Episode 105: How Micro-Licensing Could Change The Music Industry

You can feel it happening: people are watching less legacy television, and the internet is filling the gap with an endless stream of short-form video, livestreams, indie games, podcasts, and creator-led brands. That shift doesn’t just change how audiences consume media, it changes how music needs to be licensed. I’m looking at micro licensing, a model that could become a major force over the next five to ten years as the modern music industry scrambles to match the speed and scale of the creator economy.

We unpack what micro licensing actually means in practice: moving away from a slow, negotiation-heavy sync licensing process built for rare, high-value placements, and towards instant clearance for thousands (or even millions) of smaller uses. I talk through why the pricing model matters, why creators sometimes default to AI-generated music when licensing is too hard, and how a long-tail revenue economy could create meaningful income for rights holders if the infrastructure is right.

Then we get honest about the risks: value dilution, messy global rights, and the growing chaos around AI ownership and attribution. I also explore what could make this workable at scale, including strong metadata, smarter rights databases, and API-driven licensing that distributors could potentially plug into. Finally, I share a standout early market mover I’ve been researching, and why I’m pushing for independent artists, songwriters, and producers to be included rather than left behind.

If you want to understand where music licensing is heading and how to prepare your catalogue for what’s next, listen now. Subscribe, share this with a fellow creator, and leave a review with your take: does micro licensing empower independents, or does it risk making music feel disposable?

Transcript

Welcome And What We Decode

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Music Business Body, the podcast decoding how the modern music industry actually works. I'm Johnny Amott, industry consultant, artist manager, producer, educator, and author of the music business for music creators. Every Wednesday I explore the ideas, technology, and industry shifts shaping the future of music. This show helps creators navigate the rapidly changing business of music.

Why Sync Licensing Feels Dated

SPEAKER_01 0:41

This week's episode, I want to talk to you about micro licensing. Now, it might be a new term for some of you, it might be uh a term you've heard before, um, but I'm just going to explain its relevance in this week's session because I boldly predict that it's going to become a much bigger thing in the next five to ten years. So I'm going to go into what it is and what you need to be aware of moving forward. But let me start with a question. Are you watching less television than you used to? Have a think about it for a minute. And by that I mean uh network television, cable television, satellite television, that kind of thing. If you're consuming uh your content in other forms away from that, if you're kind of watching less legacy television, if you will, and more content uh on tablets, on phones, on laptops, etc., uh then actually your habits fall in line with millions and millions of others. Now that's fine, right? Because things evolve. I would include myself in that bracket as well. But here's the thing to think about, right? Over the years, the music industry has become very accustomed to making a lot of its money through the media, right? Now, the creator economy is not only changing music, but it's also changing media. Now, our habits are changing in media, and our habits have already changed in music. To boil that down to something simple, it is this the old model of sync licensing in music still exists and it still works, but it's becoming dated because of the way that we are consuming media. So, what we need to do is to actually shift to an entirely new infrastructure that caters for it, and that is where micro licensing enters the picture.

What Micro Licensing Actually Means

SPEAKER_01 2:32

So, at its simplest, if we think traditional sync licensing involves negotiations, sometimes even lawyers and music supervisors and chains, kind of like buying a house, right? There's like a big long chain to it. If that chain isn't there, and instead it's smaller, faster, more scalable, and instant, then it becomes easier to work with. And that's micro licensing, right? So I'm gonna go into a bit more detail on what that actually looks like. Now, instead of thinking of a song and its associated recording as getting one big kind of placement on, let's say, a Netflix show, instead, it's about maybe getting thousands, maybe even millions of micro usages. Now, as we know, modern media creation has exploded in recent years, right? In in a whole manner of different ways. So if we think about some of the roles that exist in this era, we need to think about how music licenses itself for those users. Because if we go, well, you know, this song gets used over here in front of a big audience, the PROs understand what that looks like. So if you perform live and you play in front of 10 people, your PRO is not going to pay you for those song copyrights as much as you would get if you were playing it in front of 10,000 people. Easy maths, right? Therefore, if we see independent filmmakers, YouTubers, content creators looking to license music at scale with a lot of use, the pricing model is not always there for the minute. And actually, it means that they're going down other routes by using AI-generated music, all that kind of stuff. Now, if they can find a way to actually license something for a much smaller fee, they're gonna be more inclined to use it. So let's imagine that you've got somebody that makes um, I don't know, YouTube content um about health and fitness and go into the gym, right? One of the things that would surely help their content is if they can license a song like Survivor's Eye of the Tiger, right? It will just grow that piece of content a lot easier. And right now, that's probably quite difficult to license. But what if it wasn't? What if for one fraction of what you would normally pay for a bigger sync license fee, you could pay a micro license fee, which still remunerates the rights holders, but on a much smaller level. That is micro licensing. So now we're seeing TikTok creators and YouTubers, live streamers, indie game developers, AI creators, social editors, virtual worlds, podcasts, creator brands, indie filmmakers, short form video at massive scale. Traditional licensing systems were not designed for this, and they are struggling to actually understand how the platforms build themselves inside of that ecostructure. Therefore, the music industry is being forced into changing the scale of how it licenses music. And again, that's where micro licensing comes into the picture.

