C2PA is metadata, and metadata is the first thing a TikTok upload strips off. So the AI-music provenance a label dutifully "added" is gone before the first play. That is the trap the EU AI Act's Article 50 deadline (Aug 2, 2026) walks labels into. We built Tessera, an Article 50 audio ingest gate, to show on screen what actually survives the trip to social. Watch one track make the case. Neon Tide, an AI-dubbed release, runs through the social-delivery transcode. The hard binding (the C2PA metadata) reads STRIPPED. Right beside it, the soft-binding watermark UUID reads RECOVERED (asset key 0x51000abc, confidence 0.989), and the manifest re-resolves from the ledger. The survival matrix then re-encodes the track through mp3-128, aac-128, and opus-96 with real ffmpeg, and the UUID comes back every time at bit-error rate 0.0. We name the scope plainly: that is our spread-spectrum mark on a fixed 12-release synthetic corpus, not an open-world guarantee, and every track here is procedurally generated audio, not real music. 🎧 Soft binding beats hard binding. That is the single most important real-world fact about C2PA, and the reason "we added C2PA" is not the same sentence as "we are covered." If your team is staring down Aug 2 and working out how provenance actually survives the wild, we would genuinely like to hear how you are thinking about it. The deadline is industry-wide, and so are the answers. #RightsTech #MusicDistribution #EUAIAct #ContentProvenance #TrustAndSafety