How to prove a song belongs to a character that has no face
Almost every demonstration of “character consistency” is a face. Upload a portrait, generate a new angle, measure the similarity, done. That is fine for one kind of creator and useless for most of the others. A virtual singer's output is audio. A VTuber's archive is hours of video in which the character is a small overlay, or not on screen at all. A comic character lives in posts. None of that has a face to measure, and a registry that can only vouch for faces is vouching for the smallest part of a character's body of work.
So the question is not “does this image look like the character”. It is “what evidence connects this work to this character” — and the honest answer is that it is several different kinds of evidence, of different strength, and they should be kept apart.
Start with what a fingerprint does and does not do
When a work is registered here, what goes into the nightly on-chain batch is not the hash of the file. It is the hash of a small binding record that names both sides: the character's registry number and specification version, the work's own fingerprint, who registered it, what rights they declared, and when. Anyone can recompute that hash and walk the Merkle path to the chain. What it establishes is precise and narrow: this file, bound to this character at this version, was registered by this account on this date. It says nothing about whether the account had any business doing so.
Evidence that does not need a picture
Four of the seven checks on the evidence ladder work on a song, a faceless video or a text post exactly as well as on a portrait.
Timing. A derivative work has to come after the thing it derives from. The check compares the work's dates — the creation date you declare, the capture date in an image file, the publish date on the linked page — against the anchoring date of the character's specification version. “Registered after the character” is weak evidence on its own; “a file whose own metadata predates the character by two years” is strong evidence in the other direction, and the check says so.
Attribution. For a linked work, the platform fetches the page once at registration and freezes that snapshot. Out of it come the title, the author or channel name, the provider and the publish date as they stood that day. If the channel name matches the character's name or its holder's handle, the check passes; if the page names someone else, it fails, and it fails visibly. A snapshot cannot be edited after the fact, which is exactly why it is worth more than a live link.
Rights. The declaration the holder made when registering: own work, or licensed. Music is asked twice — once for the composition, once for the recording — because those are routinely held by different people and a buyer needs to know which one is on offer. This check records what was claimed, with a timestamp, so that a false declaration is a dated, signed statement rather than a vague memory.
Public exposure. How long the work has sat on the character's public page, attached to this character, without anyone objecting. Silence is not consent, but a year of public association is the kind of fact a court, or a cautious buyer, actually weighs.
The strongest evidence for a song is who published it
For most non-visual work the decisive question is not what is inside the file. It is which account is the official one. That is what channel verification is for. The holder declares a YouTube channel, an Instagram account, a Bandcamp page, a domain — and gets a one-time code to put in the bio, the channel description or any post. The platform fetches the page once, finds the code, and records the result with a date. The code contains a random part, so placing it proves control of the page; a plain link back to the character page would not, because a fan page can do that too.
Once a channel is verified, every work linked from it carries that evidence automatically. A track on the verified channel, a video on the verified channel, a post on the verified account — the buyer sees “published on a channel this holder controlled on this date” next to each one. The wording is deliberately narrow. It proves the code was there at that time, not permanent ownership of the account; that is why the verification expires after 90 days and is worth re-running before a sale.
What the visual checks add, when they apply
Three checks only make sense when there is something to look at. Markers asks whether the identity markers written into the specification — a shaved left temple, a star-shaped clip above the left ear — can actually be detected in the image or in frames sampled from a video. Palette removes the background and asks whether the subject's colours match the reference set; it is the one machine check that works for every kind of character, human or not. Visual match is an embedding comparison against the reference set: the strongest signal and the narrowest, because it needs a detectable face.
For a song, all three are not applicable, and that is how they are shown — a dash, not a red cross. The difference between “failed” and “does not apply” is the whole point of running the checks separately. A track with no picture to measure is not a track that failed a picture test.
Reading the ladder as a buyer
Put together, a song on a verified channel with a clean timing check, a matching attribution snapshot, a two-part rights declaration and eight months of public exposure is well-evidenced. Not proven — nothing here proves authorship, and the platform never claims it does — but evidenced in a way that can be written into the contract by reference and checked again in a year. That is what a registry can honestly offer for the work that has no face: not a similarity score, but a stack of dated, independent, recomputable facts about where the work came from and who put it there.