Founded in 2009, Epidemic Sound charges a subscription to licence its library of high-quality, “royalty-free” production music across three tiers (personal, commercial, and enterprise). Co-founder Oscar Höglund set out to solve problems on both the supply and demand side of the music sync market. For buyers, the process of licensing music has traditionally been time-consuming, expensive, manual, and, in many ways, gate kept. On the supply side, music creators struggle to earn meaningful revenue through sync, in part due to the slow-moving and error-prone performing rights organisation (PRO) system. Epidemic Sound’s solution is providing self-serve, affordable, high-quality sync that remunerates creators.
However, Epidemic’s remuneration model has caused controversy. Epidemic pays a one-off fee to acquire all of the rights associated with the music (a buyout). In fact, it can only work with creators in Sweden and the U.S., the only two territories where writers can transfer their performance rights to a third party. Despite criticism, this buyout is an attractive option to the many creators who struggle to earn meaningful income from music. This is also what gives Epidemic the competitive advantage of offering subscribers total assurance that they will never run into copyright strikes. Along with the buyouts, Epidemic also releases its music to streaming services and splits the resulting mechanical royalties 50 / 50 with creators.
Epidemic is well-positioned to harness two ongoing trends: the growth of the creator economy, and artists seeking better remuneration. Epidemic is one of the many production music libraries that are becoming a go-to source for creators of all kinds, grabbing the ‘micro-licensing’ opportunity away from incumbent players. Epidemic also has partnerships with creator companies, like Adobe and Canva, to integrate its library directly. Meanwhile, many music creators are now looking to sync as a revenue, bringing more high-quality music to production libraries, like Epidemic’s.