right inside the app.
How Telegram Built a Social Feature on Straight-Up Piracy— Instead of paying for licensing deals, Telegram's profile music feature relies on users uploading ripped MP3s—quietly pushing them into legal and ethical gray zones.
Legally, Telegram shields itself behind "safe harbor" laws, meaning they aren't held liable until a record label manually flags and takes down a specific file. But by designing a feature that only functions well if people upload unlicensed audio, they’ve essentially built piracy into the user experience.
This isn't just a headache for record labels; it also creates a massive ethical dilemma for Muslim users trying to navigate digital spaces.
In Islamic jurisprudence, intellectual property is widely recognized as a creator's legitimate property (mal) under the concept of Haqq al-Ta'lif (copyright). Sourcing a ripped MP3 to bypass paying the artist or streaming it on a legitimate platform is a direct violation of Huquq al-Ibad (the rights of others). It is, quite simply, taking something that isn't yours without permission. Because of this, modern Islamic scholars generally view digital piracy as a form of theft, making the practice haram (forbidden).
By building a system that depends entirely on these pirated files, Telegram is practically nudging its users to break both legal and religious rules just to decorate their profiles. It’s a lazy engineering shortcut that shifts all the ethical and legal blame onto the user.