Michael Walker: Yeah. Woo. Alright. I'm excited to be here today with my new friend, Grayson Sanders. So Grayson is the founder of Cordal, which is reshaping music licensing with InstantClear. It’s being used by top players like Primary Wave, Nettwerk, and Mad Decent, and he helps make complex music rights simple, especially for AI, sync, and the creator economy.

So I'm excited to connect with him today to talk a little bit about the future of music rights and how AI, gaming, social platforms are starting to reshape the music licensing industry, and what you as an independent artist need to know in order to be able to catch the wave of what's coming next.

So Grayson, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the podcast today.

Grayson Sanders: Yeah, good to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Happy to talk to you.

Michael: Absolutely. Heck yeah. So, to kick things off, would love to hear a little bit more about you and your story and how you started the company.

Grayson: Yeah, of course. So I actually started my career as a composer, producer myself. I, up until my early twenties, was pretty much dead set on being an experimental composer. I was also touring in a band at the time, bartending, and producing, composing on the side for income. I was very fortunate at the time, around age 22, 23, to be connected with some folks that were working on a publishing venture and doing a lot of work in the sync space out here in LA. At the time I was living in New York City and they invited me to produce a few tracks, start trying to compose for visual media—not something that I had done a ton of. I was doing some film scoring, but it was mostly documentary work and, again, pretty on the experimental side.

So I wasn't as familiar with this whole notion of sync licensing and especially wasn't familiar with the type of income that it could bring to an artist or a working composer. So I got very fortunate pretty early on to have a large placement and was kind of blown away by the amount of money that could show up in one check, especially compared to what you might see off of digital—at that time, digital stores. It was very early streaming era. So how—

Michael: If you don't mind sharing, how much was that first check that you got?

Grayson: It was like $25,000. Yeah. And that was, you know, 15 years ago. So, that was a sizable check to show up in a working musician's pocket. Right.

Michael: Yeah, I would not be mad, ever, if I received a $25,000 check. That's a good day.

Grayson: Yeah, that's a good day. So, at that point I leaned in, right? Like, what is this all about? How can I make this happen more often? And so it started my foray into rights and licensing. Of course, first as a composer, I wanted to figure out how to crack the code and do more of that. That led to me actually starting an agency a few years later with a co-founder. We started focusing more on the trailer and film space, then ended up representing other artists, then started representing other labels, and we pretty much grew that agency over about 10 years.

The company's still around, actually. It's called Safari Riot. It's based here in LA. And that was my trial by fire into the business side of licensing—really learning the ins and outs of the maybe less sexy parts of the business, but very important ones, which are the underlying legal infrastructure that powers this whole industry.

And of course, music rights are a really important part of that. It's who owns the rights to the intellectual property that you're trying to license. And the process of, of course, trying to exploit that music—pitch it, get it placed—is important. But the other part is also important. It's the part of finishing the license, negotiating the clearance, doing the contracts. All of that is complex and requires a pretty deep level of understanding around the underlying infrastructure and music.

So that logically led into, well, how can we potentially figure out ways to simplify and, if not simplify, reduce the frictions that are preventing the music industry from really achieving its potential in this space, in terms of the amount that it can be licensing, the volume that it could be licensing. As you probably know, content has exploded over the last two decades. Traditional media like TV and film have been produced at a scale that's never been seen before. But we also have new media, we have gaming, we have all sorts of different outlets for people to experience music.

And all of those environments carry with it a legal component of, well, how do we license the rights to actually have music in these spaces? And so what we were seeing, operating the agency at a small scale with a small roster, was that if we really wanted to serve all of those places where music could be licensed, we would need to scale up our efforts considerably. And we assumed that if we were experiencing that, everyone probably is experiencing that in the space. And sure enough, we discovered that there's this whole industry around serving a lot of those platforms and end users—royalty-free music or production music—for the purpose of simplifying getting music into those spaces instead of going to get the band you want to license or that famous track you might want to license.

