Why Licensing a Song for Your Project Is Still So Hard

You want to use a specific song in your video, podcast, or film. Here's what you need to do: find the writers through ASCAP or BMI. Hope the data is complete. Track down the publishers. Identify the label. Negotiate in parallel because everyone wants most favored nations. Pray you can afford a clearance company.

For a Justin Bieber song, that's painful but possible. For a smaller artist, it might be impossible -- because nobody even knows who owns the rights.

Keatly Haldeman spent 20 years in sync licensing before concluding the entire system was broken.

The Problem Is Friction, Not Demand

Every person with a phone is a content creator now. Student films, podcasts, audiobooks, YouTube creators, TikTok creators who want to monetize -- they all need licensed music. Most of them can't access it.

The online sync platforms that exist all work the same way: a centralized company sits between rights owners and licensees, takes 30-50% in fees, and gives rights owners no control over pricing. The result: only indie, production, and royalty-free music is available online. When a creator wants a specific song, there's no legal path without hiring a music supervisor.

"The only music available for people to license online is indie music, production music, royalty free music, now AI music. The whole system is broken."

What's Changing

Haldeman's company, Dequancy, is building a peer-to-peer licensing marketplace. The idea: rights owners set their own prices, maintain their own terms, keep approval rights, and transact directly with licensees. No centralized platform taking half the fee.

The highest-value sync deals -- Super Bowl ads, blockbuster films -- get the attention. But the volume growth is at the smaller scale. Every creator with a $200 budget who needs licensed music represents unmet demand.

Why This Matters to You

If you're a musician: the easier it becomes to license your music, the more revenue streams open up. Get your metadata right. Make your catalog discoverable. The infrastructure is catching up to the demand.

If you're a content creator: the friction is real, but it's being addressed. In the meantime, building relationships directly with independent artists is often faster than navigating the licensing bureaucracy.

The biggest opportunities are in removing friction, not adding features. That's true for licensing. It's true for finding a studio. It's true for most things in this industry.

Key Takeaways

• Sync licensing is broken because the process is too hard, not because demand is missing
• Volume growth is at the bottom of the market -- creators with smaller budgets who need accessible licensing
• The companies that reduce friction between rights owners and licensees will capture enormous value