Over a year since launching its music licensing marketplace into beta, Israeli startup YouLicense has raised $1 million in funding from the Logia Group and Ofer Media.
YouLicense is positioning itself as a marketplace for low cost music licensing, similar to what iStockPhoto did for stock photography. YouLicense’s system lets music sellers (licensors) and buyers (licensees) communicate, negotiate, contract, and transact directly. Licenses are typically in the $20-150 range with a 9% commission charged to the licensor upon the completion of a transaction.
Since launch, the company has amassed a repository of 50,000 songs licensed by independent labels and artists. YouLicense has chosen to be “licensee-friendly” and not require song exclusivity, meaning that licensors are free to monetize their music anywhere else in addition to YouLicense.
While YouLicense expected to license most of its music for use in advertising, film and television, the bulk of its licenses have been in the long tail - specifically, for slideshow and website background music, corporate presentations, online and mobile videos, and indie film making.
Prior to this round, YouLicense operated on a mere $100,000 in pre-seed funding. CEO Maor Ezer says the company plans to roll out a white labeled marketplace in addition to storefront applications for Facebook, MySpace and Bebo in the next few months.
“YOU” , ending “R” , wtf with all these lame names
Love the idea. I’ve found myself at a loss on numerous occasions for a legal, straight forward way to find music I could use for professional projects.
Can’t wait to try out the site.
I think this is a really smart investment. Today, artists need new ways to make money from their works, and given the massive amount of placement opps available today (how many cable stations do YOU have?), you license is providing a great service! Conversely, given the extent of copyright litigation today, people using music actually need to make sure they have the right to do so. So, services like youlicense are perfect for this. And, they let people find music they wouldn’t have otherwise heard that will cost them less to license than famous works from major labels.
I also like Musync.com for this!
They are great partners for us at DashGo. While we focus on pushing content out to partner sites, they’ve helped build a custom platform for our catalog at license.dashgo.com so we can capture more long tail sync opportunities.
Congrats to the folks at YouLicense! They have done well creating a marketplace for affordable music licenses in the $3.4 billion commercial music space. The platform is similar to AudioMicro http://www.audiomicro.com , but with a different pricing model - it’s not micro stock music but more of music licensing marketplace. This is definitely a great platform with good momentum. This space will certainly be exciting to watch over the next 5 to 10.
I think it won’t be very succesful…
Forgot your own coverage of Pump Audio which has been doing this for a while and sold last year for >$40 mil to Getty Images
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....ic-tracks/
Greg - pump is rights managed licensing. Your comments illustrates that you possess a profound misunderstanding of the licensing world.
YouTube person - you seem like a troll.
It is good to see that YouLicense has received funding and is growing. However, we have had Licensing in development on RouteNote for over a year now, and it should be launching in the coming months. Mixing this with a growing Distribution service, we are the allround best newcomer in the Digital Music Space!
Steven
http://www.routenote.com