And we thought, well, wouldn't it be awesome if we could try to figure out a way to get the music people want to license to be more user-friendly? And so that's what Cordal has been trying to achieve for the last six years—building the technology that can enable that.

Michael: Cool. You know, it definitely feels like I'm not a licensing or sync expert at all, and I get the opportunity to talk with a lot of people who are a lot smarter than I am in this world who understand it. And every time I talk with them, I'm always struck by, like, wow—the traditional way that this is set up is pretty complicated. There's a lot of different moving parts. And so it sounds like what you're saying is that, coming from that world, you recognized that there is this need for a more streamlined way to compensate the people who should be compensated for their music. And so that's part of what inspired you to create Cordal. Would love to hear a little bit more about the platform that you've built and what you feel like is the unique sauce or the thing that separates it from the way that people might look for alternatives.

Grayson: Sure. Yeah. So I think maybe a good place to start is just a quick 101 on licensing and the underlying music rights that are very important to driving this part of the music business. Right? So if you're familiar with music copyrights, you'll know that you've got a recording—that's the actual recording of that song that's typically owned or represented by a record label, or maybe the artist if they haven't signed a record label deal.

On the other side, you have the composition—that's the song that's been written: the lyrics, the melodies. And so you could have many different recordings of the same song. Right? You could have covers done or alternate versions. And so the unique part about sync licensing is that when you want to get a license to use a song in a video, that could be a big film or a big TV show. That could also be a tiny video that you post on social media. You actually need to get approval from both the recording—the party that owns the recording—and the party that owns the song. So that's not always the same. If you're a musician at home and you write a song on your guitar and then you record it, well, you own your song you just wrote, and you own your recording you just made. But as you grow as an artist, you might sign a record deal or a publishing deal, and now you've got other parties in the mix that are involved in your business, in your small business.

Now imagine that you're a band and you've got four members. All four members are signing different publishing deals for their own songwriting credits or shares. Very quickly you enter this space where any given song might have five, six, seven stakeholders that are involved in that song. And all those parties actually need to be involved in the conversation with someone who's trying to license a song. Right?

And so you can imagine, if you think about how many pieces of content are produced on a daily basis around the world, you can think about how many of these conversations and negotiations are taking place. And on the other hand, you also might imagine that for a certain type of volume or a certain type of content, it doesn't really make sense even to go try to talk to five people and do five different negotiations and contracts. It just becomes impossible. You're not ever going to get through the day, much less be able to operate your product or service, if you have to do that every single time.

And so that is why so many other parts of the industry have come in to fill that need, and that's what I was referencing before: the royalty-free space. Now AI music—you have Suno and Udio coming into the equation—that's fraught with a lot of licensing issues of its own for different reasons. But what Cordal is trying to do at the foundation is, number one, bring as many of those people that represent the shares of those songs under one roof. So that means a lot of record labels, a lot of publishers, a lot of managers—folks that are currently in the business of negotiating syncs on their artists’ or clients’ behalf—get them all under one roof, number one.

Number two, provide them this spiderweb connectivity of being able to see all of the other parties that they're actually connected to by the songs that they share.

So, for example, I've got an album, right? And I didn't know—because I recorded the album—I didn't know that there might be five or six other publishers out there that are related to my album because one of the songwriters I collaborated with goes out and signs a publishing deal. And so that's actually a big problem in the music industry right now: you don't even really know all of the different parties that own pieces of the stuff that you've created, because of how fractionalized and dispersed it is.
 And so we're showing you this. We're pulling those pieces together and showing you, wow, okay, so this song—here are my two other parties that I share the song with, and we are now in this space together where we can communicate, and we can collaborate on figuring out our strategies around licensing this song.

So those were steps one and two that took almost six years to build because it is very complex. The rights management—what we call the collaborative rights-management infrastructure—is really complex. There are a lot of moving parts to that. But the exciting thing is that now, since that is complete, we've just now enabled transactions to occur—so actual licensing to occur—on top of all of that data. So now buyers can come to the platform and they can license from all those parties in a single place. And the reason why that's really disruptive is because we're the first platform ever to enable this.

