Tag Archive | Cryptocurrency
November 18, 2025  

Infinite Licensing in Gen-AI Music Ecosystems will Create Fairer Music Value Calculations for Artists and Rightsholders

Dae Bogan excerpt from the webinar “The Permission Layer for AI Music: Consent, Attribution, and Getting Artists Paid” hosted by Abbi Press for The Double Helix on November 12, 2025

Infinite licensing (IL) will be the most effective and fair system of music rights licensing and remuneration in the gen-AI music era.

I believe we will see clear elements of it by 2030.

I appreciate Abbi Press’s perspective on the human element of music licensing. As a professional in the licensing space, she raises a number of important issues that would have to be acknowledged—then solved? ignored? or avoided?—for any compelling infinite licensing (IL) system to become widely adopted.

This is why I predict that we will not see a system close to my vision of IL until around 2030.

I believe that this is an important conversation, because at the core of it, the question is “Do current licensing frameworks benefit music creators?”

Even so-called ethically-sourced and ethically-trained AI music ecosystems do not fairly compensate the music creators whose music is contributing to gen-AI music.

IL will enable dynamic market-value calculations that smart contracts, opt-ins, royalty pools, and settlements cannot and have never fully captured.

Also watch:

Dae Bogan excerpt on the panel “Revolutionizing Rights Management for Artists“ at ASCAP Expo 2018
November 12, 2025  

Infinite Licensing in AI Music

Dae Bogan and Scott Cohen (then Chief Innovation Officer, Warner Music Group) presenting the lecture “Music 2020: The Next Era of Innovation in the Music Industry” at Music Biz Conference 2019

For a few years now, in private conversations with various technologists, music rightsholders and fellow data nerds, I’ve been using, and trying to coin, the term “infinite licensing” to describe the concept of real-time AI-powered dynamic licensing of rights in both generative-AI and single-source derivative AI music applications.

No, I am not talking about smart contracts, which are finite preset rules hardcoded in a file that is then minted to a blockchain, but rather the convergence of AI (conceptual/subjective/ecosystem) and blockchain (context/ownership) within the permission layer of applications that can generate an infinite ♾️ combination of licensing deal terms.

Infinite licensing would behave sort of like an oracle within applications to dynamically value and clear rights in machine-to-machine, business-to-business, and consumer-to-machine applications, going beyond the scope of human objectivity, individual experience in negotiation and valuation, and workload capacity in the licensing process.

It removes limiting royalty formulas and most favored nations models and replaces them with highly customized and more commercially accurate representations of value at a given point in time.

I imagine a future where an AI system built on an LLM that has learned from previous licensing deals (and the outcomes and missed opportunities of such deals), ingested airplay and streaming stats, interpreted correlations and trends, while calculating the lost value of undervalued deals, analyzed historical sync data, quantifies hype, ingested sales data, and consumer behavior and sentiment data, etc. would dynamically determine rates and terms for gen-AI and single-source derivative AI music outputs.

Infinite licensing, unlike smart contracts, could factor in variations in types of use, the real commercial value of the source music involved, the perceived cultural value of music creators involved, the market value of the opportunity, and much more.

The blockchain aspect, which has been in development across a variety of projects and startups for over 10 years now, would provide the architecture for transparent and immutable rights management while remuneration could be supported by cryptocurrency.

In 2019, when I presented my lecture “Music 2020: The Next Era of Innovation in the Music Industry” at the California Institute of The Arts and again at Music Biz Conference, I argued that artificial intelligence, blockchain, and cryptocurrency would be among the technologies that will transform the music industry in the 2020’s.

California Institute of the Arts

We’re halfway through the 2020’s and I think someone will figure out infinite licensing before 2030.

October 12, 2018  

How Blockchain And Cryptocurrency Can Speed Up Spotify International Publishing Royalty Payments To US Songwriters

cryptocurrency and music

There’s been a lot of talk about applications of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency payments in the music industry. In fact, there isn’t a single major music industry conference that doesn’t dedicate some programming to related topics. There are several projects and startups currently underway to address licensing, discovery, attribution, remuneration and more with blockchain, smart contracts, and cryptocurrency.

For those of us who aren’t blockchain developers, simply keeping up with the many applications of blockchain in the music industry is the closest we’ll get actually knowing how this all (could) works.

I’ve been thinking about how blockchain and cryptocurrency could speed up the process of paying U.S. songwriters, who wait upwards of 1.5 years to get paid for the use of their songs on Spotify outside the U.S.

The current state of the flow of international publishing income to U.S. Independent Songwriters who own their publishing and use traditional publishing administrators to collect in the U.S. is quite depressing.

As an example, Tommy released a song on Spotify in January 2018. In the United Kingdom, the song earned $100 “publisher share” Spotify UK digital public performance royalties.

Here’s the breakdown:

START: $100 “publisher share” of Spotify UK digital performance royalties in January 2018.

1. PRS collects Tommy’s publishing income in the UK ($100) in January 2018.

2. PRS retains 10% admin fee and remits the balance ($90) to ASCAP in October 2018.

3. ASCAP retains 12% admin fee and remits the balance ($79.20) to the Publishing Administrator in February 2019.

4. Publishing Administrator retains 20% admin fee and pays Tommy ($63.36) in July 2019.

END: Tommy is paid $63.36 for his Spotify UK “publisher share” income (earned $100) after waiting 1.5 years and experiencing a reduction of 37% of his royalties. Imagine $1,000 reduced to $633.60 or $10,000 reduced to $6,336.00.

Had Spotify used blockchain technology to dynamically identify Tommy as the rightsholder in his song and paid him instantly at the close of the month with cryptocurrency, Tommy would have already spent his $100 on studio time!