$0.0B
annually
Industry-estimated unclaimed and misattributed music royalties — money owed but never paid.
AI-Powered Royalty Audit · Pre-launch
Verify
Every Cent
The first audit-grade AI for music royalties. We turn complex contracts and messy statements into a clear discrepancy report — at a fraction of the cost of a forensic firm.
musicbox.ai · audit / Q3 2025
CatalogueStatementsAuditsReports
Recalculation
LiveContract clause
Mechanical royalty rate: statutory minus 25% on Net Receipts from Digital Sales.
Statement line · Q3 2025
Mechanical royalties paid£12,847.30
musicbox.ai recalculated
DiscrepancyShould have been paid£17,134.40
Underpaid+£4,287.10
Why now
A two-tier royalty system.
Royalty underpayment is endemic. Until now, only the top 1% of catalogues could afford to do anything about it.
Used by the top 1%
The Forensic Audit
- Used by
- Heritage acts and superstar catalogues earning millions annually
- Cost
- Six-figure engagement fees
- Speed
- Months to years
- Outcome
- Negotiated settlement; the threat of audit is the lever
For everyone else, the audit option is effectively closed.
Built for everyone else
The musicbox.ai Audit
- Used by
- Independent artists, managers, estates, smaller labels — any catalogue
- Cost
- A fraction of a forensic engagement
- Speed
- Days, not months
- Outcome
- The same audit-grade discrepancy report — auditable, defensible
The same lever, available to anyone with a catalogue.
The scale of the problem
What’s at stake.
0%
of artists
The slice of the market wealthy enough to commission a forensic audit today. Everyone else is locked out.
0%
of statements
Contain at least one error — mis-applied deductions, missed income lines, FX miscalculations, recoupment mistakes.
Core Verification Engine
What musicbox.ai does.
Four foundational capabilities that turn an audit from a six-figure engagement into a tool you can run on a Tuesday.
01
CapabilityContract Ingestion
Audit-grade AI extracts terms, rates, splits, deductions, and recoupment provisions from your contracts — even when they live in scanned PDFs and decades-old paperwork.
Contract excerpt
3.2 Royalty rate of 18% of Net Receipts on Digital Sales.
3.3 Recoupable advances excluded from synchronisation income.
02
CapabilityData Normalisation
Royalty statements arrive in every imaginable shape — PDFs, spreadsheets, portal exports, legacy formats. We absorb the mess and turn it into one comparable structure.
PDFXLSXCSVTXTZIPJSONNORMALISED
CounterpartyPeriodAmount
Sony MusicQ3 2025£12,847.30
03
CapabilityGap Analysis
We recalculate what you're owed under the contract terms and flag every mis-applied deduction, missed income line, FX error, and recoupment mistake.
Paid
£12,847.30
Owed
£17,134.40
Underpaid+ £4,287.10
04
CapabilityAudit-Ready Reports
A defensible report you can take into a negotiation, hand to a forensic auditor, or use in formal proceedings. Every flagged figure traces back to a specific contract clause and statement line.
Audit report
queen-catalogue-q3-2025.pdf
Statements
48
Discrepancies
11
Recoverable
£37,492
The audit engine
An ear for every error.
Specialised models for contract semantics, statement parsing, and royalty mathematics — cross-checking each other in real time. No single discrepancy slips through.
- 01Model
Contract semantics.
Reads recording, publishing, and sub-publishing contracts. Extracts rates, splits, deductions, recoupment terms.
- 02Model
Statement parsing.
Normalises arbitrary statement formats — PDF, spreadsheet, portal export, legacy flat file — into one comparable structure.
- 03Model
Royalty mathematics.
Recalculates expected royalties under contract terms. Compares against payments. Quantifies every gap.
See your audit
Your statements, recalculated.
Upload a counterparty's royalty statements alongside the contracts that govern them. musicbox.ai parses, recalculates, and surfaces every discrepancy — with the source line and clause one click away.
musicbox.ai · audit / Sony Music · Q3 2025
Audit
Sony Music · Q3 2025
Statements
48
Recalculated
48
Recoverable
£37,492
Statements with discrepancies
StatementPaidOwedΔ
DSP digital · Q3£12,847.30£17,134.40+£4,287.10
Mechanical · Q3£3,402.18£3,402.18—
Sync placements · Q3£1,200.00£1,856.00+£656.00
Performance · Q3£8,419.55£8,419.55—
Physical · Q3£612.40£612.40—
SourceRecording agreement · clause 3.2
Show the source
Every figure traces back.
No black-box AI. Every discrepancy on a musicbox.ai report links to the exact contract clause and statement line that produced it. Auditable end-to-end.
Discrepancy report · Q3 2025
Underpaid mechanical royalty
Paid
£12,847.30
Owed
£17,134.40
Underpaid+ £4,287.10
Source → Recording agreement, clause 3.2
Recording agreement · clause 3.2
Mechanical royalty rate
3.1 Royalties on physical and digital reproductions of the Composition.
3.2 Mechanical royalty rate: statutory minus 25% on Net Receipts.
3.3 Recoupable advances excluded from synchronisation income.
Applied → Q3 2025 mechanical royalty calculation
Auto-traces on first view · hover or focus to replay
How it works
Five steps. Days, not months.
The same audit a forensic firm would conduct, run in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost.
Onboard.
Upload contracts and the royalty statements you've received.
Parse.
AI extracts the relevant contract terms and structures the statements.
Recalculate.
We compute what you should have been paid under each contract.
Compare.
Discrepancies are identified, categorised, and quantified.
Report.
You receive an audit-ready report with full source traceability.
Built with experience
Thirty years of catching errors at scale.
The contract terms, deduction quirks, and statement irregularities the platform handles are the real ones — captured from people who’ve sat on both sides of these audits.
In thirty years of music royalty work, I've never seen a label statement that didn't have at least three errors. Until now, we just didn't have a way to find them at scale.
Founding cofounder
Name pending
Music industry veteran · royalties & rights
Loopholes we already handle
Patterns the model already knows.
- 01Pattern
Mis-applied territory rules.
Royalties reported under a domestic rate when the licensing territory should trigger a higher international rate.
- 02Pattern
FX timing manipulation.
Currency conversion applied at favourable-to-counterparty dates rather than the contractually specified ones.
- 03Pattern
Phantom recoupment.
Recoupment balances carried forward against income streams the contract excludes from recoupment.
- 04Pattern
Controlled-composition mis-classification.
Compositions wrongly classified as controlled, capping mechanical rates below statutory.
Examples drawn from real audit experience and sanitised. The full taxonomy ships in the report.
The future of royalty intelligence
Today is the foundation.
The audit comes first. The same engine extends outward into real-world reconciliation and continuous, automated recovery — a permanent watchdog for the music you make.
Today
Verification.
Audit historical statements against contract terms. The Standard Audit Capability available now.
Phase II
Real-World Reconciliation.
Independently observe where music is being used — streams, broadcast, sync, public performance, UGC — and compare against what counterparties report.
Phase III
Continuous Watchdog.
Permanent monitoring with automated claim generation and dispute filing. If it's being played, you're getting paid.
Reserve your audit
We’re onboarding our first artists.
A small group of artists, managers, and estates is being invited ahead of public launch. Apply now and we’ll be in touch.