First of all, because any other platform that is offering a licensing solution typically operates like a sync rep. What they do is they say, “Hey, catalog A, catalog B, catalog C, you give me all your music, I'm going to put it into this marketplace and I'm going to go out and try to get buyers to license it. And if they do, I'm going to do all the legwork in the background of helping them get the rights together. And then I'm going to take a cut and I'm going to send you the money.” In Cordal, we are invisible as a platform. The rights holders themselves are directly in touch with the buyer, and they're the ones who are transacting. So it's really more of a true marketplace in that sense, and it can facilitate managing this really complicated process. Does that make sense?

Michael: That totally makes sense. That's really cool. So it sounds like, in the past, it always required a middleman to facilitate these relationships, but it was really like they were syncing up these two different parties and there's a middleman in between. Whereas with Cordal, you're basically sinking to the background in the sense that you're connecting people directly with each other and those rights are all synced up through the database. Yeah.

Grayson: Cool.

Michael: Awesome. So, it sounds like you've been building this for the past six years, and I can imagine that that is a very complex landscape to get the foundation for it. But now that you have it, how recent has it been launched and is it available today? Like, people are using it—what does the platform look like today? Yeah, would love to hear where it's at.

Grayson: Yeah. So we have been commercially in the market for about a year and a half. Up until very recently though, Cordal was just a place where, as a buyer, I could come, I could discover music, I could find the people that were associated with that music in a really dynamic way, I could communicate with them, and if I wanted to license something, I could go off platform and license it in more of a traditional way.

So it was more like a research tool, a resource. It had a great creative discovery experience that kind of feels like Spotify. But the new aspect that I was just explaining is that as of March of this year, now there's the ability to actually finish the deal through the system and the rights holders can get paid as well.

And so, yes, many companies—in fact, hundreds of companies—are using Cordal already. We're somewhere around 600 companies right now. And it is a business-to-business platform currently, so it's not open for direct signup by artists and songwriters, but it is in the roadmap for next year to extend a type of account for songwriters and artists as well to participate in this ecosystem.

It was very important for us in the early days to be controlled in how we roll this out, because there's a lot of sensitivity, as you can imagine, around this process. Legally—this one doesn't actually have the rights missing—yes, exactly—ID verification, a lot of things that really have to be in place before expansion.

Michael: Hmm. Cool. Oh man, that's really exciting. So it's very new, kind of adding that element that you said—this is the first new platform on the market that has actually enabled that directly. Yeah. Cool. So I would love to hear where your mind's at as it relates to, I think you alluded to some of these new breakthroughs that are happening with music generation and the new tools that are available in terms of AI and Udio and Suno.

One of my first thoughts as it relates to that type of technology is: I wonder how this affects the music licensing or the sync world. And it seems like it's a really hairy issue to work out. So I'm curious where your thoughts are on it and where you think that it's headed in terms of the future of this industry.

Grayson: Sure. I mean, I think to some degree everyone is navigating this in real time. Case law tends to run on a delay behind innovation, so it tends to be a little bit responsive or reactive to where the markets lead. I think that, from a philosophical standpoint—which I don't really care to comment on that much because everyone falls in a different place on that spectrum—that's one conversation that's happening.

What does it mean for artists? What does it mean for composers who are making a living in this space? Is it a threat? Is it an enabler? Does it promote creativity? I think maybe the answer to all those things is yes at the same time. Where we're focused is what it means for music rights, because up until very recently it was pretty cut and dry once you got to the core of who owns something—which did take some digging to find—but once you get to the core of who owns this recording and who owns this publishing, or who at least has the right to license it on the owner's behalf, then you could feel secure in the license that you were getting.

