The Market Share Game
For years, labels and distributors have been squabbling over their respective slices of the streaming market pie. The bigger your market share, the more leverage you have with Spotify, Apple Music, and the rest. It's been this way for so long that it's hard to imagine anything else mattering.
But as we dive headfirst into the AI era, there's a new metric in town that will eclipse market share. Coined by Mike Pelczynski, it's called attribution share, and it will fundamentally alter how music is monetized.
Enter Attribution Share
So just what is attribution share?
Attribution share asks you to imagine a world where AI can, and does, whip up new songs based on existing music. And this will be from your music. And no, you were not asked for permission upfront. In this new era, the value of your content isn't just how many times it's streamed, it's how much it influences and shapes new content—particularly how much it influences the AI models as a whole.
That's attribution share in its simplest form. It's not just about play counts anymore, it's about how many times elements of your song (the melody, the lyrics, MIDI, etc.) are used as building blocks for new content. And here's the mind-blowing part—this market could be exponentially more significant than the current streaming market.
Dynamic Licensing: The Key to Monetization
Now, I know what you're thinking. "But how do we make money from this?"
This is where we need to start thinking differently about licensing. The old model of flat licensing—where a company pays a fee for the right to use your content—just isn't going to cut it anymore. Sure, it might be tempting to take that upfront cash. But in a world where your content could be used millions of times to create new works, you're leaving money on the table if you’re blind to what the AI makes—while trusting these 800+ companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars to do the right thing. Remember what I said about asking for permission earlier?
Instead, we need to start thinking about dynamic licensing. This allows rights holders to be compensated based on how, and how much of, their content is used, and how much it influences new creations. It's a whole new ballgame, and it will require some serious tech to track and monetize these attributions.
Protection and Control in the AI Era
This shift isn't just about making more money (although that's certainly nice). It's about protecting your work and controlling how it's used in ways we've never had to consider before.
Between AI-generated music, deep fakes, and synthetic media, we're entering an era where anything can be created from everything. And if you're not careful, your hard work could end up being used in ways you never intended—without you seeing a dime.
So what can we do about it? Here are a few key steps:
1. Opt-out by default: Start by protecting your work. Put your content in a digital lockbox that tells AI systems what they can and can't use, in a language they understand.
2. Get creative with licensing: Instead of just selling the rights to your music, start thinking about licensing the influence of your music.
3. Embrace attribution tracking: Invest in technologies that can follow your content as it's used and transformed, ensuring you're fairly compensated for your contributions to new works.
The Future is, wait, it already happened…
I know it sounds a bit sci-fi, but trust me, the future is already here. The rights holders that figure this out first are going to have a major advantage. And for those of us who create, or own creative assets, it could mean the difference between being left behind and riding the wave of the next big revolution in music.
So here's my challenge to you. Start thinking about your music not just in terms of streams and downloads, but in terms of influence and attribution. Because in the AI era, that's where the real value is going to be.
As mentioned in my last post, especially when it comes to synthetic data, you need to be ready with a technical solution fast. Signing petitions and announcing in press releases what you want to happen to your music in this new reality will get you nowhere. You need a system that allows AI companies to verify attribution without accessing your full data. No AI company knows specifically what your music, lyrics, or songs are. You must include them in a registry that allows AI companies to automatically check for infringement without disclosing all of your unprotected data—and in a language their machines can understand, all while keeping your content in a protected state.
Attribution share will happen with or without you. You need to have a window into that lockbox, as opposed to just hoping for some decent accounting from companies who couldn't even be bothered to ask you for permission in the first place.
As Dr. Tamay Aykut, founder of Sureel AI, said in a recent interview, “The real threat isn’t AI itself—it’s inaction.”
This piece by Mike Pelczynski goes deeper into the economics and scale of what will happen if the creative industries choose the right path—and what could happen if they don’t.
