ALLOY

Licensing a song for a film, an ad or a game can take weeks and hundreds of emails, because who controls which share in which territory is scattered across incompatible databases. ALLOY digitises worldwide sync rights and permissions for songs and recordings into one impartial, standardised terminal that music supervisors, labels and publishers can read and verify instantly.

Music supervisors say they spend hours a day working out who controls which share of which song in which territory, then emailing publishers, labels and managers to fill the gaps and waiting in line for replies. The information exists; it is spread across an enormous number of isolated databases in formats that do not match, so the industry earns a fraction of what its catalogue could, and artists and songwriters lose with it.

ALLOY standardises that information and gives everyone who needs it the same live, impartial view: ownership splits, territories, permissions and the uses a rightsholder will and will not allow, for both the song and the recording. Labels and publishers display their catalogues so that more people can license them; buyers verify rights before they ask. The founder spent his career on the other side of those emails, running sync at Hipgnosis, Universal and BMG.