As the music industry expands across borders, royalty systems haven’t kept pace. Fragmented metadata, outdated infrastructure, and  regional inconsistencies continue to block rightful payouts to songwriters and rights holders. But instead of chasing massive disruption, some companies are solving core infrastructure problems one region, one rights stream, and one workflow at a time.

In Episode #110 of the Sound Connections podcast, host Jakob Wredstrøm sits down with Hans Peter Roth, commercial lead at Muserk, to reveal how targeted problem-solving can revolutionize global royalty management platforms for music creators. Rather than grand visions, Roth shows how meticulously addressing metadata inconsistencies, unclaimed rights, and fragmented systems can unlock enormous latent value in underserved regions. This blog dives deeper into those insights, with actionable strategies and high-quality sources to back every claim.

This blog draws out the most actionable insights from that conversation, for founders, investors, and music-tech professionals, and shows how global royalty management platforms for music creators can unlock value not by competing with legacy systems, but by doing what they can’t.

Solving Metadata Fragmentation in Digital Music Rights

One of the most persistent barriers to royalty accuracy is metadata fragmentation. In the podcast, Hans Peter Roth explained that most creators don’t lose royalties because the revenue isn’t being generated,  they lose it because their work isn’t correctly attributed. Songs often enter digital platforms without clearly linked songwriter information, rights ownership, or publishing metadata. Without those connections, platforms either misallocate or hold payments indefinitely.

Muserk's early work in the U.S. market revealed just how costly this metadata failure can be. In 2017, they onboarded 30,000 non-English tracks into YouTube’s Content ID system for the U.S. market. That simple act,  resolving and submitting correct metadata, unlocked over $500,000 in previously unpaid royalties, funds that had been sitting unclaimed due to misattribution.

Roth made it clear that solving metadata fragmentation in digital music rights is not just a technical task,  it’s the foundation of sustainable rights infrastructure. Muserk’s approach avoids dependence on fragile third-party systems by investing in custom ingestion pipelines and validation layers. According to Roth, their platform was built to operate independently so it could scale with precision,  a necessary strategy when managing more than 20 million works globally.

For rights administrators, solving metadata fragmentation in digital music rights is no longer optional. It is the baseline requirement for creators to trust the system, for royalties to flow accurately, and for platforms to scale beyond their local markets. Founders and investors alike should prioritize metadata integrity as a strategic advantage, not just a compliance task.

Global Royalty Management Platforms for Music Creators

When most people think about scaling in music tech, they imagine disruption. But for Hans Peter Roth and the team at Muserk, scale came not from revolution, but from solving royalty problems that had been overlooked for too long. In the podcast, Roth explains how Muserk began by handling just 30,000 works from a few non-Anglophone societies in 2017. Within months, they had unlocked hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties simply by providing accurate data and rights linkage.

Rather than attempting to change everything at once, Muserk focused on refining processes that were previously slow, manual, or inaccessible to non-U.S. rights holders. Roth attributed their early success to identifying creators who weren’t getting paid in the U.S. because there was no efficient way to collect on mechanical or YouTube-related royalties from abroad,  a particularly broken system in a country where publishing and mechanical rights are administered separately.

What defines successful global royalty management platforms for music creators, according to Roth, isn’t their size or ambition,  it’s their ability to solve precision-level attribution issues and build on top of those fixes. For example, Muserk chose not to rely on third-party tech stacks or society integrations to grow. Instead, it built internal infrastructure optimized for accurate matching, ingestion, and payout. This is how they scaled from 30,000 to over 20 million works managed within just a few years.

This global inefficiency is where new value can be created,  not by replacing the entire system, but by filling in its missing links. Global royalty management platforms for music creators that address these specific failures,  through automation, data clarity, and cross-border capability,  are positioned to unlock measurable value in ways legacy players can’t.

Global royalty management platforms for music creators are not about making complex things look simple,  they’re about building simple, accurate systems that work in complex, under-digitized markets. Growth lies in the gaps.

How to Build Scalable Music Tech for Emerging Markets

Roth emphasized that success isn’t achieved by exporting Western systems into new regions, it's built by designing platforms for each market’s unique constraints, then scaling that framework. For example, when Muserk ingested non-English works into U.S. systems, they didn’t just lift a solution,  they adapted pipelines, workflows, and relationships to fit local publishing norms and legal systems.

