Photo Credit: Markus Winkler
The recent influx of multimillion-dollar music-industry funding rounds is showing few signs of slowing down, for YouTube-focused music-licensing platform Lickd has raised £5.1 million (nearly $7 million at the present exchange rate) from backers including Warner Music Group.
London-headquartered Lickd – which enables visual-media creators to license popular tracks for use in certain videos on YouTube as well as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Twitch, Vimeo, and LinkedIn – unveiled the substantial raise via a formal release that was emailed to DMN. Longtime Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason’s namesake company led the £5.1 million/$6.99 million round, which also drew support from Warner Music Group and Fortnite developer Epic Games.
And in addition to fronting a portion of the roughly $7 million tranche, Warner Music Group will “make its full catalogue of millions of songs available to content creators” on Lickd, while social-video professionals can already license tracks from David Guetta, Megan Thee Stallion, and other WMG-signed acts.
More broadly, besides enabling “Lickd to amplify its commercial song library,” today’s raise will allow the five-year-old “company to continue to build its technology offering, its international footprint and its customer base,” higher-ups said. On this front, the past 18 months have seen Lickd grow “at an incredibly fast pace,” execs likewise indicated, including by inking agreements with WMG and the newly public Universal Music Group.
Building upon the latter, however, Lickd’s website specifies that a “virality clause,” pertaining to music owners’ stakes in videos that contain their IP and go viral, “only applies to one rightsholder.”
“That rightholder is Universal Music Group (UMG),” proceeds the relevant portion of Lickd’s FAQ page. “This clause means that UMG has the ‘option’ to ask you to relicense the track in a 30 day period if your video goes above 3x your average video viewership. They will not take your adsense revenue, but may require you to pay an additional fee.”
Elaborating upon the terms of the virality clause, Lickd said: “If your video goes viral (video views total of over 2.3M) in the first 30 days of your content going public, your video could be reclaimed by the rightsholder.” Moreover, though “the majority” of Lickd’s licenses “are granted in perpetuity,” Universal Music “reserves the right to potentially choose to reapply claims after 5 years.”
As initially mentioned, the last seven days have brought with them a $6 million raise for AI-focused record label Snafu Records, a $12.2 million round for music-sampling startup Tracklib, a $250 million raise for WMG-backed Dapper Labs, a $5 million capital influx for blockchain-based music streaming platform Audius, and a $122 million Series C for ticketing and music-discovery platform DICE.