Why We Built Amerge

By Levi Downey, Founder of Amerge Music Cooperative

The music licensing business is a massive multiplayer game. Artists, songwriters, producers, music supervisors, publishers, labels, agencies, and a whole lot of other people all play a part in getting music into film, TV, advertising, and games.

In the best of times, everyone knows who owns what, the right people are connected, and great music finds its way into great projects. Everyone does their part and gets paid fairly for the value they bring.

In the worst of times, it's a tangled mess of conflicting incentives, complicated rights, and opaque financial transactions. And unfortunately, the people who actually make the music are often the ones with the least information and the least leverage.

I've spent much of my career working in sync licensing, both as a music producer and alongside the music supervisors and companies responsible for placing music. I've seen how incredibly valuable these relationships can be, but also how much friction exists in a system where everyone is essentially operating in their own silo.

It got me thinking. What if we could bring all these people onto the same team? What if the people who make music, the people who place it, and the people who help it succeed could all share fairly and transparently in the value they create together?

That's the idea behind Amerge.

The problem with music licensing

There are two things that make the music licensing business particularly challenging: trust and scale.

Let's start with trust.

Every song has two fundamental sets of rights: the composition and the sound recording. Those rights can be divided among multiple songwriters, producers, publishers, labels, and other rights holders.

So imagine you're a music supervisor looking for the perfect song for a commercial. You find something you love, but there are three songwriters, a couple of publishers, and a separate owner of the master recording. Before you can use it, you need to know exactly who controls those rights and get everyone to agree.

All it takes is one missing signature, an unexpected rights holder, or a disagreement about the fee, and the whole deal can fall apart.

Now multiply that process across hundreds or thousands of songs, often under extremely tight deadlines, and you start to understand why music supervisors rely so heavily on trusted partners.

Which brings us to scale.

Publishers, sync agencies, libraries, and other music operators play an incredibly important role in this business. They build trust, manage rights, maintain relationships, and make it possible for music supervisors to find and license great music without having to negotiate with every individual artist.

These are valuable services. The problem isn't that these intermediaries exist. The problem is that the incentives between the different players are often misaligned.

The music maker wants to earn as much as possible from their work. The music placer needs to find the right music, clear it quickly, and stay within budget. The operator has to balance those needs while running a sustainable business of their own.

And because so much of the information and revenue flows through these separate organizations, the people making the music don't always know what happened after they delivered it.

Who licensed the song? For how much? What fees were taken along the way? When and how will everyone get paid?

Even when everyone is acting in good faith, this lack of transparency creates an enormous gap in trust.

So what happens if we stop treating these three groups as separate parties competing over the same pie, and instead give them a shared interest in growing it?

Bringing everyone onto the same team

That's what we're building with Amerge.

Amerge is a music cooperative bringing together three groups:

Music Makers: The artists, songwriters, producers, and composers who create the music.

Music Placers: The music supervisors and licensing professionals who connect that music with opportunities in film, television, advertising, games, and beyond.

Music Operators: The people responsible for the administration, technology, relationships, and infrastructure that make the business work.

The idea is to align the incentives of these groups so that we're all working toward the same goal: creating great music, getting it heard and licensed, and sharing fairly in its long-term success.

Rather than sending music through a fragmented network of separate companies, Amerge coordinates the rights and licensing relationships for the music in our catalog. This allows us to offer a simpler, more reliable clearance process for the works we represent.

At the same time, each song has an agreed revenue split that defines how the value it generates is shared among the people who contributed to it.

And here's where the cooperative structure becomes especially important.

Amerge isn't just another music library or sync agency. It's a business owned and governed by its members.

The people building the organization have a say in how it operates and how we invest in its future. Song-specific revenue rights are managed through separate agreements, so the people entitled to a share of a song's earnings can participate in its success.

We're essentially trying to build a music business where the people creating the value have a meaningful role in shaping the business itself.

Making transparency the default

One of the things that has always frustrated me about the music industry is how difficult it can be to follow the money.

A song might generate revenue from a sync placement, streaming, publishing royalties, or any number of other sources. But by the time that money makes its way through the various collection societies, administrators, publishers, and other intermediaries, it's not always clear what was collected or how it was divided.

We think there's a better way to handle this.

At Amerge, we're building technology that allows us to record the revenue shares for each song and distribute payments more directly and transparently.

The idea is simple. When a song generates revenue, the people entitled to that revenue should be able to see what came in and how it was split.

We're using newer technology to help make that possible, but the technology itself isn't really the exciting part.

What's exciting is what it enables.

More trust between collaborators. Less time spent tracking down payments or arguing over agreements. And more opportunity for the people who make, place, and support music to participate in the long-term value of their work.

A lot of these ideas aren't new. Cooperatives have been aligning the interests of their members for generations. Music companies have been pooling rights and licensing catalogs for decades.

What's new is our ability to combine those models with technology that makes coordination, accounting, and transparent revenue sharing much easier.

And we believe that combination can unlock something pretty powerful.

Putting the idea to the test

Of course, it's one thing to talk about building a better system. It's another thing to actually get a group of people together and make it work.

In September 2026, we hosted our first full-scale Amerge Residency in Joshua Tree, California.

We brought together 37 people, including artists, producers, songwriters, music supervisors, operators, and supporters, for a week of collective music creation.

Over six days, we created 42 original songs based on seven real-world sync briefs.

But the Residency wasn't just about making a bunch of music.

We wanted to test what happens when music makers and music placers work side by side, when contributors agree on their revenue shares as part of the creation process, and when everyone involved has a shared interest in what happens to the music after the sessions end.

It was an opportunity to put our cooperative model, technology, and relationships to work in the real world.

And it was an incredible experience.

We saw people who had never worked together before create amazing music. We had music supervisors providing direct feedback throughout the creative process. We tested our systems, learned a lot about what works and what doesn't, and came away with a catalog of original music that we're now working to finish, pitch, and license.

There's still plenty of work ahead. Making 42 songs is one thing. Turning those songs into real placements and sustainable revenue is another.

But that's exactly why we're doing this. We're not just trying to prove that a different model is possible in theory. We want to build something that actually works, and then figure out how to scale it.

Building a better way together

We're at a pretty interesting moment in the music industry.

Technology is changing how music is made, distributed, discovered, and licensed. The volume of content being created continues to grow, while the economics of being a working artist are becoming increasingly difficult.

I think this creates both a challenge and an enormous opportunity.

We have a chance to rethink some of the fundamental structures of the music business and ask whether they're really serving the people they're supposed to serve.

What would it look like if music makers had more ownership and transparency? If music supervisors had access to a trusted network of incredible artists and music that was genuinely easy to clear? If the people operating the business shared in its long-term success alongside the people creating the music?

And what if we could build all of that into an organization that the members themselves own and govern?

That's the future we're working toward with Amerge.

We're not trying to get rid of all the people and organizations that make the music industry work. We're trying to rethink how we work together, using cooperative ownership, aligned incentives, and transparent technology to create something better for everyone involved.

There's a lot left to figure out, and we're learning as we go. But after seeing what we've already been able to accomplish together, I'm more convinced than ever that this is worth building.

A more transparent, equitable, and sustainable music industry is possible. We just have to build it together.

Levi Downey
Founder, Amerge Music Cooperative

Explore the Residency →

Meet the people behind Amerge →