u/PuzzleheadedOrder560

I'll keep this tight. We have been building for exactly 2 years now and finally shipped the very first version to public.

There's a structural money problem in music that almost nobody outside the industry sees, roughly $2.5B a year that never reaches the people who earned it. It's not a scam or a villain; it's a plumbing problem. The infrastructure to track who did what simply doesn't exist at the layer where it needs to.

We're building that layer.

I'm not going to lay out the full product in a public post, for reasons that'll be obvious to anyone who's watched a good idea get cloned. What I'll say is this, we're infrastructure, not an app. 

The comparison we use internally is Stripe, Plaid, and Carta, the invisible rails a whole industry ends up depending on. We're building the equivalent for music, starting with a specific, fast-growing, underserved corner of the market as our wedge.

We only need 120,000 paying users to reach $50M - $75M in ARR from a SOM of 6Million. All mapped out, found product market fit and organic user acquisition funnels with $0 spent on marketing. Data room and deck ready to share - we are represented by Gunderson Dettmer.

Where we are:

• Launched publicly one week ago 
• Already a few hundred creators on the platform, with zero paid acquisition, it grows through the workflow itself 
• 15 years in music business/publishing behind us, 2 technical co-founder's running engineering, and a shipping track record at companies in this space

 

On the "who's behind us" part: we have some genuinely high-profile people from the music industry in our corner.. I'm not dropping them in a public thread. Please shoot me a DM and we can discuss names privately, we are located in Los Angeles & Miami, Florida.

We're raising now. If you invest at the infrastructure layer, understand why owning identity in a market is the real moat, or have serious music/rights-industry roots, let's talk. Comment or DM and I'll follow up privately.

I'll keep this tight. We have been building for exactly 2 years now and finally shipped the very first version to public.

There's a structural money problem in music that almost nobody outside the industry sees, roughly $2.5B a year that never reaches the people who earned it. It's not a scam or a villain; it's a plumbing problem. The infrastructure to track who did what simply doesn't exist at the layer where it needs to.

We're building that layer.

I'm not going to lay out the full product in a public post, for reasons that'll be obvious to anyone who's watched a good idea get cloned. What I'll say is this, we're infrastructure, not an app. 

The comparison we use internally is Stripe, Plaid, and Carta, the invisible rails a whole industry ends up depending on. We're building the equivalent for music, starting with a specific, fast-growing, underserved corner of the market as our wedge.

We only need 120,000 paying users to reach $50M - $75M in ARR from a SOM of 6Million. All mapped out, found product market fit and organic user acquisition funnels with $0 spent on marketing. Data room and deck ready to share - we are represented by Gunderson Dettmer.

Where we are:

• Launched publicly one week ago
• Already a few hundred creators on the platform, with zero paid acquisition, it grows through the workflow itself
• 15 years in music business/publishing behind us, 2 technical co-founder's running engineering, and a shipping track record at companies in this space

On the "who's behind us" part: we have some genuinely high-profile people from the music industry in our corner.. I'm not dropping them in a public thread. Please shoot me a DM and we can discuss names privately, we are located in Los Angeles & Miami, Florida.

We're raising now. If you invest at the infrastructure layer, understand why owning identity in a market is the real moat, or have serious music/rights-industry roots, let's talk. Comment or DM and I'll follow up privately.

We have around 150K in committed capital already.

Feid, Annuel AA, Bad Bunny, Mora Style - Aqui esta el link, seguren de taggearme si usan estos beats porfa!

https://app.mvssive.net/playlist/4d48c4913c7e4eb1a1aa37b87288b1fb

Hola!

Prepare un kit de melodias de reggaeton con estilo de Feid, Bad Bunny, Mora, Eladio Carrion, Anuel AA, etc. Estos loops son non-royalty free, si usan alguno de mis samples porfavor de darme credito.

Este playlist tiene 10 sample melodies solamente de loops, no drums or percussiones.
Los samples estan a 44kHz y 24Bit con su Key, BPM & file name taggeados.

Link: https://app.mvssive.net/playlist/56de1793609f48a4a4dd83cfb6ccee7f

Si necesitan contactarme porfavor de mandarme un mensaje directo por reddit y les paso cualquier informacion necessaria para los splits.

Si les gustan los samples que deje aqui, mandenme un dm y les preparo otra playlist/

So i was the executive producerx for a session i did 2 years ago for a song, i thought it was just a random song until it got a placement. The session was perfect. Everybody said so, out loud, in the room, before anyone left. A few writers, two producers, one artist. One of those nights where you already know.

I paid $75/hr for the room. $150 for the master. Covered the vocal mix and the song mix myself and didn’t think twice, because that’s what you do when you believe in it.
And that week I asked for splits. Not a contract, not lawyers, a provisional split sheet. Names, percentages, one page. I said we can revise it later, I just want something to exist.

