The anatomy of a commercial music license
This post was created by Epidemic Sound and published as a sponsored article.
A commercial music license can only pass on rights that the artist handed over in the first place. Whatever the artist kept, or gave to someone else, the brand doesn’t get, no matter what the contract says.
A commercial music license is the last step in a chain of permissions. The chain starts with the songwriter and the performer and ends with the brand that wants to use the track. That might mean using music in a social media video, an advertisement, a podcast or broadcast, in a store, or at a live event, whether the work is produced in-house or through an agency or production partner.
At each step in the chain, a right is either handed on to the next party or kept. The agreement a brand signs with a music provider can therefore only contain rights that were handed on all the way to the end.
There are three rights that can be involved in commercial use of a track
Synchronization is the right to pair music with moving images, which every video needs.
Mechanical is the right to reproduce the composition as audio. It’s used when music is copied or distributed, for example as a download, on a physical recording, or when a track is stored on a system for playback. In video, it’s usually cleared together with synchronization.
Public performance is the right to play the finished track in public: on broadcast, on streaming platforms, in a store, or at a live event.
Which rights a brand needs depends on the use. Most commercial uses need at least two.
How do a track’s rights travel from the artist to a brand?
Every right starts with the person who made the work, and each time it changes hands, a contract decides whether it moves on or stays. Two routes are common.
In both routes, the music provider, the service that ultimately licenses the music to the brand, sits between the rights holders and the brand. What changes is how many of the rights have reached the music provider by the time the brand asks for a license.
The society route
- A songwriter creates the composition; an artist records it. The composition and the sound recording are two separate pieces of intellectual property.
- The songwriter or publisher places the public performance rights in the composition with a performing rights organization (PRO). The PRO can then license those rights and collect royalties when the music is publicly performed.
- A publisher controls or administers other rights in the composition, including synchronization and mechanical rights. Rights in the sound recording are typically controlled by the artist, a label, or another recording rights holder.
- A music provider clears the rights it needs from the publisher and the owner of the sound recording, allowing it to license the track for uses such as synchronization and reproduction.
- The music provider licenses those uses to the brand.
- The brand has been licensed two of the three rights. Public performance is still with the PRO and may require a second license, from a second party, paid separately.
The direct route
- An artist writes and records the track.
- The artist hands the relevant economic rights to one music provider and joins no PRO.
- The music provider licenses all three rights to the brand.
- The brand can receive all three rights from the same source. The relevant rights haven’t been split between the music provider and a PRO.
Epidemic Sound, a global music provider built on the direct route, works first-hand with artists and controls the economic rights needed to license its music, including public performance rights. That means a brand doesn’t have to assemble those rights from several different rights holders or arrange separate public performance licensing through a PRO.
How does a music license for commercial use work when the content travels?
Commercial content rarely stays in one place. A campaign might begin as a social media video, then appear in paid advertising, on a website, at an event, in another market, or in a different format altogether.
When the rights are split between several parties, each new use can raise another licensing question. Does the existing license cover this platform or territory? Does the new use involve public performance? Does another rights holder or PRO need to be involved?
Direct licensing removes much of that fragmentation.
Because Epidemic Sound controls the economic rights needed to license that music, it can license music across platforms, formats and markets without the brand having to trace different rights back to different rights holders or collecting organizations. For larger businesses, licenses can be tailored to cover global use across online and offline media, regardless of territory or content format.
That matters increasingly as content is repurposed. A piece of music chosen for one production may end up accompanying different edits, channels and campaigns in several markets. When the rights travel together, the music can travel with the content.
What’s included in an enterprise music licensing agreement?
Copyright still applies. The difference is that the brand can get the permissions it needs from one source instead of having to clear them with several different rights holders.
For Epidemic Sound, that includes the rights in both the composition and the recording, as well as public performance rights. The result is one direct licensing relationship between the music provider and the brand, rather than one license for the track and additional permissions or royalty payments elsewhere in the chain.
There’s another part to that clearance. And that part is time.
Content published while covered by the relevant Epidemic Sound license remains cleared after the subscription or agreement ends. The license therefore attaches to the content that was properly published, rather than disappearing the moment the licensing relationship ends.
Fewer links mean fewer loose ends
Every additional rights holder creates another place where a commercial use may need to be cleared. Bringing the relevant rights together does the opposite: it gives the brand one place to establish what it can use, where it can use it and whether that permission will still hold later.
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Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!
