As the fitness industry’s Unified Music System (UMS) partner, we eat, breathe, and sleep music at Feed.fm. Our customers typically focus first on popular music, as they need the latest hits and classic jams to power workouts in apps and connected devices. Feed.fm streams major-label music for brands including Alo Moves, Echelon, and Hydrow in many countries. However, digital fitness is a global phenomenon, and fitness companies also need high-quality, high-performance music for other international markets.
In the current economy, budgets are tight and expectations are high. Fitness brands looking for solutions might find that international markets present a great growth opportunity as the US market levels off. The challenge: navigating international music licensing. In this case, a UMS like Feed.fm is essential, as global music licensing is extremely complex.
Disclaimer: Please note this article is not a substitute for legal advice, but a quick overview of the complex music licensing world.
Why is global music licensing SO complicated?
Just consider Europe, a priority market for many of Feed.fm’s customers. For businesses to directly negotiate music licensing contracts across Europe, it’s necessary to work with over 30 Collective Management Organizations (in addition to any artists, labels, and other rightsholders for the specific songs you’d like to use). If and when you manage to secure deals with all of these rightsholders, that’s when the real work begins.
To stream music across Europe, you will need to build a strategy and infrastructure for license management, tracking and usage reporting, and royalty payment responsibilities. It pays to get this right, as any breaches can result in potential million-dollar lawsuits.
A few of the compliance-related tasks you’ll need to be ready for include:
- Usage reporting in various required formats
- Composition/sound recording matching
- Restricted artist, composition, and rightsholder list filtering
- Take down notice compliance and song replacements
- Geographic fencing compliance for different catalogs
- Financial reporting for percentage of revenue or per subscriber-based royalty obligations
If music is not your core business, it’s unlikely that you have the experts on staff to help you navigate the intricacies of international licensing. In terms of outsourcing this work, a team of consultants and music attorneys may seem like an appropriate strategy, until these vendors begin piecing together your international music rights and music systems. Here are some of the hidden costs of a point solution:
The time and capital required for global music licensing negotiations and legal review, matching sound recording rights with publishing and performance rights, curation, and monitoring rights changes, among other things.
The risks associated with managing multiple partners, both in terms of legal exposure and potential gaps in the actual music rights and delivery.
And these are some of the questions you’ll need to answer in terms of the music itself:
Will your content department or product team own this? How do you know what to clear if you’re not sure what to play? Will you enlist professional curators to make track selections?
A patchwork approach to global music licensing with legal teams, content providers, infrastructure providers, and internal or third-party curation teams quickly contributes to increased financial and personnel costs.
Do I REALLY need to figure out international music licensing for my business?
Yes, and no.
Yes
If you’ve read this far, you already know how important it is to grow globally.
Over the past decade, Feed.fm has worked with fitness brands ranging from the scrappiest start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. Take Barry’s for example. CEO Joey Gonzalez saw the power of music as a growth lever. At a conference last year, Gonzalez told the audience that, “Feed.fm has unlocked our growth potential, allowing us to scale Barry’s X globally.”
With smartphone penetration rapidly increasing in such regions as Southeast Asia and Africa, it’s unsurprising that 70% of Feed.fm’s customers have a global music strategy in place. For any fitness companies working to scale outside the US, figuring out a global music plan is essential since 94% of people report music is important to keep them motivated during a workout*.
And the “no” part:
With the right partner, you don’t have to do any of the work yourself.
Feed.fm offers digital businesses a comprehensive global music solution. Our Unified Music System (UMS) includes:
- A wide range of pre-cleared music catalogs including major label and global-approved tracks.
- Expert music curation, comprehensive onboarding, monthly music optimizations, and white glove service every step of the way.
- The best music API for businesses with low-code SDK integration which automates all the licensing and compliance tasks.
- Full indemnification - you can rest easy knowing that we’ve got your back.
Feed.fm’s Global Music Solution
The Feed.fm UMS lets you stream major-label music in many countries. For everywhere else, we source the best indie-label music and the highest-quality production libraries. We also offer Feed Originals, an exclusive catalog specially commissioned for optimal performance across fitness, sports, health and wellness. All these catalogs are pre-cleared for use in apps and smart devices, and our music stations are custom-crafted by the world’s foremost fitness curators to deliver the best possible experience for your users.
Selecting the optimal indie music for global workouts is much more challenging than determining whether to program this or that Sabrina Carpenter, Kendrick Lamar, or David Guetta song.
- Feed.fm’s curation team invests significantly in the highly skilled, data-backed music discovery necessary to determine which of our licensed global tracks get programmed in customer stations.
- Collectively, our team has 20 years of fitness curation experience, including selecting and commissioning global music for all fitness modalities.
- Playback data such as skip rates plus feedback from the world’s leading fitness brands inform global music station optimizations, with tracks that don’t perform well removed.
Making global music licensing easy
While global music licensing is a truly complex problem, our industry experience and relationships put us in a unique position to solve this for our fitness customers. Feed.fm is on a mission to make it easy, fast, and legal for businesses to use music to power the most engaging customer experiences. And our dedication to delivering the right song to the right person at the right time is not limited by geography.
Schedule a free music consultation to learn more about how Feed.fm can help you start or simplify your brand's global music licensing strategy.
*Feed.fm Consumer Music Survey, 2024
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