A broken licensing market
Music is being illegally sampled at an alarming rate because there is no easy way to license it.
Rightsholders don't get paid — while people and brands who had nothing to do with the work earn millions on others' copyrights.
The true cost of manual clearance
A fragmented workflow delays revenue recognition and exposes the organization to financial liability — priced at 60 licenses cleared per month.
A precleared library — custom terms & approval rights
bushido replaces the slow, fragmented clearance process with a single, secure, white-labeled platform that gets smarter by enriching data.
The projected ROI of automation
Platform cost is immediately offset — and exceeded — by eliminating waste.
Averages at 60 licenses cleared / month.
Conclusion & next steps
bushido's platform provides the structurally improved licensing workflow rightsholders need to scale.
White-label solution for hosting and selling licenses
Every rightsholder gets their own branded storefront — their catalogue, their terms, their pricing.
License Detail
Sample fee, creator split, territory and usage terms — surfaced upfront on every track.
Licensed Media Upload
Full control over every licensed release from a single upload flow.
Flexible pricing, built in
bushido gives rightsholders 3 ways to price your licenses.
Rightsholder Dashboard
Every right you own, every stream it earns from — each with the next action to capture or grow it.
All your income sources in one place
DSP streaming, mechanical, master, neighbouring rights, public performance and sync — unified from every backend in the bushido stack.
FUGA API · AUDIBLE MAGIC · SONGSTATS
Approval Rights
Remixers must upload a premaster version for approval, together with their release plan.
Rightsholders retain final say — reviewing the premaster and release plan before any license is granted.
Request Quote
Set fee and split after learning who is requesting — to maximise revenue.
Fingerprinting: find every illegal use
Every unlicensed composition, identified and priced — then presented to the rightsholder for Takedown or Recovery.
bushido's fingerprinting engine scans every major platform, matches offending works to your compositions, and scores each case by estimated recovery value.
Takedown
A statutory DMCA notice generated in minutes — evidence → notice → delivery → confirmation.
Remove infringing works expeditiously — with legally compliant Section 512(c)(3) language locked in, so every notice holds up.
DELIVERED TO THE PLATFORM'S DMCA AGENT
Or convert: offer a license instead
A real-time license through bushido — cleared terms, cleared money, no notice required.
Recovery
Reclaim what the offending work already earned — retroactive price + go-forward terms.
Collected royalty statements on the offending work feed a recovery calculation — recoupment due, retro multiplier and license fee — producing a retroactive license price and a share of future revenue.
ROYALTIES REDIRECTED TO THE RIGHTSHOLDER
Matching Engine
Clear partially-owned songs using authoritative rightsholder data and Audible Magic fingerprinting.
Song Lookup
Search the catalog, resolve ISRC ⟷ ISWC across 40M songs, and pre-clear in one step.
Most Favored Nation & Payouts
Level every rightsholder to the highest rate, then pay all payees automatically from one split.
ISRC Code & Work Code Generator
Mint recording & work identifiers directly in the platform — ISRC, ISWC, HFA, PRO and custom codes, registered against your catalog.
Sign Term Sheet & Download Stems
A legally compliant agreement generated and signed in one step.
Stem Extraction
Multi-track audio separation, powered by Audioshake.
Ingestion
Three ways to onboard a catalog — from self-service to bulk industry feeds.
Metadata
Industry-standard fields on every track — powering discovery, clearance and accurate royalty accounting.
Old Way vs New Way
Traditional clearance versus the bushido approach, side by side.
Lost Annual Licensing Revenue
The scale of revenue left on the table without automated clearance.
rightsholders
per year
*weighted average
How the license fee splits
The vast majority of every license fee goes straight to the rightsholder.
Team & Advisers
Leadership Bios
Full-stack entrepreneur and product innovator. His 20-year career began helping launch Fox Sports, Golf Channel, NHL Network and Facebook's Partner Team.
Every venture has built tools that increase wealth for creators — Create.It, which helped Red Bull, FOX, Hennessy and the USOC find world-class talent, and Amptube, which gave YouTubers distribution.
He went on to build David's Music Exchange to identify the true value of music, then applied the same infrastructure to bushido — using streaming and social signals to predict where artists sell out and which talent is emerging.
CEO of Wixen Music Publishing with 16 years in music publishing, and a longstanding advocate for songwriters.
On policy, he chairs The MLC's Dispute Resolution Committee and has testified before the Library of Congress on AI, the DMCA and statutory rate reform. He sits on the NMPA AI working group.
He advances industry standards through the CISAC CWR working group, and previously served as Publisher Chair of the CISAC CAF group — modernizing both standards.
Marketer and brand strategist with nearly three decades in music, known for identifying stars and building partnerships that expand brand value.
Recent work includes Smirnoff's Lemonade strategy, activated at Summer Jam and The BET Awards.
He served as CMO at Def Jam Records, running campaigns for Justin Bieber and Grammy-nominated Jhené Aiko. Before that he was Head of Commercial at Simon Cowell's Syco, shaping The X Factor and Got Talent globally. As Head of Bad Boy Worldwide he grew the company across apparel, television, film and spirits.
