Warner strikes deal with Sports Music Licensing Company Clicknclear

ClicknClear, which claims to be the world’s only specialist music rights tech and licensing company for performance sports, has secured a new blanket deal with Warner Music Group.

The deal, which spans WMG’s entire global catalog, enables Warner Music to license its entire catalog through ClicknClear to the global performance sport market.

Licensing music to performance sports is a revenue stream that ClicknClear estimates to be worth $2.4billion annually.

ClicknClear says that it is already backed by more than 750 music industry rightsholders who represent hundreds of thousands of labels and publishers, including Warner Music, Sony Music, Universal Music Publishing, and Sony Music Publishing.

Founded by entrepreneur Chantal Epp, ClicknClear first launched in beta in 2018 as a pre-cleared music licensing platform for the cheerleading industry.

ClicknClear offers a suite of three tech platforms that tackle copyright infringement in performance sports across cheerleading, jump rope, dance, the marching arts, gymnastics, indoor skydiving, and more sports.

The firm uses a rights-matching database to track master and publishing rights, upload and monitor 100% cleared music. The database contains over 4.5 million tracks, with more than 10 million publishing rights.

The company also runs a licensing platform providing an online marketplace for teams to search and license music for all the specialist rights they need beyond the venue’s performing rights license. This includes over 500,000 tracks, fully cleared, and licenses sold for  $10-25 per track, per mix, for a one year license.

ClicknClear also operates a license verification system that uses a Content ID tool to ingest multi-track music mixes, identifies the music in use, verifies licenses, and reports all music for competitions and online content.

Chantal Epp, Founder and CEO, ClicknClear, said: “We are elated to finalise this global deal and partner with WMG to license the major’s entire catalogue to the performance sports industry.

“It is a major milestone, as it significantly increases the pre-cleared tracks for performance sports. It also highlights the credibility and huge potential value of this previously untapped market to the music industry.

“As we continue to do more deals with performance sports and use our technology to support their compliance in music licensing, the revenue stream to our music rightsholders will continue to increase.

“Our most recent deals – with Winter Guard International for Color Guard, as well as Para Dance UK for disability inclusive Dance – are both firsts in those specific sports sectors and testament to this.

“This year we will continue to demonstrate the great potential of our technology-enabled channel to the music industry, with new sports deals and new product and feature rollouts.”

Tiago Correia, Senior Director, Global Digital Business Development, WMG, added: “We are delighted to be working with ClicknClear.

“Their technology will help us to evolve the market by sharing clear and accurate data and empower the performance sports industry as a whole, all while ensuring our creators are getting appropriately renumerated and credited for their work.

“We’re excited to see what’s next and how we can explore and level-up untapped markets and regions.”