There is a tech maxim that says the road to 21st century progress isn’t paved with asphalt, but with fiber optic cables and data centers. If that’s true, The Music Infrastructure Company (MusicInfra) is aiming to be the road crew bringing progress to royalty collections. Founded in 2023, MusicInfra is an independent business-to-business music technology and rights management company that provides modular tech infrastructure, like data processing, rights-matching engines and royalty clearinghouse services, to digital streaming platforms and rights-holders.
Its backers include Raine Group, UTA Ventures, and Peter Thiel’s Snö Ventures, and starting this week MusicInfra is the rights management support provider for Amazon Music on music used in videos, a connection that opens the door to working with any of the National Music Publishers’ Association’s (NMPA) roughly 800 members. Landing Amazon as a client presents more than just a step-change in scale for MusicInfra. MusicInfra co-founder and CEO Björn Lindvall says, “We’ve reached this kind of inflection point where both publishers and the platform are actually trusting us to do something.”
How MusicInfra operates
Asked for an analogy to describe what MusicInfra does for clients like Amazon Music, an AI model said MusicInfra is like Plaid/AWS/Shopify, providing universal financial plumbing like Plaid, scalable and customizable tech in the background like AWS, and inventory tracking and a cashier like Shopify.
Björn Lindvall responded: “I haven’t heard that before, but I don’t disagree. We basically do four things. [First] We match this whole thing, and then we give Amazon a bucket of songs that are clear to use. Second, these songs are consumed on Amazon in one way or the other and then our deal engine [determines] how much are you getting paid per video? How much are you getting paid per stream? Whatever it is we send reports back to publishers and back to the platform, and then we pay people. Those are basically the four steps.”
Scaling up for Amazon
Discussing the challenges of bringing on a partner the size of Amazon, Lindvall noted: “Standing up a machine of the size that is required for Amazon … a 15-person team cannot do that manually. It all has to be built with repeatable processes and data. For instance, Amazon wants clearance information on what videos they can and cannot use every 24 hours. So we run that every 24 hours. It takes us on average 28 minutes to do the clearance. Previously, people have turned this around in a month.”
He added that the expedited timeline “enables our clients to increase their revenue by putting more music live on their platforms faster and, at the same time, stay compliant with their licensing agreements and pay rights-holders correctly and on time.”
Industry shifts and future goals
Regarding broader music industry trends, Lindvall noted that infrastructure is now taken very seriously as growth sits at 5-7% growth per annum rather than double-digit percentages from five years ago. “You must have the infrastructure layer working, and up until now it has not been working. It’s been controlled by a whole heap of middlemen with bad tech, bad processes and suboptimal relationships,” he said.
On whether gaining Amazon Music brings the international clearinghouse goal closer, Lindvall stated: “One hundred percent because we have effectively two sets of stakeholders through clients. One is the platforms. The other are rights holders/publishers. In winning one client like Amazon, everyone who wants to do anything from Amazon has to work with [MusicInfra].”
Reflecting on the journey, Lindvall concluded: “Most people told me I was crazy trying to do something like this, and there are many miles left to go. But having the Amazon team choosing us is an enormous endorsement because the entire music industry obviously knows that they know what they’re doing, and the bar for working with Amazon is very high. In order to win a big contract like that, you … basically [must win the] approval of the [biggest] publishers, including all of the majors.”