Roth explained that how to build scalable music tech for emerging markets hinges on three critical steps:

1. Localizing ingestion pipelines: to handle metadata formats and registration anomalies.

2. Building repeatable processes: that can be deployed across markets.

3. Restarting each market's relationship-building: trust with local publishers, labels, and societies, which unlocks further adoption.

This process resulted in managing over 20 million works by replicating a simple, effective model rather than attempting global blanket solutions.

Data-Backed Signal: African Streaming Boom

The impact of this approach is evident across Africa. In 2024, Spotify paid around $59 million in royalties to Nigerian and South African artists, a dramatic increase from 2023, highlighting how scaling infrastructure in emerging markets releases substantial value. This rise supports the core podcast insight: how to build scalable music tech for emerging markets isn’t hypothetical, it correlates directly with revenue flow into those regions.

Key Takeaways for Builders & Investors from this:

• Iterate market by market: Fixing a U.S. pipeline doesn’t guarantee success in Lagos or São Paulo. Deploy, adapt, repeat.

• Infrastructure equals opportunity: As Spotify’s payouts show, creators need clean systems to convert attention into royalties.

• Operational discipline wins: This isn’t speculative “tech for Africa”, it’s execution, trust-building, and scaling a proven playbook.

Data Infrastructure Strategies for Music Rights Startups

In the podcast, Hans Peter Roth laid out a hard truth for rights-tech builders: clean metadata doesn’t happen by default. Muserk’s growth wasn’t driven by features or user experience, it was the result of building specialized infrastructure from the ground up. Rather than relying on third-party inputs, they developed internal ingestion pipelines and conflict resolution tools that gave them full control over rights attribution. This allowed them to scale from 30,000 to more than 20 million managed works, without inheriting other platforms' errors.

For startups, this highlights a clear priority. Data infrastructure strategies for music rights startups must begin with ownership of the backend. According to Roth, depending entirely on shared protocols or external societies can be limiting if the incoming data is inconsistent or incomplete. What matters is the ability to absorb flawed metadata and normalize it internally, because platforms that can’t reconcile rights information can’t scale.

Many in the industry are now pushing toward this model. Reports show that a growing number of platforms are shifting from patchwork fixes to unified, scalable data protocols that link works, recordings, and rights holders in structured pipelines. These systems don’t just process metadata, they help standardize attribution across DSPs and markets, allowing rights to flow accurately regardless of geography.

One of the most critical insights Roth shared is that music tech isn’t just a product game, it’s a process game. Platforms that treat metadata like a long-term infrastructure problem can outperform flashier competitors because they eliminate the recurring costs of manual reconciliation. That’s what makes data infrastructure strategies for music rights startups a long-term differentiator, not only for publishers and CMOs, but also for investors looking for operational moats.

The value isn't in collecting data, it's in making it reliable, consistent, and actionable across markets.

Licensing Challenges for Music Tech Startups

Roth makes it clear that building trust through proper licensing is a marathon, not a sprint. He shared that early in Muserk’s history, it took nearly four years of persistent negotiation, legal groundwork, and incremental licensing deals before the company secured scalable access to large catalogs and international rights streams. This process wasn't glamorous, it involved rebuilding pipelines, trust, and legal frameworks piece by piece.

Roth stressed that without this foundational licensing work, ambitious growth, like unlocking millions in royalties or expanding into new territories, simply isn't possible. He described licensing as a grinding, often unpublicized journey: one license, one publisher, one market at a time. Yet, each legal agreement unlocked new capabilities to aggregate rights, cross borders, and, ultimately, release value to creators.

What Industry Data Confirms

• Sync licensing, a critical revenue stream for tech platforms, now faces increasing friction and complexity. A Synchtank report noted that in 2023, media licensing became tougher to navigate due to greater contractual constraints, shrinking budgets, and elevated administrative demands, even as demand increased.

• Investors are also recognizing this slow-burn licensing model. According to the Financial Times, startups tackling copyright and licensing for AI purposes have secured $215 million in funding since 2022, projecting that licensing will expand from $10 billion in 2025 to $67.5 billion by 2030.

