The Rules work. The Workflow Doesn't

I don't believe that copyright law is broken.

I do believe that the systems to prevent these laws being broken is fundamentally flawed.

The framework that protects artists and rights holders, the principles of ownership, the structure of splits, the rules around clearance has been built and refined over decades. They work. Rights holders who have spent years defending that framework are right to defend it.

What I am here to say is this: the workflow those rules live inside is completely unfit for the world we're operating in now.

What the workflow was built for

Music licensing was designed for film, TV and traditional advertising. Long lead times, structured deals, small volumes and sync supervisors spending weeks clearing a handful of tracks for a campaign was normal. That was fine in the days where media moved slow enough to wait for approval.

Whilst that world still exists we have a whole new creator economy growing exponentially every single year.

Modern short and long form content creation has changed the game entirely. Millions of creators are publishing daily content with music being a pivotal part of how the video is received. Brands are also running dozens of campaigns simultaneously across multiple platforms yet there is no licensing embed at the point of upload to accommodate commercial use. The demand for music licensing is now running at a speed and scale the existing workflow can not handle.

What happens when workflow can't keep pace

When licensing is too slow, people often default to royalty free music. They use unlicensed tracks and hope nobody notices. They build workarounds such as the biggest gaming streamers on the planet running two separate computers so they can stream with commercial music on one while recording DMCA-safe clips on the other. That entire infrastructure exists because the licensing workflow can't move fast enough.

The status quo isn't neutral. Every time a creator defaults to a stock track instead of a real artist's music, that's a licensing event that didn't happen. Every time a brand chooses an AI-generated track to avoid the clearance headache, that's revenue the rights holder never saw. Our audit puts the unlicensed commercial music market at £12 billion annually. That number is only going to grow.

Creators and brands want to do the right thing. They just can't navigate the licensing processes we already have.

What the licensing workflow actually looks like today

When I was a content creator trying to license music for my streams, I sent around 300 licensing requests to labels and publishers. I got one response, an automated reply.

That's not unusual. Licensing form submissions get sent to an inbox, logged in a spreadsheet, and worked through when someone has time. Sometimes an intern processes the backlog months later. The information and tools available to most people trying to license music commercially simply aren't there.

This isn't a criticism of the people working in licensing. It's a structural problem. The volume of requests the creator economy generates is orders of magnitude beyond what the existing workflow was built to handle. No individual sync manager is the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the absence of infrastructure that makes licensing programmable at scale.

What infrastructure actually changes

When Stripe was built, it didn't change the rules of financial transactions. Payments were already legal. Merchants already knew they needed to get paid. What Stripe did was make the underlying process programmable and accessible via API, repeatable at scale, fast enough to not be the limiting factor in building a business.

The same principle applies to music licensing. The rights exist, ownership is documented (imperfectly), but it exists. What's missing is the infrastructure layer that makes licensing queryable, clearable, and auditable at the speed and volume the market is demanding.

Programmable licensing doesn't replace sync managers or agencies. It gives them a workflow that can keep pace. It means a rights holder can define at the organisation level: these are the categories we'll license to, these are the ones we won't, this is the process, these are the rates. And then that process runs without every individual request needing manual intervention.

One verified record of ownership. Clear approval workflows. Uniform data. Licensing that moves at content speed.

Why this matters now

AI is accelerating the urgency. The next wave of platforms, and the next wave of content, will need music licensing embedded from the start. Not bolted on after a legal crisis. The pattern of building first and settling licensing disputes later is already established. Spotify launched with major label deals in place but still paid $30 million in 2016 to settle a class action over unpaid mechanical royalties owed to songwriters and publishers. YouTube spent years fighting rights disputes with labels and publishers before building Content ID to manage claims at the scale its platform demanded. TikTok lost a major label's entire catalogue for three months in 2024 after a licensing dispute over artist compensation. The pattern repeats because the infrastructure to do it differently hasn't existed.

This isn't about technology for technology's sake. It's about the gap between the value music creates and the value that actually flows back to rights holders. That gap is already enormous.

The rules work. They always have. What we're building is the workflow those rules deserve.