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Business News Digital Labels & Publishers
STIM launches music service for YouTube Creators
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 25 August 2022
Swedish collecting society STIM has launched a new service called Cora Music which is, and I quote, “a world-first service, providing YouTubers with a one-stop shop for quality music”.
Basically it’s a service that allows YouTube creators to easily license a catalogue of commercially released music for use in their videos. If creators use such music in their content without seeking licences, their videos may be blocked, or a record label may claim the creator’s share of any ad income that YouTube generates via the Content ID system.
However, sorting out direct licences from record labels and music publishers is a lot of work for YouTubers. Which is why many YouTube creators use production music instead of commercially released tracks. What STIM refers to as “unknown buyout music” in its Cora Music blurb, by which they probably mainly mean music from another Sweden-based entity, good old Epidemic Sound.
With Cora Music’s “world-first service” creators can access commercially released tracks via a one-stop shop, with both recording rights and song rights covered. Now, if that sounds very much like the existing Lickd service, that’s because it is. Albeit with a few thousand tracks to choose from rather than Lickd’s million plus catalogue.
So maybe all that “world-first service” talk is a bit hyperbolic, even if there are some differences between the Cora Music and Lickd models. But still, it’s interesting to see a collecting society dabbling in this space, recognising that complexities around music licensing – especially when you go global – have often resulted in the new breed of content creators using production music, or unlicensed music, or no music at all.
“Cora Music represents famous tracks from all kinds of genres, is available in one single database, and has a state-of-the-art filter according to category, mood, tempo and much more”, STIM said yesterday. “Cora Music is currently available for YouTubers, and will later be expanded across other platforms”.
“There is a myriad of online services that offer music to YouTube creators”, added STIM CEO Casper Bjørner, “but Cora Music [offers] unlimited access to hits that the viewers love – not simply anonymous muzak. This is the result of extensive and successful licence negotiations with numerous partners, and we’re really proud”.
