music-licensing
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The People Who Represent the People Hiring Famous People
Burns Entertainment has spent 56 years on the less glamorous side of fame: deciding which famous face fits, what the rights are worth, and how to keep a clever idea from becoming an expensive misunderstanding.
Criteria Entertainment Built a Borderless Back Office for Latin Music
Diana Rodríguez left the major-label tower and built the connective tissue artists rarely see: one small, multilingual team coordinating management, publicity and market entry across the Americas. The useful lesson is not glamour. It is patience, local knowledge and the discipline to say no.
The Company Making Sure Your Stream Finds the Right Songwriter
Every play creates a tiny accounting problem. Music Reports built the database, software and human review operation that tries to solve billions of them before the money disappears into the music industry's black box.
Dualtone Built a Record Label for the Artists the Majors Left Behind - Then the Long Game Paid Off
The Nashville label survived the CD collapse, a tornado and streaming's brutal arithmetic by making a peculiar promise: fewer artists, clearer deals and careers measured in albums, not weekends.
ASCAP Is the Quiet Machine Behind Every Public Play
A song can travel from a phone to a stadium in seconds. ASCAP's hard, mostly invisible job is to notice the trip, price the public performance and send the money home.
Hook
Hook is a New York-based music technology company behind an AI-powered social app that lets fans legally remix and mash up licensed songs into short-form clips for social media. By combining a catalog of over 20 million licensed recordings with AI tools for genre-shifting, tempo changes and video editing, Hook aims to turn unauthorized fan remixing into a channel that keeps artists and rights holders in control - and paid. Founded by former JioSaavn COO Gaurav Sharma, the company launched on iOS in early 2026 and raised a $10 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures.
Gaurav Sharma
Gaurav Sharma is the founder and CEO of Hook, a New York-based AI music platform that lets fans legally remix and mash up licensed songs and share them to social feeds while artists and rights holders keep control and get paid. A Johns Hopkins and Peabody Conservatory-trained musician turned operator, he previously helped scale India's JioSaavn to hundreds of millions of listeners and built and sold two consumer-tech startups. In 2026 Hook closed a $10 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $16 million.
Mood Media
Mood Media is the world's largest in-store media company - the business behind the music, digital screens, on-hold messages, and even the scents that shape how retail, restaurant, hospitality, and healthcare spaces feel. Owner of the iconic Muzak and DMX brands, Mood curates and delivers audio and visual experiences to hundreds of thousands of commercial locations across more than 100 countries, reaching roughly 100 million people a day. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, the company blends music licensing, hardware, cloud software, and retail-media advertising into one platform that lets brands control the sensory feel of their spaces.
Royalty Solutions Corp
Royalty Solutions Corp is a New York-based, fee-based music royalty administration and publishing services firm that acts as an outsourced, white-label royalty department for record labels, independent publishers, distributors, and management companies. Founded by third-generation music executive Mark Spier, it pairs enterprise-grade royalty software with hands-on accounting to process statements, register catalogs, handle mechanical and master-use licensing, and pay rights holders accurately - all on a flat fee rather than a commission, so clients keep their earnings.
Shamal Ranasinghe
Shamal Ranasinghe is the Chief Business Officer at Audius, the decentralized blockchain-based music streaming platform. A 25-year music-tech veteran, he co-founded Topspin Media in 2007 - one of the first direct-to-fan platforms for musicians - before spending eight years as VP of Product at Pandora/SiriusXM building creator tools. At Audius, he leads major label and publishing deals, including a landmark global licensing agreement with Kobalt Music in 2024, while championing a world where artists own their music, keep 90% of revenue, and connect directly with fans without gatekeepers.