Nobody did it.

Not out of malice. Because the song wasn’t worth anything yet. Asking people to sign paper for a record earning zero dollars feels like bureaucracy for its own sake. It’s the least urgent thing in the world. We’ll do it later. Everybody meant it.

Two years pass. Song’s out, doing its thing quietly. Still no splits.

Then the artist gets picked up for a Pepsi campaign running through SoundCloud. She makes a video, the song’s in it, and the record finally starts moving.

I sent the split email that afternoon. Silence for hours. Then the campaign comes up in the chat, and within minutes the group is very alive.

And here’s the thing I didn’t expect: the second the word pepsi entered that chat, everybody’s brain filed it under sync money. That blue logo means commercial means licensing means a check the song earned.

One of the writers was certain of it, and certain he was owed a piece. I’d read the contract. Pepsi never licensed the song. Nobody shot a commercial. The deal was with the artist, she’s a public figure on Instagram, she got booked as a creator, and she chose to use her own record in the video she made. That’s talent money. It’s hers, for being her. The song is just what she happened to play.

From the outside those two things look identical. “Our song was in a Pepsi thing and now there’s money” and “the artist got paid to post and used our song” are not remotely the same deal, and almost nobody can tell them apart from a group chat. But I’m the one explaining it, so I’m the one taking money out of his pocket.

Then somebody says we need to see the master agreement before anyone signs splits. The master agreement is between the artist and the producers. It has nothing to do with the composition. Nobody knew that either, so me saying it just sounded like I was hiding something.

Then it went personal. I said fine, if we’re all splitting masters, let’s all split costs, the $600 for the room and the master.

And he said: “I spent 200 dollars flying to los angeles to make that session.”

He was right. He did. Real money out of his own pocket, two years ago, for a record that had never paid him a cent and had no paper anywhere with his name on it.

That’s when I understood we weren’t negotiating. We were comparing receipts. Two people who made something good together, itemizing what it cost each of us to be in the room that night.

I told him I’m not making money on this. I’m not getting paid at all. Both true. Didn’t land, because by then nobody believed anybody.

Here’s what I can’t get past.

Everybody behaved rationally. Two years ago, signing a split sheet had no upside, there was nothing to protect. Today everybody has a reason to care, and that’s exactly why nobody can agree: there’s money on the table, so every position is now worth defending.

The moment agreement is easiest is the moment nobody has a reason to bother. The moment everybody finally cares is the moment agreement is impossible. Those two moments are never the same day, and the whole industry runs on pretending they are.

And “I warned them” is a cop-out and I know it. I did warn them. I sent the sheet. Then I felt covered and moved on, which is not the same as making it happen. I had the room. I was paying for it. I could have said nobody leaves until this page is signed. I didn’t, because I didn’t want to be that guy on a night that good. Wanting to be right two years later was easier than being annoying for ten minutes.

So, real question:

Does anybody actually do provisional splits the day of the session? And if so how do you get people to sign something for a song that isn’t worth anything yet?

Because that’s the trick I still don’t have. Also curious how many of you have a group chat that looks exactly like mine right now.

I’ve been thinking about something that seems like it could become a much bigger issue as music technology evolves:

What if every song had a permanent digital identity from the moment it was created?

Not just a title and artist name.

A complete record of the song’s history:

• Who created it
• Who owns it
• Who contributed to it
• Publishing splits
• Licensing history
• Versions and derivatives
• Whether AI was involved in the creative process

Right now, music exists across thousands of disconnected systems. A song might have one set of information with a streaming platform, another with a performing rights organization, another with a distributor, and another with publishers.

Sometimes those records don’t match.

That creates problems even without AI.

Artists miss royalties.

Writers aren’t properly credited.

Licensing takes longer than it should.

Ownership can become unclear.

Now add AI into the equation.

If millions of new songs can be generated every day, how do we track where they came from? How do we understand ownership? How do we determine what rights exist?

Maybe the future of music needs something like a “digital birth certificate” for every song.

A permanent identity that follows the work wherever it goes.

Not to control creativity, but to create transparency.

Imagine being able to look up any song and instantly know:

• Who made it
• Who owns it
• What rights are attached to it
• How it can be used

The internet gave every webpage an address.

Streaming gave every song a place to be heard.

Maybe the next evolution is giving every piece of music a reliable identity.

Of course, there are challenges.

Who controls this information?

Who decides what gets recorded?

How do we protect artists’ privacy?

And would a system like this actually make the industry more efficient, or just add another layer of complexity?

Curious what people think:

Should every song have a permanent digital identity, or would that create more problems than it solves?

