A coalition of top independent labels has joined forces to launch Catalog, a curated music licensing marketplace designed to let artists sync their music and receive real-time compensation.
Beggars Group, Domino, Ninja Tune, Warp, Partisan Records and Erased Tapes are among the early supporters of the platform, which launches Wednesday (Nov. 5) via music supervision company Too Young Ltd.
Created by Frederic Schindler, AIM’s music supervisor of the Year 2025, the platform will debut with more than 30,000 sync-ready tracks from over 1,800 artists, with the aim of serving as an antidote to the royalty-free stock music economy.
Catalog arrives with the intention of helping to put more money into artists’ pockets. Creatives are able to set sync offers via its Sync Smart Pricing technology, which analyzes data points on an artist and song history to generate market-rate fees. The process thus allows for approvals faster, bypassing the traditional exchange of documents and any subsequent red-lines by auto-generating a final license once the terms have been agreed upon between stakeholders.
While searching for music on Catalog, creatives can use advanced filters such as audio similarity, and audio-to-picture auditioning, as well as being guided by a human-led “editorial search” mode to find relevant tracks. Artists signed up to the platform include Kurt Vile, Yves Tumor, Ela Minus, Marie Davidson and Icelandic multi-instrumentalist Ólafur Arnalds.
By providing this technology, Catalog is seeking to reduce the number of sync exchanges with “ghost artist libraries” – stock music attributed to anonymous musicians, presumably in an effort to reduce sync payouts for advertisements, video content and so forth.
“Catalog is the result of a deep collaboration with the most forward-thinking rights holders in the industry,” Schindler explained to Billboard U.K. “This is what happens when artists, labels, publishers, managers, and supervisors come together to address a problem. We’re not ‘disrupting’ them; we’re building this new era together.”
Ahead of its launch, Catalog music director Thierry Planelle worked with Veronique Nichanian, creative director of Hermès, to replace a key track for the fashion house’s Men’s Ready to Wear 2026 runway prior to the show. The feat prompted an endorsement from Christof Ellinghaus, founder and CEO of revered indie City Slang.
“This placement very quickly demonstrated Catalog’s ease of process and powerful usability,” Ellinghaus said in a press release. “We are excited about the prospects ahead with this great new platform. And trust us, we usually hate platforms!”
Membership applications for Catalog are now open in the U.K., Europe, US, Canada and Mexico. Further access information can be found on its official website.