These findings confirm Roth’s point: the path to scaling music technology isn’t paved with code or user interfaces, it’s built on formal, often tedious licensing agreements with labels, publishers, and societies. This multi-year grind results in durable rights access, unlocking revenue streams that remain unavailable without those legal foundations.

AI Challenges in Music Publishing and Rights Attribution

Roth emphasized that the rise of AI-generated music poses a hidden strain on rights systems, not owing to royalties, but because each AI track adds administrative overhead without generating revenue. He stressed that every synthetic work still needs ingestion, cataloging, tracking, and reporting, which consumes technical and operational resources. Multiply that by the thousands of AI-generated tracks, and the backend burden becomes substantial.

To compound the problem, current metadata infrastructure isn’t equipped to handle this new wave of content. Roth explained that without updated industry standards and new metadata fields specifically for AI-origin tracking, platforms risk losing attribution accuracy. These AI challenges in music publishing and rights attribution aren’t hypothetical, they’re already materializing as rights platforms struggle to cope with an influx of non-revenue-generating works.

Roth also highlighted the need for collaboration: solving these challenges will require shared business rules and data standards. Instead of relying on ad-hoc detection or inconsistent reporting, he called for implementing provenance tags, attribution logic, and content governance as part of rights infrastructure. In other words, preparing for AI isn’t just a feature request, it’s mandatory for maintaining system integrity.

What This Means for Music Tech Builders

Platforms must go beyond traditional metadata, they need AI-detection, provenance tags, and immutable attribution logs embedded directly into their infrastructure. Integrating AI challenges in music publishing and rights attribution into core data systems is no longer optional, it’s essential for sustainability and compliance.

Investor Opportunities in B2B Music Royalty Technology

Throughout the episode, Hans Peter Roth pointed out that operational efficiency, not hype, is what drives value in music rights. Muserk didn’t scale by promising disruption; it grew by handling tedious, often overlooked tasks like metadata validation, royalty allocation, and licensing reconciliation. These aren’t glamorous problems, but they are the ones that unlock predictable revenue.

This makes the space particularly compelling for long-term investors. B2B rights platforms sit on recurring income tied to high-volume digital use. They also build durable moats through infrastructure, once a system integrates with publishers, DSPs, and societies, switching becomes costly. Roth noted that relationships, data integrity, and back-end speed are what differentiate winners in this space.

The growing appetite for music royalty infrastructure backs this up. In 2024, a new investment vehicle backed by Bridgepoint committed up to $150 million toward music royalty tech, specifically targeting platforms that clean up payments and metadata across producer and publisher rights. It’s a sign that investors are beginning to view rights infrastructure as a utility, stable, scalable, and foundational.

For those looking at investor opportunities in B2B music royalty technology, the signal is clear. The best bets aren’t platforms chasing virality or trend cycles, they’re the ones solving real operational friction in rights workflows. Revenue follows precision.

Conclusion: Rights Infrastructure Wins When It’s Built with Precision

What Roth made clear is that fixing music royalties isn't about sweeping transformation, it’s about solving specific, persistent operational problems. Muserk’s growth didn’t come from trying to change the entire music business; it came from solving for metadata misattribution, licensing delays, and international royalty bottlenecks, one step at a time. Each of those pain points, once resolved, unlocked new revenue and trust across global markets. The lesson here is simple: platforms that quietly fix rights workflows at scale can outperform those chasing disruption headlines.

The value proposition is especially sharp for builders and investors. Rights tech isn’t a moonshot, it’s a compounding infrastructure play. Companies that prioritize metadata integrity, localized licensing, scalable ingestion pipelines, and robust attribution layers will be the ones who manage tomorrow’s rights systems. This includes preparing for the AI wave, where attribution stakes are even higher and legacy systems are already being stress-tested. The podcast makes it clear: the most effective platforms don’t chase complexity; they reduce it through better design, better partnerships, and rigorous execution.

The takeaway isn’t about vision, it’s about infrastructure. Metadata is messy. Licensing is slow. Global royalties are fragmented. But for those willing to do the work, one dataset, one contract, one system at a time, there is outsized value to unlock. The companies solving these pain points are building something rare in music tech: scale that lasts.