Executive Summary

Missing or incorrect credits and feature metadata is a persistent operational and financial problem across the music ecosystem: DSPs, labels, publishers, performance rights organizations, sync agents and the estimated 100,000 music and audio businesses that rely on accurate metadata face lost royalties, poor discoverability and compliance risk when credits are incomplete. Independent creators and aggregators are particularly exposed because they account for much of the recent catalog growth and often lack the tooling or workflows to systematically capture contributor credits at scale. You could build a multimodal inference and aggregation service that combines audio fingerprinting, source separation, name/entity OCR from artwork and docs, public metadata aggregation (MusicBrainz/DDEX feeds), and a human-in-the-loop verification layer, delivered as a REST API and enterprise dashboard with batch ingestion and audit trails. The product would output normalized credits, role classification (writer, producer, performer), confidence scores and provenance for each attribution, plus billing-ready payloads for downstream royalty systems. The timing is favorable: the sector-level opportunity is roughly $3.6B if you target 100,000 platforms at an average contract value near $36K, and market forces—rapid indie release growth, improved multimodal AI capabilities, and increasing regulatory and rights-holder scrutiny—are converging to make platforms prioritize metadata fixes now. Advances in source separation and audio-to-text models materially reduce the marginal cost of inferring missing features compared with manual curation, lowering the barrier to product-market fit. To stand out you’ll need to prioritize precision and provenance rather than raw recall: aim for high-confidence automated matches (targeting 85–95% precision at usable recall levels), clear provenance and a streamlined human verification workflow so enterprise customers can meet compliance and payment audits. Major challenges are nontrivial — assembling labeled training data, navigating legal ambiguity around inferred credits, and executing a B2B sales motion into conservative enterprise buyers — but a focused value proposition (audit-ready credits, SLA-backed APIs, DDEX/RIN integrations) and initial wins with distributors or PROs could create defensible commercial momentum.

Market Opportunity

Missing music metadata (features/credits) — AI + aggregated API to fill gaps targets a $3.6B = 100,000 music & audio businesses/platforms x $36K ACV (metadata, licensing, API fees and enterprise deals) total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 15% (metadata & music tech adjacent markets growing with streaming & creator economy).

Key trends driving demand: Creator economy growth -- more independent releases increase demand for accurate credits and metadata to ensure discoverability and royalty flows.; Advances in multimodal AI -- improved audio recognition, source separation and OCR enable inferring missing metadata from assets themselves.; Regulatory and rights pressure -- growing attention on proper attribution and payouts pushes platforms to fix metadata gaps..

Key competitors include MusicBrainz, Discogs, Gracenote (Nielsen), ACRCloud, AudD.

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Missing music metadata (features/credits) — AI + aggregated API to fill gaps

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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