Journal · Music for brands

Who owns the music? Rights, buyouts and licensing when a brand commissions a custom score

When a brand commissions a custom score, the music is owned by whoever the contract says owns it - and if the contract says nothing, the composer keeps it. That is the short answer to the question every brand and agency asks about ten minutes after asking what it costs. The long answer is more useful, because "owning the music" is not one thing: it is two separate copyrights, a bundle of usage rights that can be sliced by territory, media and time, and a set of royalties that in most countries cannot be signed away at all. I sign these agreements for a living - for Jacquemus, TARO ISHIDA and NIO House Amsterdam among others - so here is the plain version: what you are actually buying, the four deal shapes, and what to put in the brief so ownership is never a surprise.

What you are actually buying: two copyrights, not one

Every finished piece of music carries two rights. The composition - the melody, harmony and arrangement, the thing that exists on paper before anyone records it. And the master - the specific recording of that composition, the audio file you actually put in your film. They are owned separately, licensed separately and priced separately. When a brand licenses a track from a library, it licenses both from the library. When a brand commissions me, both rights start out as mine, because copyright in most countries belongs to the person who made the work the moment it exists, and stays there until a written agreement moves it. In the Netherlands, where I work, the Copyright Act is explicit: a transfer only happens through a signed deed, and only for the rights that deed actually names. Paying an invoice transfers nothing. Neither does the word "commission".

This matters because the two rights answer different questions. Who can re-record the theme in a new arrangement for next year's campaign? That is the composition. Who can cut the existing track into a fifteen-second social edit? That is the master. A brand that owns the master but not the composition can use the recording forever and still cannot re-arrange it without asking. A brand that owns both can do anything it likes - and has paid for that.

Buyout, licence, work for hire: what each one really means

The vocabulary is where most confusion starts, because the same words mean different things in Amsterdam, London and Los Angeles.

Buyout

A buyout is a one-off fee in exchange for the copyright itself: the brand becomes the owner of the composition, the master or both, in perpetuity, everywhere. In its strict sense it also tries to include the composer's future royalties, which is where it collides with how the music business actually works (more on that below). In practice, "buyout" is often used loosely by agencies to mean "we pay once and never hear about this again" - which is a licence with a long term, not a transfer of ownership. Ask which one is meant before you sign it.

Licence

A licence leaves the copyright with the composer and grants the brand defined rights to use the music: in which media, in which territories, for how long, and whether anyone else may use it too. An exclusive licence means the composer will not license the same music to anyone else for the term - which, for brand work, is the whole point. A licence is not a lesser deal than a buyout. For most campaigns it is the better one, because you pay for the usage you actually need instead of for ownership you will never exercise.

Work for hire

"Work for hire" is a specifically American construction. Under the US Copyright Act, a commissioned work is a work made for hire only if it falls into one of nine listed categories - music written as part of a film, commercial or other audiovisual work is one of them - and both parties sign a written agreement saying so. The brand is then treated as the author from the start. A standalone audio asset that is not part of an audiovisual work, such as a sonic logo delivered as a file, does not fit the categories cleanly, which is why American lawyers usually pair the phrase with an assignment clause as a fallback. Outside the US the concept mostly does not exist: in the Netherlands and most of Europe the composer is the author, full stop, and the only way to move the economic rights is the written assignment described above. Moral rights - the right to be credited and to object to distortion of the work - stay with the author regardless, under Dutch law and across most of Europe. For film specifically, the two standard shapes are set out in how to hire a film composer.

Shared ownership

The fourth shape, and the one I use most for sonic identities: the brand owns the master outright and holds an exclusive licence to the composition for every touchpoint it uses, while I keep the composition copyright and the writer's share of royalties. The brand gets everything it needs to run the identity anywhere, forever, with a guarantee that no competitor will ever hear the same music. I keep the right to be paid when it is broadcast. Both sides get what they actually value.

Side by side: buyout vs exclusive licence vs term licence vs shared ownership

The four structures look similar on an invoice and behave very differently over the life of a brand. Here they are on one page.

The three terms that decide the real price: territory, media, duration

Usage rights are the largest single variable in a commissioned-music quote - larger than the length of the piece or the number of instruments. Three terms carry most of the weight. Territory: one country, Europe, worldwide. Media: online only, broadcast, paid advertising, in-store, in-product. Duration: a single campaign flight, a few years, perpetuity. A thirty-second cue licensed for one year of online use in the Netherlands and the same thirty seconds bought out worldwide, in perpetuity, for all media are not the same product, and the quote reflects that even when the music is identical. Exclusivity sits on top of all three: the promise that nobody else will ever license the same music is what turns a track into an asset, and it is worth more than any other line on the estimate, as I set out in what does sonic branding cost.

