Amazon Music brings in MusicInfra to clear songs for video push
Amazon Music has hired technology firm MusicInfra to manage the song rights behind its expanded music video offering.
The deal makes the independent company the rights management support provider for music used in videos on the platform, according to details shared in a Billboard interview with co-founder and chief executive Björn Lindvall published on 20 October. CelebrityAccess reported the appointment on 12 October, noting MusicInfra would bring speed and flexibility to the expansion.
MusicInfra was founded in 2023. It describes itself as The Music Infrastructure Company and operates as an independent business-to-business technology and rights management firm, working with streaming services and rights holders rather than signing artists itself.
Its job for Amazon is practical. It supplies what Lindvall called a bucket of songs that are clear to use, meaning tracks where the underlying songwriting rights have been checked and approved for video use.
That check, known as song clearance, is the process of identifying who controls a song and securing permission to use it. MusicInfra refreshes that clearance information for Amazon every 24 hours, setting out what videos can and cannot use particular music. Its average clearance turnaround time for Amazon is 28 minutes.
More broadly, the company provides data processing, rights-matching engines and royalty clearinghouse services to digital platforms and rights holders. In plain terms, that means software that links a recording to the song written underneath it, plus a central system to sort out payments and send royalties to the correct owners.
Clearance is fiddly work. One hit can have several writers, several publishers and different owners in different countries. The scale is large: the National Music Publishers' Association, the US trade organisation for publishers, counts roughly 800 members alone.
MusicInfra's backers include Raine Group, UTA Ventures and Snö Ventures, the latter associated with investor Peter Thiel.
For viewers, this means less visible plumbing. Videos load, songs play, and the payments flow behind the screen. Without that paperwork, a platform cannot legally pair pictures with music at scale, which is why Amazon has outsourced the checks as it adds more video.
