2025 TLDR: Music labels and publishers on Chordal are now making *new* 6-figure annual revenues from InstantClear.
We started 2025 by announcing InstantClear - our solution for how to scale micro-licensing (social, podcast, reality…) for popular copyrights without requiring dynamic pricing, sacrificing creative curation, or an insane amount of administrative lift for large catalogs. (We also talked a lot about why after real-world trials, we feel dynamic pricing is not the way forward.)
We launched a V1, got boatloads of feedback from licensees and licensors, and here are some pieces of data I’m particularly proud to share:
-->People made real money.
In many cases, this was the first time they had been able to monetize pre-cleared licensing because they didn’t control songs one-stop. No manual invoicing, pro-rata payments arrived in their accounts.
-->120,000+ songs became eligible for InstantClear.
These are songs where all fractional owners on a copyright have claimed their shares on Chordal, so they are now fully pre-clearable using InstantClear. Does this seem small relative to the world’s total music? Of course. But consider progress made on point 3…
-->We generated 106x efficiencies for label and publisher teams navigating the pre-clearance process.
Last year, we asked some of our clients “How hard would it be to pre-clear your full catalog for certain types of uses or media? (Maybe for example, Social Media (Unpaid))”. Typical answers: Impossible. We’ll never do it. Runs for open window…
Why? Because in the end, the ROI likely isn’t worth it, or at least quantifiable enough to project against.
Tons of email correspondence for approvals, contracts, payments, invoices, all likely managed by a 6-figure employee.
In fact, you'll probably make more money litigating the infringement… but longterm do we really want to make enemies out of all our potential buyers? Maybe it's better to show them a compliant path.
We then asked: “If you've done pre-cleared licenses, how many songs on average were you able to clear and how long did the process take?” The answer on average: 50-500 songs, and about 20-200 hours of work.
The equation was simple, to grow this area for rights holders, we needed to help them reduce the time and effort for everyone, so they can unlock more pre-clearable tracks. More pre-cleared tracks results in a better experience for higher-volume or less sophisticated buyers. More buyers=more revenue, less infringement. Positive feedback loop for all!
So…when we helped a company turn 400 songs pre-clearable into 9,000+ this year, it felt encouraging. And to hear that it only required about 30 minutes of their team’s effort instead of 20 hours…. felt VERY encouraging.
A huge thanks to everyone that continues to believe in us. More to come and a lot of exciting new partnerships along the way.
Happy 2026!
