What happens when your song goes viral on TikTok — but you never see a dime? Or when your artwork turns up in an AI-generated ad without your permission? In a world where content travels faster than contracts, creators are left wondering who’s really keeping track.
The internet didn’t just break down distribution barriers — it scrambled ownership, too. Now, with AI, streaming, and digital platforms reshaping the rules, protecting creative work is both more important and more complicated than ever.
That’s where rights management services come in — but are they evolving fast enough to keep up?
Traditional Rights Management
Before the internet, rights management was mostly manual and analog. Think of it as librarians or middlemen keeping ledgers of who owned or licensed each song, book or film.
For example:
- Music-rights organizations (ASCAP, BMI) tracked radio plays;
- Publishers handled book licenses and translations;
- Payments and licenses were negotiated case by case, often with piles of contracts and records.
The goal was always the same: ensure creators got paid when their work was used.
The Digital Tsunami: Streaming and Global Distribution
Streaming changed everything. Now content flows worldwide instantly. Platforms like Spotify, Netflix and YouTube flipped the old model from selling single copies to millions of micro-interactions every day.
A song might play in Tokyo one moment and São Paulo the next, yet each play earns only a tiny fraction of a cent. (In fact, it can take on the order of 120–170 streams on Spotify to earn a single penny).
To keep up, rights managers have moved from paper ledgers to real-time data dashboards. They now rely on software and databases to track plays, downloads and views across dozens of services and territories, splitting up tiny royalty payments among all contributors.
New Challenges from Generative AI
Generative AI is shaking up creativity – and causing headaches for rights managers. AI tools like ChatGPT (for text) or Midjourney (for images) often train on huge internet datasets that likely include copyrighted books, art and photographs. Creators worry their work might be used without permission.
Courts and lawmakers are scrambling: in a recent hearing, one judge warned that an AI could produce “an infinite number of competing products” from a book without paying its author.
The issue remains unsettled, with dozens of lawsuits still pending. For now, rights firms must navigate this murky terrain – some may start offering AI-scanning services or new licensing deals to protect creators, but clear rules have yet to emerge. In other words, rights management services have yet another frontier: helping clients understand what, if any, permissions are needed when their work is used to train or generated by AI.
Blockchain and Smart Contracts: Innovation in Rights and Royalties
Amid these challenges, blockchain technology and smart contracts are often touted as a solution. A blockchain is like a tamper-proof public ledger. Each song, photo or manuscript could be registered with a unique digital ID, and a smart contract could automatically split payments among contributors at pre-set rates whenever the work is used. In theory, this would cut out many middlemen and boost transparency.
In practice, experiments are already underway.
For example, Italy’s authors’ society SIAE is testing an Algorand-based platform that records each music play on the blockchain, giving artists “a transparent view of their works” and potentially sending royalties straight to their digital wallets.
Major companies are experimenting too: Sony launched a blockchain system for written works, and Baidu for image copyrights.
All these aim to give creative works indisputable, timestamped identities. Smart contracts can also speed up payments: on a blockchain, every sale or stream could trigger micropayments in real time. Experts note that smart contracts (often via NFTs) could make royalty splits far more automatic and transparent.
In short, blockchain could let creators define the terms of use for their content once – and then have payments flow out instantly to everyone involved whenever the content is consumed.
Remaining Gaps and Inefficiencies
Even with new tools, rights management still has big holes. For example, the U.S. Mechanical Licensing Collective reported that after its first payment cycle in 2021, nearly $500 million in royalties were still “unmatched” — money that couldn’t be paid out because metadata was missing or inconsistent. In general, problems include:
- Fragmented systems: Each streaming service or country often runs its own licensing database. There’s no single global registry, so a work might have multiple IDs in different places, making tracking difficult. This fragmentation leads to lost payments and a lot of manual reconciliation.
- Complex ownership: Creative works often have many layers of rights. A hit song can involve composers, lyricists, performers and labels; a movie has writers, actors and directors. Splitting revenue among all contributors is still partly a human puzzle. Even a small error in metadata can cause a payout to be stalled or misdirected.
- Legal gray areas: Technology moves faster than legislation. Between AI-generated content, global platforms and user uploads, it’s not always clear what requires a license. Rights teams often have to play detective (for example, combing YouTube or TikTok for unauthorized clips), and courts may take years to settle these new questions.
These gaps mean many creators feel shortchanged or left in the dark — like running a punch-card system in a blockchain world, where the promise of new tech hasn’t quite made it into everyday practice.
Future Outlook: Towards a Smarter Rights Ecosystem
The future of rights management is fast, digital, and creator-centric. AI will soon help detect unauthorized use in real time — scanning platforms, spotting samples, and flagging misuse automatically. Shared global registries and smarter metadata could finally fix the chaos of mismatched royalties.
Rights managers won’t just push paper — they’ll become tech-savvy allies, offering real-time dashboards, instant licensing tools, and blockchain-based royalty systems. The goal? Total transparency and faster, fairer payouts.
In a world of infinite content, rights management must be more than reactive — it must be intelligent, automated, and fiercely on the side of the creator.