There is more music being made than at any point in history, and almost none of it can be legally used. Not because rights holders would say no — but because finding them, asking them, agreeing terms and paying them takes months and costs more than most uses are worth. So the use never happens, and nobody gets paid. FonoTec's clearance engine collapses that from months to seconds.
This is the single clearest way to explain what FonoTec is building. It is an illustration, not a customer story — but every step in it is a real product requirement.
An artist is on a beach. Her phone buzzes. A red dot on the FonoTec app.
A DJ in Antwerp has uploaded a remix of one of her records. The engine has already identified the source recording, matched every rights holder attached to it, and scanned the network for where this remix could be used: station rotations, brand briefs, agency campaigns, in-store estates, and social-platform licensing pools.
It comes back with a number. Thirty-five million potential uses. Estimated value to the rights holders of this recording, if she approves: $12 million.
She reads it. She presses approve.
In the same second, everyone else attached to that record gets the same notification with their own number: the writers, the publishers, the original producer, the featured performer, and the DJ in Antwerp. Each of them approves from their own phone.
The moment the last approval lands, the contracts execute themselves. Signed, timestamped, immutable, split-defined. The remix is now legally cleared and instantly available across the entire FonoTec network. It starts earning before the artist has put her phone down.
Not a fraction of a cent. A licence fee, at 85%, for a use that is worth something to somebody. The remixer earns, the original writers earn, the publisher earns, the performers earn. Value flows to everybody who actually made the record.
The DJ in Antwerp reaches an audience no algorithm would ever have routed to him — because the route is a brand brief, a station rotation or a campaign, not a playlist. Discovery through use, not through followers.
This is the part the incumbents cannot copy. On FonoTec you don't follow an artist or a playlist — you choose what you're doing. Driving. Recovering. Opening a store. Closing a club. The music arrives because it fits the moment, and the moment is what pays.
A single commercial use of a piece of music normally requires separate permission from separate parties under separate agreements, often in separate countries. That is the friction the whole industry has simply learned to live with. FonoTec clears all of it in one action, because every share is already registered before the request arrives.
| Right | Who holds it | What it permits | How it clears today | On FonoTec |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Master recording | The recording owner — on FonoTec, the artist | Use of that specific recording | Direct negotiation with the label | Registered at upload. Cleared instantly. |
| Publishing / composition | Writers and their publishers | Use of the underlying song | Publisher or collecting society, weeks to months | Shares registered once, applied automatically to every request. |
| Neighbouring rights | Performers and the producer | Public performance and broadcast of the recording | Collecting societies, paid in arrears | Attributed per play, paid monthly with the rest. |
| Derivative & remix | All of the above, plus the remixer | Creating and exploiting a new version | Usually never happens — too slow and too expensive to be worth it | One approval request, all parties, seconds. |
Audio fingerprinting matches the upload against the registry and identifies the source recording and every work embedded in it, with a confidence score. Anything ambiguous is routed to a human in the rights team rather than guessed at.
Every party attached to the source is resolved from the registry: master owner, writers, publishers, performers, producer. Each has a declared share and a verified payout destination already on file.
The engine scans live demand across the network — station briefs, enterprise contracts, agency campaigns, social licensing pools — and returns a use count and an estimated value. This is the number that makes approval a commercial decision rather than an administrative one.
Every party receives the same request with their own number. Approve, decline, counter, or set conditions — territory, media, exclusions, minimum fee. Conditions are enforced by the engine, not by a PDF nobody reads.
On the final approval, the licence executes and is written to an immutable, cryptographically signed record: parties, shares, terms, territories, timestamp. Every party holds an identical, independently verifiable copy. Disputes become lookups.
The work goes live across the network immediately. Every use is attributed, the split runs automatically, and all parties are paid monthly with a statement showing exactly which use generated which line.
A clearance engine with no demand attached is a database. FonoTec sells the cleared catalogue into the markets that already spend heavily on music and are worst served by the current process.
Creative agencies burn weeks on music clearance for every campaign, and routinely settle for a production-library bed because the track they wanted couldn't be cleared in time. We become the place they search first, because everything in it is already cleared.
Promos, trailers, idents, continuity and programme beds, at volume, across territories. High frequency, repeatable, and a category where speed of clearance matters more than almost anything else.
Instagram, TikTok and every platform where people add music to what they make. This is the largest pool of music use on earth and the least well cleared. A pre-cleared catalogue with automatic attribution and splits is exactly what those platforms need.
The branded stations — automotive, hospitality, restaurant, retail, clinical. Every play is already a licensed use with an attributed split, so the enterprise business feeds the rights business automatically.
Traditional sync, but transacted in minutes rather than months. The margin is lower per placement than a negotiated sync deal; the volume is orders of magnitude higher.
The category that barely exists today because clearing it is impossible. Making it possible creates an entirely new supply of music, and a new income line for every rights holder in the original.
Rights are not a legal overhead on this business. Rights are this business. A clearance engine is only as good as the registry underneath it, and a registry is only as good as the people who build the licensing framework, negotiate the platform agreements, and decide what the engine is allowed to do automatically and what has to come to a human.
That is why the model funds a rights, licensing and in-house counsel function from the first year of the raise — before it is obviously needed, because by the time it is obviously needed it is already too late.
The platform licence framework, rights-holder terms, enterprise agreements, territory coverage and the standing relationships with societies and publishers.
Registry integrity, ownership verification, conflict resolution and the human review queue for anything the engine won't clear on its own.
Per-use attribution, split calculation, statement generation and monthly distribution — auditable end to end, because artists will audit it and should be able to.
The clearance engine is the highest-margin line in the group and, by 2031, the largest. It carries almost no marginal cost: once a work is registered, every subsequent licence is close to pure contribution.
| Year | Cleared works (m) | Clearance transactions | Avg FonoTec net fee | FonoTec net revenue | Gross licence value | To rights holders |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2027 | 0.05 | 1,200 | $95 | $114,000 | $0.8m | $0.6m |
| 2028 | 0.6 | 22,000 | $78 | $1.7m | $11.4m | $9.7m |
| 2029 | 3.2 | 165,000 | $62 | $10.2m | $68.2m | $58.0m |
| 2030 | 11.0 | 720,000 | $52 | $37.4m | $249.6m | $212.2m |
| 2031 | 28.0 | 2,100,000 | $46 | $96.6m | $644.0m | $547.4m |
Average net fee falls as the mix shifts from high-value sync and advertising toward high-volume social and UGC clearance. Figures are illustrative management estimates from the group financial model.
From this line alone. That is the number that makes FonoTec worth joining, and the number that makes the artist-acquisition strategy self-funding.
The same published take rate as everywhere else on the platform. No separate rate for rights, no administration deduction, no reserve.
Rights and licensing overtakes every other revenue line in the group and becomes the engine of the long-range plan.
Every record ever made is sitting behind a permission problem. We're the ones solving it, and we're giving 85% of what it unlocks back to the people who made the music.