The new flavor in the recipe that has been introduced through generative AI music is that that pathway is no longer cut and dry. And you've got a whole spectrum of how generative AI might be used in a piece of music. So, for example, let's say that I am using a production tool that has a generative AI component in it to create samples or to create loops or to create drones, and I'm using that within the context of other instruments and things that I'm adding to my overall production, and then I export that as a standalone. There's a fairly strong argument to be made that that is a substantially different piece of work that falls under derivative works law. Some people might debate that, but I personally feel like that is fair use.

Michael: And real quick—when you say derivative works law, I'm familiar with fair use, and I think I get from context what you're saying, but could you describe what is the illegal use of music like that, and at what point is it a gray area or is there a definitive “this is when you're not allowed to use a piece of work like that”?

Grayson: There's a definition that people use to define something that would be perceived as substantially similar. Okay. And a lot of that is—you look at some of these lawsuits that have happened over the last 10 years with famous songs and then other songs that came out that were similar. Some people thought, “Oh, same chord progression,” but then you get musicologists involved and they're analyzing the actual melodic structure and the rhythm and the tempo and everything.

Michael: Musicologist—like, for someone who works in the music industry, I'm surprised that I'm not really familiar with that word, but I love the word musicologist.

Grayson: Yeah. So a musicologist is somebody who is an expert in—they both understand music theory and traditional music notation, but they're also familiar with music law, and they understand. They essentially get hired to advise on a lot of these cases where it's like, if you look at the actual melodic structure and you look at the cadence, is this a direct copy? Is it substantially similar to the original? How infringing is this, so to speak? And at a certain point it's so subjective, but they try to apply a scientific method to it.

Michael: Like a hundred random people in a room across the world in society—do they think it sounds… Although even that could be—yeah, because some of those chord progressions can sound similar, but it's interesting where you draw the line.

Grayson: Right. So derivative works come from—are derived; it is in the word. They're derived from an original. So there's a tie-back there. If you're doing a remix, that's kind of a derivative master recording from the original. It's incorporating aspects of the original and you're creating a derivative of it.

In AI-generated music, it gets a lot hairier because you most of the time don't hear any audible tie-back to the training data that is underlying—that contributed to that output. Unless you put in, you know, “give me something that sounds like Miles Davis,” and something comes out sounding like a Kind of Blue recording and you're like, wow, this is clearly trained on this album. But that's not how most people are using those tools. They're trying to be creative and generating new ideas that are actually, under the surface, based on old ideas.

And so that brings with it—like I said, I don't want to comment on the philosophical side too much—but from a licensing standpoint, it gets really tough. And so, at least right now, most of the larger corporations—large brands, multinationals—that are big music licensees, they are paying a lot of money every year for music licensing across all of their medias. They have pretty strict no-AI policies at this point.

They will require their music vendors to carry errors and omissions insurance and all sorts of things—and they've been requiring that for years—but this is just to prevent them from getting into any inadvertent copyright-infringement issues. But now, with generative AI, it's a minefield for them. So they're pretty strict about not using it—or if they are using it, it's got to be fairly trained and there's a whole diligence process behind evaluating that, evaluating those products, making sure those models were really trained.

So from a music licensing and sync standpoint, I would say that right now people are very scared of integrating something that may have been generative-AI-originated into a final license. I don't know how that's going to evolve though. Things are changing so fast on so many fronts. Very recently—just in the last couple weeks—there's been news that the majors are now negotiating with Suno. And so we thought—no one was sure if that was going to happen. We thought this massive lawsuit might have resulted in potential success for the music industry, but it looks like they might be trying to come to the table.

And so the results of those cases could really determine a lot for how we move forward as an industry with what's allowed and what's not. There's a lot there to unpack, for sure. Yeah.

Michael: Yeah, so what I'm hearing you say is that, for most of the established sync and licensing world, people are afraid or hesitant to actually use generative music because of the state of murkiness right now. And the last thing you want is for you to invest all this money into creating this— a video game or TV show or movie—and then realize that a key piece of music that you created for it is not actually able to be used. It's illegal.

And so you can either get sued or have to somehow replace it, and it would just be a big mess. And so because of that, people aren't fully embracing the technology yet. But now—and this was within a few weeks of us having this conversation—there is talk of conversation between the majors and Suno. So maybe they could come to some kind of agreement. I wonder what that would look like.

