Song Sleuth, a technology company focused on solving music rights and distribution problems, announces a major partnership with Warner Chappell Music, the music publishing arm of Warner Music Group, aimed at helping it better monetise the multi-billion-dollar user generated content (UGC) market.

Song Sleuth will be working for all Warner Chappell songwriters, covering more than one million musical works, to find UGC and derivative content that is currently unclaimed or facing other monetisation issues on UGC platforms.

By virtue of its flagship product, an innovative AI and machine learning platform called UGSeeker, Song Sleuth is able to ‘find the unfindable’ – UGC that is currently slipping through the net of existing detection systems on digital platforms and therefore not being monetised.

Song Sleuth CEO Jordan Gross said, “We’re thrilled to be partnering with Warner Chappell Music to help enable their songwriters to get more of the money that they should be receiving from UGC platforms. For too long we have seen revenue slip down the back of the proverbial sofa, so we’re excited to be putting our proprietary technology to use and helping rights owners monetise their content correctly. This is part of our overall mission to clean up royalty distribution and improve the quality of music data.”

Kamil Latorre, Senior Director, Digital Legal Affairs for Warner Chappell Music said, “We’re always looking at the market for new ways to maximise our collections for our songwriters and to increase our confidence in the identification of the use of our repertoire across UGC platforms. UGC content remains difficult to monitor and monetise correctly for rights holders, notwithstanding the ongoing efforts of our digital service partners, so we’re excited to work with Song Sleuth to continue to improve the scope and accuracy of our royalty claims.”

Song Sleuth is a rapidly expanding business with main offices in Lisbon and Chicago. Led by CEO Jordan Gross, the team includes CTO Ibrahim Maali and Head of Engineering Greyson Gregory. The Warner Chappell Music partnership is the first of a number of major deals that are currently in the pipeline. In addition to UGSeeker, Song Sleuth offers two additional products: Live Link, which looks at artist touring schedules and identifies live music UGC in near real-time, enabling rights holders to claim and monetise content from virtually the moment it is uploaded to YouTube, and Insights, which uses millions of UGC data points to provide trends and insights to partners.