In 1914, a group of composers, lyricists and publishers in New York set up ASCAP, with the composer Victor Herbert among its founders. The same year, music publishers in London set up the Performing Right Society, now PRS for Music. Both had the same job: collecting payment when music was played in public, so songwriters didn't have to chase every venue themselves.

Three years later, the US Supreme Court ruled on a case Herbert had brought against Shanley's, a New York restaurant. The restaurant argued it owed him nothing for the music its band played, because it didn't charge diners to hear it. The court disagreed. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it: "If music did not pay, it would be given up."

That ruling settled what the societies needed. From then on, one yearly fee let a restaurant or shop play anything in a society's catalogue without having to ask each songwriter (find out more here). It still works like that today.

Online content already kind of does this. The big platforms hold blanket licences with labels, publishers and societies like PRS, which is why anyone can add a song to a personal post without asking. On Instagram and TikTok, those licences cover personal use only. They stop at the point content turns commercial. A brand post, a paid creator partnership or a game studio's trailer has no equivalent route in the app to license for their commercial use case.

Some businesses decide to use the music anyway and risk copyright strikes, while others switch to royalty-free, AI or commissioned music instead. That is why more than £12 billion of commercial music is used online every year without a licence. Most people don't set out to break the rules. It’s that nobody has laid out a quick and easy licensing route for them to follow.

ASCAP and PRS built that route for restaurants and shops. Commercial online content now needs its own.

Why the existing fixes are only part of the solution

There are legal ways to use music online. Each one however, only addresses part of the problem (we compare them in more detail here).

• Music libraries offer pre-cleared tracks. They work if you're happy with library music instead of a specific artist.
• Platform tools bring licensing inside the app. TikTok's Commercial Music Library is mostly royalty-free but rarely has the songs that are trending. YouTube's Creator Music offers some well-known tracks on a revenue share, but only to US creators in the YouTube Partner Programme. Both only cover their own platform.
• Direct sync deals get you the track you want, but they can take weeks of negotiation, which suits big campaigns better than daily posting.
• Revenue claims, like YouTube's Content ID, let a rightsholder collect the ad revenue from a video that uses their music instead of blocking it. The creator still has no licence, a brand can't plan a campaign around it, and it only works on YouTube.

Each of these does its own job well. None of them lets a brand or creator license the exact track they want quickly and easily, for their exact use, at the moment they need it. That is what most online content now needs and nothing has yet been built for this level of volume.

Why nobody notices the gap

Most people never think about music licensing, because nothing ever prompts them to. Trakr analysed more than 350,000 TikTok posts from over 1,000 brands between 2024 and 2026. More than 79% of those brands used music from major or large independent catalogues with no clear evidence of a commercial licence. That points to a gap in the process, not a few careless brands.

The habit starts inside the apps. On Instagram or TikTok, you pick a song and it's added in seconds. It feels exactly the same whether the post is personal or for a business, but the licence behind that song only covers personal use. Nothing flags the moment a post turns promotional, so people carry the same habit into brand and sponsored content. Most only learn the difference from someone who has been caught out, or from someone who works in music.

Even musicians find it hard. A 2026 Berklee study surveyed more than 1,000 video creators, musicians, brand marketers and music supervisors. It found 36.9% of musicians had hit at least one licensing or rights barrier when trying to earn from their video work. Cost, confusion and different rules on different platforms were the most common.

When there is a consequence, most people never see it. Unlicensed use is usually handled by the platform muting the audio, often after the trend has already passed. Lawsuits tend to be saved for large brands where hundreds of posts can be grouped into one claim that is worth taking to court. For most people nothing happens, so nothing changes.

Why enforcement hasn't closed the gap either

UK copyright law is strong. What struggles is the economics of enforcing it.

In the UK, a cease and desist or a court judgment for unlicensed use typically recovers what a licence would have cost in the first place. At the scale this is happening, the legal and admin cost of chasing that recovery usually exceeds the value of winning it. Enforcing each case one at a time loses money more often than it makes it. This came up when I was at the BPI's Grow Music graduation in Parliament earlier this year: the law is sound, but nobody built an enforcement mechanism sized for millions of small infringements rather than a handful of large ones. The collecting societies learned the same thing a century ago. Suing venues one at a time was never going to cover the volume. A licence everyone could get easily did.

Why now is different

Three things have changed that make this fixable in a way it wasn't five years ago. Creator-led commercial content isn't a niche anymore, it's the default way brands and individuals reach an audience. Platforms are actively looking for new monetisation layers rather than treating licensing as someone else's problem. The infrastructure to automate clearance at this volume, verified ownership records and programmable approval rules, is something that can now be built, not just thought about.

Streaming didn't take off because people were told to start paying for music again after the piracy boom. As Spotify founder Daniel Ek told The Telegraph in 2010, "you can never legislate away from piracy." The only fix, he said, was a service that was better than piracy and paid the music industry at the same time. That is what worked: something easier to use than the free option, collecting a small amount from a huge number of plays. IFPI put streaming revenue at over $22 billion in 2025. Nobody has done the same for how music gets used inside the content people make, as opposed to the content people stream.

In 1914, the answer to volume was a society and one licence any establishment could buy. Today the answer looks different: permission built into the tools where content gets made, on terms the rightsholder has already set. The principle was settled over a hundred years ago. The workflow is what we're now building at Creds.

If you want to see how it works for your content or your catalogue, try Creds for free.

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