Quote Originally Posted by kikix12 View Post
They're not playing Square Enix's music at all. Cause Square Enix doesn't have any music. Square Enix is neither a music band nor a music studio. They are developers that pay artist to make music which Square Enix uses in specified amount of games. The more games, the more they need to pay, so that's usually one.
The artists, which are not part of Square Enix, hold the actual rights to the music. Square Enix only licenses it so that they are allowed to share it with the public, just like how you would need to pay the artist of a song that you want to play on stage at some bar or festival.
Wow hold on I had to address this.

You don't understand how copyright works at all. For all of the tracks Nobuo Uematsu made from FF1-FF11, he owns absolutely zero of them. He was employed by Square at the time in which his job was to create music. By standard copyright practice any and all music created by him during this time period belongs to Square unless otherwise agreed upon. After this time period he left Square, now Square Enix, and became more of a contractor. Square commissioned his work for title songs. These songs are not necessarily owned by Square, but Square currently holds the rights to use them. Square cannot however extend these rights to anyone they like (the players). These would be Answers, Dragonsong, and whatever else they pointed out for us not to play.

To loosely quote one of the devs of FFXV before the launch of the game, when asked if they could put in old FF music to listen to in the in-game car: "we own that music, and that sounds like a good idea, so we'll do that". And thusly so, a wide range of music spanning FFI - FFXIV was included in the game. Indeed, Square also owns the majority of the music within FFXIV. Not the intro title music that they commissioned from Uematsu, but all of the music created by the sound team under Square.