Creators will be able to drop up to 60 seconds of hit songs into videos in Adobe’s free editing app, but only for personal, non-commercial projects.
The hardest part of making a video for social media has never been the editing. It has been the music. Use a hit song without a license and your post gets muted, flagged or pulled. Adobe now wants to make that problem disappear for everyday creators, at least for their personal projects.
Adobe announced Tuesday that it has struck separate partnerships with Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group to bring fully licensed music from leading artists into Premiere mobile, its free video editing app for iPhone and Android. The deals put two of the three major record labels directly inside a free editor, a significant move for an app built for TikTok, Reels and Shorts creators.
Once the feature arrives, users will be able to browse, search and preview trending tracks by artist or song, filter by genre and length, bookmark favorites and explore collections curated by the labels themselves. Creators can drop up to 60 seconds of a popular track into a video, and Adobe is adding music-powered templates that pair a song with an edit from the start. Finished videos can be exported to YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Instagram Reels.
“Our partnership with Adobe Premiere mobile integrates WMG’s catalog directly into the creative process,” said Rachel Scarpati, Warner Music Group’s VP of digital strategy and business development. Bryan Stone, senior vice president of business development at UMG, also backed the deal in the announcement.
There is an important catch. The tracks are licensed for personal, non-commercial use only. Anyone making paid or branded content will still need to clear music through Adobe Stock Audio. For filmmakers, that line matters more than it might seem. A fan edit or a personal behind-the-scenes clip is fine. A trailer, a promo for a film’s release or a sponsored post for a brand almost certainly counts as commercial work, which means the indie director cutting a teaser for a festival premiere will still have to license music the old-fashioned way.
Adobe has not announced a release date, describing the feature only as “coming soon.” The company also has not said how many tracks will be available, whether the full catalogs of both labels will be included, whether Universal and Warner music will arrive at the same time or whether the feature will come to Premiere Pro, its flagship desktop editor. Sony Music, the third major label, is not part of the announcement.
The move puts Adobe in a crowded fight for creators. Canva launched a licensed music library with 60-second, non-commercial clips in 2023, Meta’s Edits app arrived in 2025 backed by its own label agreements, and Adobe brought TikTok’s Commercial Music Library to Adobe Express in 2024. By adding Universal and Warner to a free app, Adobe is betting that recognizable songs, not just stock tracks, are what will pull young creators away from the editing tools built into the social platforms themselves.
For Adobe, there is a longer-term logic too. Premiere mobile is a gateway product. Creators who learn to edit on their phones with a familiar Adobe interface are the same creators who may one day graduate to paid Creative Cloud tools, and putting their favorite songs one tap away is a strong reason to start there.
