Celebrating 10 Years of Online Music Licensing - YouLicense

It’s been ten years. A decade. A decade of online music licensing.

We launched in April 2007 the initial beta version of YouLicense. Just to put things into perspective, ten years in technology time is like dog years. Ten years ago, Facebook was just rolling out publicly, the iPhone was a couple months away from launch, instagram was three years away from conception, MySpace was blowing up and I had to buy an invite for Gmail on eBay for a few bucks.

 Ten years is a long time. We like to think that YouLicense has a small piece of rock n' roll history as the first online music licensing platform to every exist. I just heard the story of the Chelsea hotel in NYC. How Bob Dylan took the name of his favorite poet there at age 18, how Sid Vicious murdered Nancy there and of course we all know Leonard Cohen’s encounter with Janis Joplin aside many great stories. Not to compare how the Chelsea Hotel entered rock history but hope that launching the first online music licensing marketplace in the world will be remembered somehow. Of course, throughout the years many more launched great products, and I’m sure they’re doing well and have their place as well.

The concept was and still is, simple - I want to license music for my project directly from the artists with no knowhow of what publishing and master rights are. I want to click a button and pay. And we, the company, wanted to offer artists complete control over the process - who are we to decide what’s a good song and what’s bad. 

 So we launched YouLicense. It’s not a music library or some kind of production company, this was an open for all music marketplace where we, the company, do not control any rights and do not block out any music by any artist - it’s all community driven. A marketplace for the artists.

 I can go into lengthy stories on why we founded the company and what happened along the way, acquisitions missed, investments and opportunities, the music industry and the major labels and so many people who wanted to be part of this revolutionary concept. But I’ll save those stories for the next decade.. 

 By now we could have and probably should have shut down YouLicense years ago when the Lehman financial market crash happened and we ran out of capital because no one wanted to fund music startups anymore. But we didn’t. I guess for myself and my brother, Ohad, this is our contribution to music somehow and we’re keeping it alive so artists can utilize this amazing tool. 

 It’s probably not going to last much longer as everything is moving to mobile and technologies are changing. But we’ll do our best to push on and support our community of over 100,000 artists and hundreds of daily licensing deals taking place between artist and licensee directly.

 And to end with a quote so eloquently put by Rage Against the Machine - “Fuck you we won’t do what you tell us”.

 Cheers and thanks to all the people that made this happen - Ohad Ezer, Asaf Cohen, Tomer Kaplan, Reavis Daniel Moore and many others. 

Maor Ezer