Grayson: Yeah. I mean, historically, I think the majors have—if they can't beat 'em, they join 'em. And you've seen that happen in terms of model adoption. We saw that in the early streaming era as well. And so maybe there's a general acceptance—and maybe we're all feeling this across different medias, not just music—that AI's here to stay. It's bringing with it a lot of wonderful innovation, a lot of things that we couldn't do two years ago that were unfathomable and now we're doing daily. That's awesome.

And there's also a component of a very real, clear, and present danger as it affects revenue streams for folks—displacement of jobs. And so we're experiencing all this at once. And from the sync standpoint, people in the established sync space are taking a little bit more of a cautionary approach at this point.

Michael: Yeah.

Grayson: If you're talking about DIY producers and musicians, or even content creators, AI is everywhere. On YouTube—the backgrounds of YouTube videos—it's already disseminated beyond the point of control. So it's more like, in my view, the focus should be at this point on remuneration—making sure that the data sets that are underneath these models have a method in place to attribute to the right rights owners and compensate them, even in a tiny, fractional way, for the usage of their intellectual property.

Michael: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, it certainly feels like there should be some kind of attempt or some kind of ability to compensate the people who are supplying the data that's training these models, which are then being commercialized. Also, the logistics of it seem like an interesting challenge to face, and I'm sure there's a lot of very smart people who are working to the bone to figure this part out right now.

Grayson: There are a couple companies I know of that have made some serious progress on that. They've done some really interesting things around tracking the weights of data that trained certain—sorry, tracking the weights in outputs from the data sets. So, for example, you get an output from a particular model based on a prompt, and then underneath in the data you can look at the top 100 weights that resulted in that output, and those weights are—let's, for the sake of the conversation, say from zero to 100. You have the top 20 of those weights around the 85th percentile up to 100, and then it slowly tapers off.

But with that type of thinking, you can look at those weights and say, okay, how can we assign some type of royalty rate to the owners of the copyrights that were the most influential on the output? And I think that's the way we should be thinking.

Michael: Wow, that's really interesting. Yeah, I think I saw an interview with some of the founders of Anthropic (Claude AI), and they had an internal joke where they recognized that there was a specific weight in their model that was assigned to a—like a beach city or something. And so they had a model that they wrote where they amped up that weight a bunch, and all of the outputs were sort of normal, but then they would somehow find a way to reference that city.

And, if I remember correctly, it was kind of the point that you're making right now around the weights, where it is a science—or it's an art—of figuring out how to attribute those weights, because it's not always clear when the brain comes together. And maybe it's like our own neurons—sometimes they get wired together and there's interesting relationships that happen—but you can start to see a correlation between certain topics or ideas that get triggered together.

And so these companies are doing analysis of those weights in a way that allows them to attribute if a certain artist comes up. And if you directly say, “I want a song that sounds like The Beatles,” and you say that over and over again, you notice, oh, there's this weight or there's this piece of the AI model that keeps getting triggered. Whenever we say that, then you can start to map that and say, this might relate to The Beatles or it relates to a genre that is also heavily influenced by The Beatles and the music scene around it. Oh man, that's so fascinating.

Grayson: I think so too. I think so too.

Michael: Cool. So, would love to hear—just as we get ready to wrap up this conversation—what are you personally most excited about that you're working on right now? Where do you think things are headed for—let's say the majority of people who are watching or listening to this right now are independent musicians or maybe independent collectives of artists who are looking at “how can we best swim along with the waves of technology that are crashing right now?”

How would you recommend that they approach these new kinds of technologies, and how can they best utilize the Cordal platform you're building? I know that you mentioned you have in the roadmap some different things that are coming out. I would love to hear you talk a little bit about next steps for people who are watching this right now.

Grayson: Yeah, absolutely. Well, if we're focusing just on finding success in sync and figuring out a way to tap into this as a potential revenue stream, there are some very practical things that you can do to set yourself up for success even before you get into the area of trying to meet the right music supervisor or pitch your music or find that right placement.

