Why I Started Creds

Years ago now I was building a full time career on Twitch and YouTube playing video games. Things were going so well that I wanted to do things properly which meant licensing the music I used in my streams and videos.

So I started looking.

I went down every forum I could find. Sent emails to labels and publishers. Asked friends who worked in the industry. Nobody had a straight answer. Not because the rules don't exist, they do and they're clear, but the workflow for actually following them was nowhere to be found. Where do you even go to clear a track for online content? Despite all the emails and conversations I genuinely couldn't figure it out.

I sent around 300 licensing requests and I got one response. An automated reply telling me the track wasn't in the budget.

That was a reality that stuck with me and never shifted.

The rules weren't the problem

The more I sat with it, the more I realised this wasn't a me problem. I'd been more thorough in trying to solve this problem than any creator I knew of. If I was willing to do all that and couldn't get a licence, what did that mean for everyone else?

It meant they didn't bother. They used the music anyway or they defaulted to stock tracks or they just hoped nobody came after them.

The copyright laws aren't broken, the ownership structures do work, but the rules that govern music licensing have been built and refined over decades by people who care about protecting artists. What doesn't work is the workflow those rules live inside: manual, fragmented, built for a world of film, TV and traditional advertising. Not for millions of creators publishing daily content.

The system was never designed for what content creation has become and we haven't built the systems to keep up.

The first attempt

I didn't move straight to the platform we've built today. My first attempt was a blockchain-based licensing protocol: smart contracts, decentralised infrastructure, the whole architecture built around removing any central point of control.

It took months and cost close to £15,000 to build. The early feedback from people in the industry was consistent. The concept was interesting. Getting a real catalogue onto decentralised infrastructure wasn't realistic for how rights holders actually operate day to day. It solved a problem nobody had asked me to solve, and created a new one: nobody wanted to adopt it.

That was the most useful rejection I've had. Building something an industry isn't ready to adopt is the same as building nothing.

So I scrapped it. What replaced it was centralised: rights holders control and verify their own data, licensing terms are programmable, approvals move without any blockchain overhead sitting underneath. Same underlying idea, built in a shape the industry could actually pick up.

That's the model Creds runs on today.

Why Creds, why now

Content creation has changed the scale of the problem completely. Billions of pieces of commercial content are now published every year: brand posts, monetised creator channels, social advertising, and almost none of it is properly licensed. Our own audit puts the unlicensed commercial music market at £12b+ annually. That's not a hypothetical future problem. It's already happening.

The infrastructure to fix it hasn't existed. Not for independent artists who want their music licensed without a team of lawyers. Not for brands who want to do the right thing but can't get a straight answer. Not for platforms who want to embed licensing from the start.

Creds is building that infrastructure. Verified ownership records. Automated approval workflows. Licensing that moves at the speed creators and brands actually work at. We're not changing the rules. We're building the layer that makes following them possible.

If you're a creator, a brand, or a platform who's hit the same wall I hit, that's exactly what we're here for.

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That's why Creds exists. Come and see what we've built.