The Three Forces Driving Change

SPEAKER_01 5:36

Okay, now here is why micro licensing really matters for music creators. So micro licensing potentially creates a long tail revenue economy, right? So instead of relying upon one huge placement, artists may eventually earn from thousands of smaller uses. And this is why it's becoming more important now. We are at the intersection of three pretty major shifts, right? We've got the creator economy explosion, so millions of creators who now need music, and traditional sync systems that can't scale fast enough to keep up with it. We've then got the AI content explosion, so AI generated content could massively increase things like video creation, digital environments in general, and that sort of infinite demand for licensable music. And also the rights infrastructure. We know that this is starting to improve with metadata and blockchain, AI search, and rights databases are getting much more sophisticated. So that enables automated licensing at scale. Now, this is a fascinating subject, but also we need to be able to not be reactive to this but actually prepare for it properly, because there are some problems that potentially could come with it, right? So let's have a look

Risks Rights Mess And AI Chaos

SPEAKER_01 6:56

at those. Microlicensing could create value dilution. So some people might fear that music becomes too cheap, right? So if it becomes too cheap, it becomes hyperscaled and it becomes automated, it could change the way that music value is perceived because people might forget that actually it's catering for a smaller audience rather than a traditional larger audience. The rights complexity, we all well, I've talked about this on a lot of podcasts, right? Music rights are already pretty messy, right? Publishing territory, uh different territories having different kinds of systems on uh collection, uh performance rights, neighbouring rights, masters, of course, as well. Um, scaling micro licensing globally is going to be pretty difficult, right? Not impossible, but it's certainly a tall order. The other thing is this, right? AI and ownership chaos. Now, as AI generated music increases, it becomes much more fragmented as to who owns what and how creators are being paid and how rights are being tracked and all that kind of stuff. Now, I wonder if we start to see independent music distributors that actually build in the API of other companies that can offer this kind of scale. So imagine uploading your music to let's say TuneCore, Ditto, Distro Kids, somewhere like that, and then being given the option to be able to say, would right now they give the options to be able to say, do you want this delivered to social media? Do you want content IDs? That's great. That's not really what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about is can this be scaled into media by having a distributor who's already got the metadata of who wrote what and who owns the recording, all that metadata for ownership is within a distributor. So if a distributor can build in partnerships with other companies that can actually offer this at scale, then an instant clearance process could actually become quite viable. So then that leads us on to a really interesting shift, and that is

Instant Clearance Via APIs

SPEAKER_01 9:00

this. Micro licensing may fundamentally shift music from high value rare placements into high volume continuous utility. Now that is a completely different conceptual shift. Can it happen? I don't know. Maybe I don't necessarily feel like it's something that replaces something that came before, it's more about coexistence. So, not for one minute am I saying, oh, those days of the big sync placements are gone. I'm saying that this is another system that kind of works towards supporting creators that are not on big channels or on big networks that can still license music. So it's not like uh it's just a different market, right? It's not like it replaces what's currently there, it just coexists. At least that's how I see it, unless I'm missing something.

Cordle As An Early Market Mover

SPEAKER_01 9:50

Now, what I've tried to do with this is to look at who the early market movers are in this area of micro licensing. And I think there are a few, but one really, really caught my eye, and that is a company called Cordle, right? So Cord A L, Caudal, right? They're not paying me, by the way, to mention them. Uh they came up in my research in three or four different sources, and they kept getting led back to something that they've built, which I think is very interesting. So let's take a look at what they do. All right, so here's their website, and they've got uh some proprietary information on instant clear, right? So if we look at uh what they actually do, what we can see is that they've already started to do this, right? So 189,159 clearances, fractional payouts, and counting. And they you can see here that they're dealing with a lot of different brands, right? Um, so what they've got is they've got something that also is built into TikTok, which allows for content creators to be able to license music very, very, very quickly. Now, here's the thing, right? If you click on here over here, you've got instant clear on Cordal and then Instant Clear API. This falls in line with what I said about distributors a moment ago. Because if the API is there and it clearly is, and it could be built into other partnerships, then that is where we could see this kind of start to move up a little bit more in scale. Now, what's really interesting is this. If we go over here to the creative suite, what we can see is for music companies, for music supervisors and content companies, and then we've got this for artists, songwriters, and managers coming soon. Now, this is the thing to always keep in mind, right? What I'm referring to here, um, you know, when I talk to you, it is about rights holders, is about the remuneration to rights holders of your music, your songs, and your recorded music as separate things, right? Now, that is a very, very valuable asset class, right? We know this. You've worked so hard to try and make the music that you've made, and it will have an audience if it's marketed correctly and if it's good enough, right? Now, if we're not careful, a system like this could work to, if you will, make the rich richer. And that's not necessarily something that we would want to see because we want to see an artist-centric ecosystem, right? It's therefore interesting to me that we see this section here for artists, songwriters, and managers coming soon. So I have reached out to Caudle and invited their CEO onto the podcast. Uh, hopefully, uh, we're gonna get him to come on in a few weeks' time because I'd like to ask him about that particular feature. Because if this is something that's only really there for big music publishers and big record companies, I mean maybe it's just been tested out on that, but it looks to me as if they're very, very keen to work with independent rights holders, i.e., independent artists, songwriters, producers, uh, etc.

What This Means For Independents

SPEAKER_01 12:52

People that control independent rights. Now, if this were a system that you could sign up to and upload your tracks and put in your metadata and make it available, then that opens up a world of new opportunity. It makes everything faster, everything more scalable, all the things that I talked about earlier in today's episode. So while we'll keep you posted on the Cordle thing and any other market movers in that area, so there it is, everybody.

Final Takeaways And Sign Off

SPEAKER_01 13:19

Micro licensing in a nutshell. It's good to start thinking about this because whether it's Cordal or whether it's somebody else, there will be a major market shift, and I think it's going to happen fairly quickly because music has to fall in line with media's new habits, right? And how we're consuming everything. And right now, music's a little bit behind the media in regards to how it licenses that, but it can catch up. Maybe this will be the solution. Who knows? Until then, have a great day, everybody. Thank you for being here. May the force be with you.