And some of that actually relates to what we're talking about today, and that's number one: really try to understand how music rights work. That's something that I wish I was taught even when I was younger than when I figured it out. Understand the way your intellectual property works, because that is the core to so many aspects of how you can monetize the music industry—not just sync.

But in sync, it's especially important to have a very clear picture over your recording rights and your publishing rights. And on the recording side specifically: are you using samples? If you have used samples, where do those samples come from? Do they come from a beat marketplace? If they came from a beat marketplace, make sure you really understand the terms and conditions of that beat marketplace—what it means (like BeatStars, for example). Have you used generative AI to create samples in your music?

If the answer's yes to either of those questions, that's something that is certainly going to come up in the licensing process if you're trying to get a sync license. So I would say a really good best practice is, number one, try to keep your rights as clean as they can be, because if you're going to be getting an opportunity from a music supervisor to potentially license your song into something, you want to provide them the easiest pathway to do that with as little stress and concern as possible, because just know that they're probably looking at other options at the same time.

And it's not just based on what's the creatively most exciting thing when they're making that ultimate decision. It's based on a lot of things. The complexity, for example, of licensing something equates directly to time spent and effort spent on their part. And so if you can make that pathway very clean—have all that data ready—you're setting yourself up for success, for sure.

Now, something that is really exciting to me is that up until fairly recently, sync has been something that is pretty tough to access. It is a pretty closed industry, and that's not for the sake of being exclusionary. I think you've got a lot of huge music fans who are making these decisions for music. Music supervisors are huge music fans. They love the idea of finding a great independent artist, finding a cool label in this corner of the world that they never heard of. I think it just comes down to time and the pure, breakneck pace that these productions operate at that ends up making it such that those licensees—those buyers—default to their usual relationships and their sources of music curation.

What I think is exciting now is that there are way more outlets and opportunities for music to find a home in visuals and be licensed. And as that connects to Cordal, of course, in the future there's going to be an ability for artists to be more involved directly. But we have just—we're about to announce that we've taken our licensing technology that we launched in March and we're putting it into an API. So what that means is that API can now be used by other platforms around the world to extend music licensing functions to their user base.

And so that means that your music could eventually be in all sorts of places for all sorts of licensing—even if they're small fees, but they're higher volume—for content creators. And so that's the future that Cordal's focused on: how we can use this underlying infrastructure we built to get the music produced by artists and songwriters into as many places where it could be discovered by someone who's making that content-purchasing decision. And so that's what I think you should definitely look forward to from us.

Michael: Yeah, that's super exciting. I mean, as the founder of a software-as-a-service for musicians that we just launched about two weeks ago—

Grayson: Oh, congrats.

Michael: Hearing that you guys have—either in progress or right now—you have an API, would love to connect more on how we can integrate directly. We have about 160,000 artists who are in our database, mostly on our email list, because we only launched the software recently, but would love to integrate sync licensing opportunities for them, because I'm not an expert in that industry at all. So I tend to leave that for experts like yourself. Would love to explore that more.

Cool. Sweet. Well, Grayson, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today and sharing a little bit about your background and sync licensing, what you're creating for the future of the industry. And for anyone here that's interested in connecting more or staying up to date on the latest updates from the platform, what's the best place for them to go to connect more?

Grayson: Yeah, so we have an Instagram, so definitely feel free to follow us and interact there on comments. Also LinkedIn—we're very active on LinkedIn. And then our website is the best place to learn about the newest updates coming out of the platform, so it's cordal.com.

Michael: Alright, fantastic. Cool. Well, Grayson, that's talking about chords. I'm not sure if that's coming through clearly or not. Yeah. But I was thinking like you're taking all these separate notes and you're putting together beautiful—
 Alright. Well, Grayson, thanks for being on the podcast and look forward to talking again soon.

Grayson: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Really enjoyed chatting with you. Take care.