How accurate would it be to characterise Lickd as a kind of Shutterstock for music? It is somewhat accurate. But Shutterstock isn’t licensing the biggest photographers in the world - Lickd is, on the contrary, licensing the biggest artists in the world. But the commercial model is not a million miles off. Lickd is the first company to ever look at a solution for content creators of all kinds whilst licensing music from major labels and publishers, including current music that’s in the charts. Our unique software protects our users on the
platform that they place music on, for example, YouTube. Platforms like YouTube have built in music recognition software that identifies popular music being used in content, and presumes that all music uses are some sort of infringement of copyright, therefore, persecuting the creator and attempting to police them out of earning revenue.
There’s an obvious benefit for video content creators – less licensing hassle, but what’s in it for the gaming industry? Gaming is obviously an enormous industry, bigger than music and film combined. Any content vertical with that sort of reach has a huge platform, a huge audience to work with and promote music too. Most of us could probably recall a song that we
discovered through a game. For me, I remember the title tracks from ‘Tiger Woods Golf’ and ‘NBA 2004’ when they were released on PlayStation, and this synergy has only grown from strength to strength for millions more as gaming has become the huge commodity it is today. In terms of how Lickd got together with
Fortnite and Epic Games; essentially music became part of their engagement strategy, and they started paying more attention to it. Senior teams were asking key questions like: ‘how can we work with artists’ and ‘what sort of artist does our audience want to hear within a game’? With this comes complexities around licensing
and demographics. Gamers who are also content creators often live stream their content or create highlights videos for YouTube. At Lickd, we already know that that in-video music on YouTube is an issue and so we collaborate with Fortnite to bridge that gap so that gamers can enjoy the wonderful events that Fortnite put on for them, while also being able to then promote and share that content in the ways that they normally would.
Whether this is for
ancillary income or additional income on top of a salary, if content creation is a full-time job, Lickd protects creators on those platforms, to enable a more effective creation and lifecycle process for the content they’re publishing.
AI threatens to disrupt music creation as much as it has art and writing. What might be the impact of future AI applications on a business like Lickd and how are you preparing to meet the challenge? There’s various ways that AI will impact music. It’s something we’re following closely and it would be foolish for anyone to suggest that any part of the music industry isn’t already seeing some element of business being affected directly by AI. The complete uptake won’t be imminent, but at
some point creators will become of faith with tools that allow them to generate music through these new means for use in their videos. Once created, that music will still need to be licensed, and there will be commercial models that give users access to the tools and/or licensing opportunities for the music created by that tool. In the metaverse, there will be music
collaboration spaces and music production event areas or venues. Generative AI is useful for creating ‘music stems’, and building a sort of catalogue of music elements that can then be used by people collaboratively to start making an entire song - something that was not happening in the past. An AI can continuously keep churning out new
beats and new melodies and new riffs and new instrumental sounds, and people will get together to create music on the fly, and that will require AI generative tools at some scale. I think you’ll see things like musical skins and music ‘emotes’ where avatars might want their own soundtrack or music identifier. How do I know someone entered the room? Well, I just heard their music handle to signify they’re here. Like boxers have ring walks, there’ll be a version of that somewhere in the
July 2023 MCV/DEVELOP | 37
Paul Sampson, CEO of Lickd
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