There is nothing sinister in any of this. A brand that says "worldwide, all media, forever" is asking to take the composer's entire future income from the piece, and pays for it. A brand that says "online, Europe, two years" is not, and does not.

The royalties you cannot buy, and why that is good news

Here is the part agencies find counterintuitive. When a commercial airs on television, a brand film plays at a festival, or a track streams, the broadcaster or platform pays a licence fee to a collecting society - Buma/Stemra in the Netherlands, PRS in the UK, ASCAP or BMI in the US - and that society pays the writer's share directly to the composer. That money never passes through the brand. It is not on the brand's invoice, the brand does not owe it, and in most countries the composer cannot legally sign it away to the brand even if both sides wanted to, because the society, not the composer, administers those rights on the composer's behalf. A "full buyout including all royalties" clause therefore either does nothing, or quietly asks the composer to work outside the system that pays every professional composer.

The good news for the brand: the writer's share costs you nothing, so you can leave it alone, and a composer who insists on keeping it is not being difficult. They are behaving exactly like every film composer you have ever heard of. The commissioning guide covers how this sits inside the rest of the agreement.

What happens when the campaign outlives the licence

Most ownership problems are not disputes; they are calendars. A term licence signed for a two-year campaign, and then the campaign runs for four. A brand film licensed for online use that a sales team starts showing at trade fairs. A hold-music cue licensed for one office that a group rolls out to forty. None of these are bad faith, and all of them are technically unlicensed use - which matters on the day the brand is acquired and a due-diligence lawyer asks for the music paperwork. The fix is cheap and boring: put a renewal option in the original agreement, with the price of extending term, territory or media agreed on day one. Then "can we keep using this?" has a number attached instead of a negotiation. The same logic applies to the hidden costs of library-based identities covered in custom music vs library music: a licence with a term is a subscription, and subscriptions end.

Shared ownership, and when it is the better deal for both sides

For a sonic identity - a sound the brand intends to use for a decade across every touchpoint - I recommend the shared structure over a straight buyout more often than not, and not out of self-interest. A buyout makes the brand the owner of a composition it will never administer: it has to register the work with a collecting society, handle sub-licences, and manage the composition for the life of the identity, which almost no marketing department is set up to do. Shared ownership gives the brand the master outright, an exclusive perpetual licence for every touchpoint it names, and a guarantee of exclusivity, while the composition stays administered by the person who already knows how. The brand's lawyers get a clean exclusivity clause. The brand's finance team pays for use, not for the overhead of ownership. And the composer stays credited and paid when the work is broadcast, which is the arrangement the film industry has run for a century. That was the shape of the TARO ISHIDA identity, where the kick drum is a recording of the brand's own heel striking the floor - the brand owns that recording, because it should.

AI-generated music: the ownership question nobody has settled

One deal shape has quietly appeared that has no settled answer at all. A track generated entirely by an AI model cannot currently be owned by anyone in the United States: the Copyright Office's January 2025 report restated that copyright requires human authorship, the federal appeals court in Washington agreed in Thaler v. Perlmutter two months later, and in 2026 the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal. The position in the EU and the Netherlands is not identical in law but arrives at a similar place in practice, since protection attaches to an author's own intellectual creation. The consequence for brands is stark: a purely generated sonic logo cannot be exclusive, because there is nothing to own, and no buyout can change that. Where AI tools assist a human composer - sketching, orchestrating, processing - the human contribution is protected and the ownership questions above apply as normal, which is one reason provenance clauses ("no part of this work was generated without human authorship") are now appearing in brand contracts. I go into what is and is not protected in the state of AI in music.

What to put in the brief so ownership is never a surprise

Five lines in the brief settle almost every ownership question before a note is written. State whether you need exclusivity, and against whom - your category, or everyone. Name the media, the territories and the duration you actually foresee, and add "with an option to extend", so the price of growth is known. Say whether you need the stems and separated parts, and whether you might want to re-arrange the theme later, which tells the composer whether the composition licence needs to include derivative works. Say whether the music will be part of a film or commercial, or delivered as a standalone asset, because that decides the legal shape. And ask, plainly, which of the four structures the composer proposes and why. A serious composer will answer in a paragraph. The full checklist lives in how to commission custom music, the pricing side in what does sonic branding cost, and the service itself in sonic branding.

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