MIC — Music Industry Claims
The Problem
The music industry is broken at multiple levels. At a person level, there's real incompetence and negligence — people cutting corners, not responding, not understanding or doing the job their actual role requires, making bad decisions that hurt creators. And beyond that, there's harassment, sexual harassment, and abuse. These aren't isolated incidents — they're systemic to music industry culture in ways that span across every genre, every company, every level.
At an infrastructural level, the problem is fragmentation. Systems were built incrementally and separately, and they don't communicate with each other. Companies run internal tools that don't integrate with outside systems. Different countries have different rules, different legislative frameworks, different requirements. There's no unified infrastructure — just silos stacked on top of each other.
And here's what we also know: there are plenty of outstanding innovators, founders, executives, and creators in this industry creating mechanisms for real change. We're excited to play a part in that mission. We believe it will be a better place — the more that creators know their rights before they even press record, the more there are clear escalation paths when things go wrong, the more royalties and licensing fees are transparent across every platform, the more session provenance and origin tracking is built into the infrastructure, and the more accountability is visible and enforceable.
This is where it stands right now. These are the gaps and problems we see. And together, we're going to work to solve them.
Four layers are failing:
The Education Gap
Creators enter the industry without understanding contracts, rights, royalty mechanics, or what questions to ask. They don't know what they don't know — and by the time they do, they're locked into agreements that don't serve them. The industry has institutional knowledge, but it's tribal, not documented.
The Transparency Wall
Even when creators ask the right questions, they hit silence. Why? Not always incompetence — often it's legal constraint. Labels can't explain their own processes because their contracts with distributors, PROs, and publishers limit what they can say. Information gets trapped behind NDAs and conflicting incentives.
The Routing Collapse
The industry runs on email and tribal knowledge. Creators don't know who to contact. Companies don't have unified intake systems. A question that should take 10 minutes takes 10 months because it bounces between departments with no accountability or escalation path.
The Structural Squeeze
Royalty departments are chronically understaffed. Most are running a year behind. When you combine that with outdated systems, siloed data, and no automation, the backlog becomes permanent. And the people trying to fix it are burned out.
What We're Building
Right now, we're collecting and documenting claims to map the actual problems. That's phase one.
Once we understand the patterns in the data, we'll build toward:
Auto-articulation (powered by Gemini API)
To help creators frame their issue so it actually reaches someone who can act
Intelligent routing
To map the right question to the right department, with accountability
Real-time education
When we see patterns, we publish guidance for both creators and institutions
Structural feedback
The data shows us which problems are education gaps vs. routing failures vs. genuine capacity constraints
The goal: turn chaos into diagnosis, diagnosis into triage, and triage into systemic change.
At minimum, you get radical transparency — an honest view of where the industry is critically breaking.