The creator economy is booming, but music rights are more confusing than ever. Thematic is quietly fixing that for both content creators and music artists.
The following was created in collaboration with Thematic, a proud partner of Digital Music News.
First launched in 2018, Thematic connects emerging and established musicians with digital content creators. Thematic’s approach removes the risk for creators by offering pre-cleared music for YouTube videos, automating licenses at the time of download. Music artists also benefit enormously by opening content licensing windows for discovery opportunities.
Of course, music-driven UGC is now growing exponentially across a range of UGC and emerging platforms, making Thematic a compelling partner for companies looking to adopt their community approach to music licensing.
Twitch Partnership
Thematic has just partnered with Twitch for its new Soundtrack by Twitch (Beta) feature. Soundtrack offers rights-cleared music to gamers for play during their live streams. The partnership for Thematic represents a great opportunity to scale both sides of the platform. Thematic will be able to onboard a wider selection of music artists, while giving existing artists on the platform another channel for promotion, including the opportunity to join the Twitch Affiliate Program.
Shutterstock Partnership
Thematic’s matchmaking algorithm makes it a perfect partner for Shutterstock to curate assets. It also introduces Thematic’s Gen Z creators to the Shutterstock platform for stock photos, videos, and music. The partnership will help streamline the content-creation workflow for these creators, providing them with another source for their creations.
Songtrust Partnership
Thematic has signed a partnership agreement with Songtrust to give independent music artists more control over their content and the direction of their careers through publishing admin services. As the world’s first self-service global royalty collection solution, Songtrust is an intuitive partner for Thematic as it helps artists earn more income by seeing where they are leaving money on the table. Both companies are working together to reduce complexities around music rights and publishing.
More on How Thematic Works
Thematic has developed new matchmaking technology that analyzes how songs are used in creators’ videos. It gives artists more opportunities for organic discovery as creators are instantly matched to the perfect songs for their content. The Thematic algorithm recommends songs to content creators that match their personal aesthetic and the theme of their video.
In turn, artists, labels, and other rights owners can license their content for limited windows to generate a promotional — or even viral — boost.
On average, artists using Thematic see a 20% increase in Spotify and YouTube revenue as well as adding 6,500 new fans to their community.
Thematic bills itself as an exchange for Gen Z content creators. It has focused intently on eliminating traditional licensing landmines that digital creatives typically encounter. To date, the company has generated more than 1.2 million licenses for creators while driving 20 billion song plays and converting 11M new fans for music artists.
“Our curation engine is constantly analyzing how the songs are being interacted with and used by both our creator community and other creators on YouTube to best match our songs with video themes,” says Thematic co-founder Michelle Phan.
Michelle Phan is a global beauty icon, successful entrepreneur, and part of a trailblazing creator-class who helped define the “creator economy” As a result of her battle with music copyright claims, Thematic was founded as a safe, fair and collaborative creative exchange with the mission to build a more equitable ecosystem.