Discover ‘New Music Library for Creators’ by Universal Music.
A new music library for creators to monetise their art, claim-free.
Until now, the Swedish company Epidemic Sound dominated the subscription-based music market, allowing creators to pick a track from a catalogue of royalty-free music and sound content, to include in various media projects such as videos, films, podcasts, and more.
Using such a service allows creators to prevent receiving claims on their production, leading the content to be blocked, removed or worse: receiving a strike impacting the entire project monetisation capacity.
The model: Creators pay a subscription fee and in return, they can tap into a diverse library, outsourcing the copyright rights or licensing fees management to the platform.
And here’s where we dive into the case of Universal Music Group.
Universal Music for Creators: A sound investment?
Not long after the recent announcement of a joint project with Deezer on the 17th of October 2023, the Universal Music Group decided to take a leap into a market monopolised by Epidemic Sounds by launching a service called ‘Universal Music for Creators’
This new service promises “claim-free, premium music and sound effects” for online videos.
As such, Universal is using a subscription model for the new library with two tiers.
Its $5.99-a-month Creator plan offers unlimited downloads from its library of more than 50k tracks and 200k sound effects, with this audio able to be used to monetise one channel per platform on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, TikTok and Snapchat — which is far cheaper from its unique competitor VS 11€-a-month Personal plan for an Epidemic Sounds subscription*
*Options differ — see comparison table below.
Despite being almost twice as cheap as Epidemic Sound, Universal Music provides more creative freedom (and crash tests) to Creators, allowing them to monetise up to 5 channels per platform, including podcasts and websites which was not mentioned by Epidemic Sound (yet).
If you are a Creator, Digital Artist, or Musician en devenir, please carefully consider the options included in each package to decide the most suitable plan. You can browse the catalogue to assess the possibilities before making a decision.
Musically Yours, Break On Through
Check out more content about today’s music industry and streaming business in the publication Areas & Producers.