I recently had a meeting with a very big A-I Music Generation company and one of the artist's i do all of their Music Publishing Administration. The meeting was going well until i asked the question: 

"Will my artist be liable in the future for using A-I generated music if we use your tools? Were the ML Datasets you guys used cleared and properly credit the original authors or will she have to give up royalties in the futures to the authors of those ML datasets?" The conversation went south after i asked these questions that after the meeting it got me thinking:

"What if every A-I-generated song could automatically pay royalties back to the creators whose music helped train the A-I? Not because a song was copied. Not because someone filed a lawsuit. But because we could actually measure which catalogs contributed to the A-I’s output."

For decades, music royalties have followed a simple model:
Someone streams your song → you get paid.

Generative A-I breaks that model. When an A-I creates a new song, it’s drawing from patterns learned across millions of recordings. The value isn’t coming from one track,it’s emerging from an entire training dataset. So who should be compensated???

A new research paper proposes an attribution-aware royalty framework for generative music. 

Instead of asking: “Did this A-I copy someone’s work?” It asks something much more interesting:

“Which creators’ catalogs contributed to this output, and by how much?”

Each creator would receive an attribution score based on their measurable influence on the generated song, and that score could be used to distribute royalties. It’s essentially the beginning of what could become a Content ID for A-I training.

The researchers also acknowledge today’s attribution technology isn’t yet accurate enough to support reliable royalty payments at scale. For now, licensing deals remain the more practical solution. 

But here’s what I found most interesting…The paper argues that as attribution technology improves, royalty-based compensation becomes increasingly valuable,for both creators and A-I companies.

That completely changes the conversation. 

The future debate may not be:
“Should A-I exist?” 

Or even: “Should A-I companies license music?”

It may become:
“Can we accurately measure creative influence?”

If the answer eventually becomes yes, we may be witnessing the beginning of an entirely new royalty infrastructure.

One thing is becoming increasingly clear:
Metadata, attribution, and rights management are no longer just administrative tasks,they’re becoming core infrastructure for the A-I economy.

What do you think? Is attribution-based compensation the future of A-I music, or will blanket licensing remain the standard?

I recently had a meeting with a very big A-I Music Generation company and one of the artist's i do all of their Music Publishing Administration. The meeting was going well until i asked the question: 

"Will my artist be liable in the future for using A-I generated music if we use your tools? Were the ML Datasets you guys used cleared and properly credit the original authors or will she have to give up royalties in the futures to the authors of those ML datasets?" The conversation went south after i asked these questions that after the meeting it got me thinking:

"What if every A-I-generated song could automatically pay royalties back to the creators whose music helped train the A-I? Not because a song was copied. Not because someone filed a lawsuit. But because we could actually measure which catalogs contributed to the A-I’s output."

For decades, music royalties have followed a simple model:
Someone streams your song → you get paid.

Generative A-I breaks that model. When an A-I creates a new song, it’s drawing from patterns learned across millions of recordings. The value isn’t coming from one track,it’s emerging from an entire training dataset. So who should be compensated???

A new research paper proposes an attribution-aware royalty framework for generative music. 

Instead of asking: “Did this A-I copy someone’s work?” It asks something much more interesting:

“Which creators’ catalogs contributed to this output, and by how much?”

Each creator would receive an attribution score based on their measurable influence on the generated song, and that score could be used to distribute royalties. It’s essentially the beginning of what could become a Content ID for A-I training.

The researchers also acknowledge today’s attribution technology isn’t yet accurate enough to support reliable royalty payments at scale. For now, licensing deals remain the more practical solution. 

But here’s what I found most interesting…The paper argues that as attribution technology improves, royalty-based compensation becomes increasingly valuable,for both creators and A-I companies.

That completely changes the conversation. 

The future debate may not be:
“Should A-I exist?” 

Or even: “Should A-I companies license music?”

It may become:
“Can we accurately measure creative influence?”

If the answer eventually becomes yes, we may be witnessing the beginning of an entirely new royalty infrastructure.

One thing is becoming increasingly clear:
Metadata, attribution, and rights management are no longer just administrative tasks,they’re becoming core infrastructure for the A-I economy.

What do you think? Is attribution-based compensation the future of A-I music, or will blanket licensing remain the standard?

I keep losing the thread on splits and credits, especially when 4+ people touch a beat and someone adds one line three weeks later. Do you write it down in the moment, sort it out later, or just vibe and hope? Genuinely want to know what works.

I saw a few friends of mine use Google Sheets for this and dropbox, is there an alternative to this?

Ive been seeing post about soothe but this plugin takes a lot of my computer CPU when i try to run it on multiple channels - i do a lot of vocal production and i am looking for a hack or an alternative to this plugin - i get a lot of CPU overload specially when i use it for sidechaining.

Specs:
M3 macbook pro with 16gbs ram running on os x tahoe.