Every year, hundreds of millions in music royalties are lost annually due to fragmented and inaccurate metadata. For artists and rights holders, this can threaten the very sustainability of their careers. For broadcasters and production studios, it’s a complicated administrative burden.
As digital platforms such as online broadcast, YouTube, and TikTok continue to grow at an explosive rate, conventional music rights management systems are failing to keep up, leading to hundreds of millions in lost revenue for all stakeholders. Orfium’s mission is to build the tools and technology to shape a more equitable and transparent ecosystem for all stakeholders, thereby protecting the future of the industry.
Why are music royalties unclaimed?
A key reason music royalties go unclaimed is because the industry’s metadata is fragmented and incomplete. With the explosive growth of user-generated content (UGC) on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, the sheer volume of music being used is staggering. On YouTube alone, over 30,000 hours of video content are uploaded every hour. This creates a data flood that traditional rights management systems simply can’t handle.
When music is used in those videos, the metadata, which identifies the song, its composer, publisher, and other rights holders, is often incomplete, inconsistent, or missing entirely. Without accurate metadata, a song’s usage can’t be properly tracked, and its rightful owners can’t be paid.
For example, a song might be used in a video that racks up hundreds of thousands of views overnight, but if the metadata is wrong, the royalty payment may be lost forever. This systemic inefficiency doesn’t just impact a few creators; it undermines the entire system of fair compensation.
Orfium’s AI-Powered Solutions: Finding, Matching, and Claiming
While fragmented metadata is the core problem, the solution lies in a multi-stage approach that goes beyond simply cleaning up data. It involves a full-spectrum process of identifying, linking, and monetizing music usage.
1. Advanced Music Identification
The initial step is to find music in a vast digital ecosystem that is often devoid of useful metadata. This is accomplished using sophisticated AI, such as a proprietary Deep Learning Model (DLM). This technology is engineered to analyze key acoustic parameters and precisely identify musical segments within audio and video content. Its advanced training allows it to recognize music even when it has been manipulated for example, sped up or remixed, a crucial capability in the world of user-generated content.
2. Asset Matching and Linking
This is the domain of asset matching, which addresses the systemic challenge of fragmented and inaccurate metadata. AI models intelligently link a specific recording to its underlying composition, thereby creating a comprehensive and reliable set of connections. This process ensures that the music usage found in content can be properly attributed, providing the foundation for accurate royalty distribution.
3. Proactive Revenue Recovery through Claiming
Finding and matching usage is only half the solution; the final, crucial step is claiming that usage to recover revenue. This process is powered by a unique partnership between AI and human expertise. While AI tools analyze and identify revenue opportunities, a dedicated team of expert claimers uses these insights to perform the critical function of placing claims on behalf of rights holders. This “human-in-the-loop” approach provides essential validation and feedback, ensuring that the system is not only highly efficient but also exceptionally accurate in its ability to proactively monetize music usage.
How does AI help with music royalties?
AI is a game-changer for music royalties because it solves the core problem of fragmented metadata at scale. Orfium’s proprietary Music Licensing System (MLS) uses an advanced blend of machine learning and large language models (LLMs) to recognize and attribute music even when the identifying metadata is incomplete or wrong. This makes our technology uniquely effective in the world of user-generated content (UGC), where metadata is often sparse.
Orfium’s system’s strength comes from its unique foundations:
- Vast, in-house datasets: We’ve trained our AI on massive amounts of curated data, allowing it to accurately match music to its creators.
- Continuous learning: Orfium’s AI evolves to stay ahead of new content trends and data formats, ensuring long-term accuracy and reliability.
- Human-in-the-loop expertise: Our proprietary AI systems have processed over three quadrillion rows of data, and our expert team provides critical oversight throughout. This human-AI partnership ensures our system is not only efficient but also exceptionally accurate by layering the vast processing abilities of AI-powered technology with decades of highly trained music industry experience.
Orfium’s Commitment to Ethical AI in Music
Our commitment to ethical business practices is integral to our solutions and everything we do. We believe that technology should serve creators, not replace them, and this core principle guides our approach to developing and deploying ethical AI in music. Our ethical framework is designed to ensure our AI promotes fairness, transparency, and accountability, giving all stakeholders the tools to shape a more equitable ecosystem.
Key Principles of Orfium’s Ethical Framework
To ensure a responsible approach, we adhere to several key principles in our AI development:
- Bias Mitigation and Fairness: The music industry is globally diverse, and so are its creators. To ensure our AI systems are fair and unbiased, we train our models on diverse, globally representative datasets. This prevents the unintentional exclusion of specific genres, cultures, or artists, ensuring that our systems work equitably for everyone.
- Transparency and Explainability: While AI models can be complex, their decisions should not be a black box. We are committed to transparency in how our systems operate. In fact, our work in this area is validated by our participation in a highly competitive EU grant, which focuses on developing frameworks to enhance AI explainability and accountability. This initiative positions us at the forefront of ethical AI development, ensuring our technology can explain its decision-making process for copyright attribution.
- Data Privacy and Security: The data we handle, from artist information to usage patterns, is highly sensitive. We prioritize the security and privacy of our clients’ data, adhering to strict contractual agreements and all relevant data protection regulations to ensure client trust.
- Creator Empowerment: The ultimate goal of our AI is to empower creators and rights holders. We are focused on building AI to solve the challenges of music rights management, not for generative content creation. This ensures our technology is used to protect and enhance the value of human-created work, supporting a sustainable future for the industry.
For more information on Orfium’s ethical commitment to AI-usage, visit AI at Orfium .
What do Orfium’s solutions do?
Orfium’s solutions are designed to deliver a tangible financial impact by transforming the chaos of music data into streamlined revenue streams. We give our clients a direct, actionable path to recover lost income and ensure they’re paid for every use of their music.
Our technology achieves this by:
- Unlocking Lost Revenue: Our proprietary AI-driven platform identifies, matches, and claims your music usage across the digital ecosystem, ensuring you’re compensated for performances that would otherwise be lost. We have already unlocked millions of dollars for our clients by linking previously unmatched compositions on platforms like YouTube. This is not a theoretical gain; it’s a direct financial impact achieved by getting music metadata right.
- Bringing Unprecedented Transparency and Fairness: We bring a new level of clarity to the industry. Our technology processes data at an unprecedented scale, having processed over three quadrillion rows of data in 2024 alone. This immense scalability provides our clients with a comprehensive and transparent view of where and how their music is being used, ensuring a more equitable system where they are rightfully paid for their work.
- $1B in Recovered Royalties: We are on track to deliver $1 billion in total revenue recovered for our clients.
Orfium’s vision for the future of music rights management
The rise of AI-generated music and the expansion of digital platforms into new territories presents both challenges and immense opportunities. Orfium’s vision extends beyond solving today’s problems. We are pioneering AI-driven technology that not only solves today’s metadata problems but builds a fully integrated ecosystem for the music industry’s future.. We are building the solutions that will not only address the current music copyright and royalties maze, but also anticipate and prepare for the complexities of the future.
This is just a snapshot of the technology we’re building and the financial impact we’re already making in the music industry. To get an in-depth look at how Orfium is pioneering AI-driven technology for the future of music rights management, download our full whitepaper here.