Why now is the time for the creator right

YouTube’s Lyor Cohen and the Recording Academy’s Harvey Mason Jr. recently penned an op-ed for Variety in which they made the case for the NO FAKES act being seen as the starting pistol rather than the finish line. They argue new industry infrastructure is needed not just to protect artists’ images and likenesses but also to monetise them. At MIDiA, we couldn’t agree more. 

In fact, this thinking aligns perfectly with a concept that we first introduced in 2021 (here and here) and revisited it in 2024. The concept? The creator right: a right that applies to the creator themselves, to work alongside the traditional, specific music rights associated with their creative output.

This is how we put it:

“Creator rights (encompassing creators’ time, image and brand) can be seen as an evolution of music creator remuneration beyond songs. Already “personality / persona rights” are recognised in many global jurisdictions, and image rights are well established and protected.”

Now with NO FAKES working its way through the system, we are poised to have an even more robust legislative foundation for the creator right. It matters not only as a formal recognition of value, but as the basis of an entirely new monetisation framework. As we said in 2021:

“In order to capture as much of the value from all the activity around a creator as possible, we propose a new framework of creator rights licensing that also encompasses the non-music activity of a music creator in digital environments.”

Currently, music creators are rarely remunerated for non-music activity, most notably the social content they make to help drive streams. The funnel has become contorted. For many artists, social content takes at least as much time, often significantly more, than making the music itself. They or their labels will then often pay to amplify that content. That resource-intensive activity then accrues value for platforms in the form of ad revenue. Artists are paying in labour and capital to create value for the platforms.

A creator rights licensing framework would enable creators to be remunerated when their activity accrues value to platforms. It would create a framework by which licensors can act faster to help creators participate in the revenues where their non-music content is creating real monetary value.

In fact, the benefits of a creator right would be threefold:

1. Participate in the value accrued from non-music content
2. Participate in value generated from AI that leverages likeness (both visual and sonic), image, and name
3. Open up monetisation opportunities in the emerging experiential economy (e.g., games skins)

This might all sound radical, but it is simply applying principles routinely applied elsewhere. No legitimate business would attempt to create products using another’s brand and iconography. Yet an artist’s voice, name, and likeness is their brand. Lionel Richie’s move to copyright his voice (as reported by Music Business Worldwide) may be in the context of cracking down on AI ‘fakes’, but it fits entirely within this principle.

A new music business is emerging that goes far beyond the original recording and composition. But because rights systems do not exist for it, they risk being left reaping no monetary reward from this new economy. We can of course capture some of the value in some instances by applying traditional licensing (e.g., licensing AI model inputs) but those systems are not agile enough to capture the wider, new value that will be created.

Right now, the music industry is, understandably, squarely focused on the AI start ups of today and what they are doing now. But this is only the earliest stages of a new market. Most of the companies that shaped the dot com era (Yahoo, AOL, MySpace, Alta Vista, etc.) simply ran the first lap of the race. Of course, some of today’s players will likely do an Amazon and be one of the long term players. But the Amazon of today, with video, music, data centres and smart devices, bears little resemblance to the online book retailer of the ‘90s. We need to build for the potential of what this sector can become, not simply what the companies of today are doing. And creators need to be at the centre of that.