Creators should be able to license music from major artists. Lickd lets them do it for as little as $8 a song.

Most of the time, if you hear a song in a long-form YouTube video, it’s not the latest radio hit from a super pop star. That’s because getting clearance to use mainstream music is tough and often expensive, so creators generally opt for using royalty-free tracks or pay to license music made specifically for use in digital content.

But what if a creator wants to use the latest radio hit?

Enter Lickd, a London-based company that charges creators as little as $8 to license over 1.4 million tracks from artists like Coldplay, Dua Lipa, and Justin Bieber.

Co-founded in 2016 by veteran music exec Paul Sampson, Lickd negotiates with record labels and individual artists to make mainstream music available to creators–and tells Tubefilter it sees a significant difference in video performance when creators use its tracks versus non-mainstream music. 

Sampson says he co-founded the company because, after working with music, film, TV, and advertising since 2005, he realized “the fastest-growing production center in the world at the time was none of these. It was user-generated content.” He started paying attention to our industry, and saw that as platforms like YouTube grew, the quality of production resources that had traditionally only been owned by Hollywood film studios “had been democratized to the home user.” 

“A home camera would set you up for a YouTube channel,” he says. “You can do it all on your laptop.”

One critical aspect of production, however, was not democratized: music licensing.

Vouching for creators

“It’s incredibly complicated and fragmented and expensive to do,” Sampson says. “There are so many rightsholders involved in every single song, and every single rightsholder has to give you clearance to have access to the song before you can do anything with it.”

This process alone is a barrier to entry for creators, and even if they can navigate through it, licensing a single well-known song for one video can cost thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of dollars. Sampson had seen films, TV shows, and commercials license songs, and wanted to know why creators weren’t being given the opportunity to do so, too–at prices far below what 

“I looked at it, the fastest production sector of the world,” he says. “Why are they being treated, essentially, as second-class citizens? Why is this production sector the only one in the world that doesn’t have access to every song in the world?”

Lickd exists to give creators that access, he says. With its business model, creators pay a one-time set fee per song based on their channel’s average view count per video. They can also pay $15/month to become a Lickd subscriber, and get significant discounts on licensing tracks. So, for example, a creator whose videos average between 200,000 and 350,000 views will pay Lickd $200 to license a single track if they aren’t a subscriber. If they are a subscriber, that fee drops to $50.

Songs start at $8 apiece for creators whose videos average fewer than 50,000 views, and all songs are priced the same: a platinum Coldplay track would be the same price as a song from a lesser-known artist. (Revenue from that fee is split between Lickd and rightsholders.)

And once creators have licensing through Lickd, they won’t run into trouble with ContentID, because Lickd built software called Vouch that hooks into YouTube’s API and lets the platform know when a creator has licensed a song through it.

“YouTube doesn’t automatically recognize the acquisition of the rights,” he explains, which can result in creators’ videos getting copyright struck unjustly. “There’s no point building this unless you also operate customer security and freedom from that persecution. So before we did anything, the magic sauce that makes the whole thing viable is the software we built, Vouch.”

Using mainstream music might bump viewership

So creators get the hurdles of licensing and copyright challenges out of the way. Now what? Lickd says they may have yet more to look forward to.

It conducted a study using a dataset of 215,000 YouTube videos, 19% of which licensed music through Lickd, and found that videos using mainstream music generated 14.2% more views, 12.9% more likes, and 6.6% more comments than videos without mainstream music.

Some genres see even more significant results. Gaming and tech videos that use mainstream music generate 141% more views, 83% more likes, and 102% more comments than those that don’t.

Sampson says Lickd is also seeing evidence of better viewer retention when creators license mainstream music. He believes that’s because mainstream tracks are more engaging, particularly for viewers in genres like gaming and fitness, where gameplay or workouts can be set to long periods of music. It’s no surprise that creators who invest in higher-production elements, including music, would see performance of their videos naturally increase.

“Your audience wants to hear it, you want to use it, and there’s a business case to [creators],” he says. “You’re going to see an uplift in most major KPIs that YouTube’s algorithm uses to deem you worthy of promotion.”

Sampson says that ultimately, Lickd’s mission is to allow any creator to use top-performing music tracks. It’s spent “millions of pounds” achieving that mission, and has a 25-person team that’ll continue to negotiate with rightsholders and platforms alike. 

“Get in touch,” he urges creators. “We’re small, but we still want to speak to people, and work with people, and see if we can’t take this to the next level together, because they shouldn’t be left behind. We’re fighting to make sure they’ve got everything they need to make great content. People all over the world are changing the face of what it means to create content on YouTube, and they must be allowed to do that with the best music in the world.”

Lickd is a Tubefilter partner.