Who Really Gets Paid When Your Sound Goes Viral?

 

Something strange has happened over the last decade.

We have never had more creators, more content, more streams, more videos, more music… yet somehow creators are earning less.

Not because they are not talented.
Not because the audience isn’t there.
But because the system paying them was never designed for the digital world we now live in.

It’s outdated.
It’s slow.
It’s opaque.
And in many cases, it’s flat-out unfair.

The Royalty System Was Built for a World That No Longer Exists

The traditional royalty model came from a time where:

• Music lived on CDs and radio
• Licensing meant one deal with one label
• Artists depended on intermediaries who kept the books
• Audits took years
• And creators were the last ones to get paid

Fast-forward to 2025 and that system is still being used to manage:

• TikTok clips
• Instagram reels
• Shorts
• AI-generated remixes
• YouTube backgrounds
• Podcast snippets
• In-game loops
• Brand UGC campaigns
• Fitness apps
• Live streams

We’re using tools designed for the horse-and-carriage era to pay creators working at Tesla Cybertruck speed. It’s not just broken. It’s absurd.

Nobody Knows Who Owes What to Whom

Let’s be honest, tracking royalties in 2025 is chaos. A single 10-second audio clip might get:

• Used in a TikTok
• Reposted on Instagram
• Remixed by an AI
• Clipped for YouTube
• Added into a podcast
• Embedded into a meme
• Used by a game studio
• Auto-sampled by an AI agent somewhere

Who pays?

No one knows. Or worse: the payout gets lost somewhere between distributors, platforms, PROs, labels, and middlemen. By the time the creator sees a payment, the excitement is long gone and the amount is barely enough for a coffee from Starbucks.

And Getting Paid Takes Forever

Creators talk about this all the time:

“YouTube pays in 30 days”
“Labels pay in 90 days”
“Beat marketplaces pay monthly”
“Streaming platforms pay quarterly”

If your rent is due on the 1st, what exactly are you supposed to do with a 90-day payment cycle?

This is why creators chase brand deals instead of royalties. They need cashflow, not promises.

AI Just Made the Royalty Problem 100x Worse

AI models can remix, regenerate, and reshape sounds endlessly. But here’s the catch…
If an AI uses your drum loop, vocal snippet, or baseline inside its dataset, how do you get paid? Today, you don’t.

Which is crazy, because AI companies are making billions training on creative data that belongs to real people. The problem isn’t AI itself.

The problem is the lack of infrastructure that treats creative data the way it deserves to be treated, as an asset.

So What’s the Fix? A New Royalty Engine Built for the Internet

Here’s the new way forward and it’s already emerging.

Step 1: Put Creative Rights On-Chain

When ownership is on a public ledger:

• No middlemen
• No lost royalties
• No “we’re still processing your payout”
• No guessing who owns what

Every track, beat, sample, or dataset gets a verifiable ID. Finally, clarity.

Step 2: Make Every Usage Traceable

Whether a beat is:

• Used in a video
• Sampled
• Remixed by AI
• Embedded in an app
• Streamed in a game
• Added to a dataset

…the creator automatically earns.

Not quarterly.
Not monthly.
Instantly.

Step 3: Let Developers Build On This

This is the big one and it’s why protocol like Mubert matters. Developers can plug into a global “creative API” where usage = instant payout.

Imagine:

• Fitness app automatically pays creators every time your track is used
• TikTok-style app sending micro-royalties in real time
• AI models paying creators each time their dataset contributes to a generation
• The next Spotify built on programmable royalties

This isn’t a “crypto dream”, it’s the infrastructure the internet has been waiting for.

Why This Change Benefits the Creator Community Most

The creator economy is the largest on the planet, but also the most squeezed by the old model. Creators here need:

• Faster payouts
• Transparent royalties
• Legal ownership
• Direct control
• Better data on where their content goes
• Tools that compete with platforms, not fight them

On-chain royalties aren’t about “crypto”, they’re about cutting the unnecessary friction that hurts creators most. It’s about giving the kid in Ohio the same rights as the artist in LA. It’s about helping the YouTuber in Texas get paid instantly when their sound goes viral. It’s about letting independent creators keep what they earn, without paying five layers of middlemen.

It’s about freedom.
It’s about fairness.
And honestly, it’s overdue.

The Future of Royalties Is Simple: Earn As You Create

The next generation of creators won’t wait for checks. Their royalties will flow like the internet itself: fast, global, verifiable, automatic.

Music will pay on use.
Datasets will pay on training.
Sounds will pay on sampling.
Agents will pay on generation.

The old system pays artists when it feels like it.
The new system pays creators when they’re actually used.

And that’s the fix.

AI Music Company

Mubert is a platform powered by music producers that helps creators and brands generate unlimited royalty-free music with the help of AI. Our mission is to empower and protect the creators. Our purpose is to democratize the Creator Economy.

Generate Track API for Developers