Music Licensing Super Highway: The Rights Launches Music Clearance Infrastructure for Growing Sync Licensing Traffic

The Rights is a leading innovator in the music industry, dedicated to eradicating the friction inherent in music licensing. As former Head Of Business Affairs for iHeartMedia, The Rights founder & CEO Tres Williams licensed songs for countless projects and directly experienced the dysfunction endemic to the sync industry. Keatly Haldeman, President, The Rights, was co-founder and CEO of Dequency, the world’s first web3 sync marketplace, and co-founder and CEO of Riptide Music Group.

Dequency and The Rights recently announced they completed a merger transaction to build the industry’s new infrastructure commercial music licensing at scale. The companies bring together the best technologies developed to date using blockchain to simplify music licensing at Dequency, with The Rights remaining focused on working with the commercial music industry to solve the needs associated with licensing complex copyrights. The combined company will operate as The Rights.

Investors include Spyglass Media Group, Endeavor Entertainment, Borderless Capital, Algorand, Grit Capital Partners, Bob Pittman, Kimbal Musk, Tosca Musk, Lyndon Rive, Peter Rive, Vinny Lingham, Steve Kokinos and Brian Bedol.

The Rights (therights.com) and Dequency are joining forces to announce the public launch of their new, innovative platform designed to overhaul licensing commercial music for videos.

The Rights Sync Licensing Clearance Platform reduces the back-and-forth required to secure an audiovisual music synchronization license (aka a “sync”) for commercial music by at least 90%. It turns an inefficient system of manual paperwork and administrative burden into a streamlined quote, licensing and payment flow. The platform draws on a proprietary 90 million-song database and thoughtfully designed workflow automation processes to allow labels and publishers to process up to 10x the volume of syncs.

Developed with input from the world’s top sync licensing experts and rights holders, The Rights Platform provides the much-needed standardized licensing infrastructure to scale sync transactions. The Rights and Dequency have worked with industry heavyweights such as Kobalt Music Group and Believe Distribution to refine the platform in beta, and have received $7.5M to date in investment from Spyglass Media Group, Endeavor Entertainment, Borderless Capital, Algorand, Grit Capital Partners, Bob Pittman, Kimbal Musk, Tosca Musk, Lyndon Rive, Peter Rive, Vinny Lingham, Steve Kokinos and Brian Bedol.

Clearing music for video use has long been an industry bottleneck: every piece of content that includes music requires a sync license with all rights holders of the recording and composition, and there is no easy way to secure these rights. As a result, video creators and advertisers often turn to easy-to-clear production music and increasingly AI-generated music as a replacement for their preferred choices. By some estimates, this low-cost, high-volume music sector is forecast to grow to $2.9 billion by 2032, siphoning revenue away from the artists and writers of the world’s most-desired songs.

The Rights’ extensive database facilitates direct connections to licensing contacts at labels and publishers. Its data science team optimizes works-to-ownership relationships and matching across rights holder data feeds via machine learning and data linking. This approach not only streamlines the workflow for licensees by offering fee estimates and one-stop transactions, but also provides licensors instant onboarding and a dashboard to manage license requests efficiently at scale using their own agreements.

“Sync licensing has remained largely untouched by tech efficiencies within the music industry,” said Keatly Haldeman, President of The Rights and founder of on-chain sync licensing company Dequency. “Our goal is to create infrastructure for the industry to make the clearance process smooth for both rights holders and licensees. The Rights has the unique ability to ‘one-stopify’ licensing so a track with multiple rights holders can be cleared in a single transaction. If adopted industry-wide, The Rights system could turbocharge commercial music sync deals and unlock billions in new revenue for labels and publishers and the artists and songwriters they represent.”

The Rights is spearheaded by music industry veterans with decades of experience on both sides of sync licensing. “Commercial music rights owners have faced a daunting landscape with a multi-rightsholder system and a process often bewildering for anyone but the most experienced licensing professionals,” commented Tres Williams, founder and CEO of The Rights. “Our aim is to equip both licensors and licensees with the necessary tools to navigate this landscape more effectively.  We can match the agility of production music libraries and one-stop catalogs yet offer the pricing flexibility, consent rights, and customized terms required to maintain the premium value of commercial music.”

“There’s now an ever-growing ocean of content being created, to which our artists’ and songwriters’ music simply does not have access,” says Tom Stingemore, music industry veteran and founder of industry-wide, back-end data platform, ALLOY sync distro. “We’ve all got the same problem and empowering artist-centric sync platforms like The Rights is clearly the solution.”

© 2024, Seth “Digital Crates” Barmash. All rights reserved.