Friction, Friction, everywhere.

Photo by Adi Goldstein

I heard a comment recently relayed by Paul Langworthy, Chief Revenue Officer of Songtradr. He was quoting a Songtradr customer, a CEO launching a new music service, who, partway through the process, had thrown their hands up and said:

“Your industry is bonkers. I knew it was complicated, but I didn’t realise it would be this hard.”

With no accusation or attempt to provoke, it was a reaction from someone likely very smart, well-funded, and highly capable, encountering the music industry from the outside for the first time and realising just how difficult it is to navigate in practice.

Complexity, nuance, and accumulated friction

Music rights are nuanced, and always have been. Creative collaboration, shared ownership, territorial differences, long tails of value, and cultural context are all part of what makes music operationally distinct from many other industries.

There is, however, an important distinction to be made between nuance and friction.

Over decades layers of infrastructure, process, regulation, and market structure have been built on top of one another, often in response to very real needs and stimuli at very specific moments. Each layer made sense ephemerally, but collectively they have produced an ecosystem that is difficult to reason about holistically.

This is particularly obvious and pertinent when seen through the fresh eyes. For anyone trying to integrate music into a product, service, or investment portfolio, this manifests not as “interesting complexity”, but as a dense web of uncertainty. The same is true even for those working on the inside- there is barely a day that goes by when I don’t discover something I didn’t previously know about the way rights, data, collections or collective management functions in a given niche.

Fragmentation as the default operating model

One of the defining characteristics of the modern music industry is fragmentation, and not only in the oft-discussed single dimension of rights. Fragmentation is happening multi-dimensionally- and all at once.

We all know how fragmented rights are. At the highest level, the distinction between recorded rights and publishing rights is often presented as foundational knowledge. In reality, that distinction is but the starting point. Each layer breaks down further, across right types, territories, administrators, rights holders (in their various guises) and creators (the atomic unit of rights holder), let alone their various guises- song writer/artist/performer, and not discounting versions, derivatives, samples, covers, splits… the list is ongoing, and even experienced professionals regularly disagree on some the intersections.

But infrastructure is also fragmented. There is no global, authoritative source of truth for repertoire, ownership, or usage. Data flows through multiple parallel systems, each optimised for a specific purpose, using inconsistent identifiers and schemas. Subsequently reconciliation is a permanent and costly activity, rather than the rare exception.

Finally, services are fragmented. Licensing, reporting, payments, claims, audits, analytics, and compliance are often delivered by different providers, each solving a narrow slice of the problem. Integration happens downstream, typically through manual processes or bespoke tooling- paralleled to the reconciliation required in the infrastructure layer.

From the outside, this fragmentation looks less like a sophisticated ecosystem and more like a patchwork that requires deep insider knowledge to navigate safely.

Music is everywhere, but built for nowhere

At the same time, music has become a horizontal dependency for a growing number of industries. Wellness apps, fitness platforms, gaming, social products and retail environments as well as other media businesses deeply rely on music to shape user experience and emotional engagement. In many cases, music is central to the product’s perceived value.

Yet, because of the above, integrating music remains one of the most daunting parts of bringing those products to market.

The risk profile is unclear and the licensing pathways convoluted and opaque. The operational burden and costs are poorly understood at the outset and often underestimated. Founders and product teams discover late in the process that “having music” and “having the right to use music correctly, globally, and at scale” are very different propositions.

As a result, music is frequently treated as something to minimise, defer, or workaround- not because it lacks value, but because the cost of getting it wrong feels disproportionate.

The economic cost of complexity

What makes this especially challenging is that many of the industry’s core concepts are difficult to communicate cleanly to those outside it.

Ask a first-time founder to explain the difference between a recording and a composition, or between a mechanical and performing right, and the explanation will likely have many a “errrrr” and “ummmmm”. Ask the same question of someone inside the industry, and the answer is frequently better communicated, though not necessarily more precise.

This isn’t a failure of intelligence or effort, but it does reflect on how mental models have followed in mirroring this same fragmentation. The ever growing complexity has become self-reinforcing, meaning knowledge accrues to those who have already invested years learning the system, and that knowledge gap is raising the barrier to entry for everyone else.

This matters because the friction has real commercial consequences. The current B2B integrated music market- licensing, infrastructure, services, and tooling designed to help non-music companies use music- is estimated at roughly $150–300 million annually.

That number feels small when set against the breadth of industries that increasingly rely on music to function. With clearer rights models, better infrastructure, and lower integration friction, a market in the region of $4–5 billion is by no means a stretch of the imagination.

The missing value is not driven by a lack of interest in music, but rather by uncertainty. Many businesses would happily pay for clarity, predictability, and scalability if those things were easier to procure.

Friction is the wrong kind of moat

Today, one of the most painfully effective barriers to entry in music is simply how hard it is to engage, and particularly without risk.

This is an odd position for an industry whose product is as emotionally powerful and culturally universal as music. Difficulty becomes a proxy for protection, even when it deters participants who could otherwise expand the market.

Systematic opacity may feel protective in the short term, but it constrains growth, experimentation, and investment. When a capable CEO looks at the music industry and concludes that it is “bonkers” it is a signal that the systems surrounding it have drifted away from accessibility.

A healthier dynamic would see the primary barrier to entry rooted in the perceived value of music to a given service: how central it is to the user experience, how thoughtfully it is integrated, and how fairly it is subsequently compensated. Complexity would still exist  (because nuance doesn’t just disappear)- but it would be surfaced, translated, and managed rather than obscured. Value should be the key distinction- not friction.

Music is the most utilised component of modern digital experiences. Making it easier to integrate, understand, and invest in would not only grow the value it can then command- it would also allow that value to compound.