Song Stakeholders

What it is

A brand that wants a song for a game, a trailer, an ad or an event needs two licenses. The master license covers the recording itself and comes from whoever owns it, usually a label. The sync license covers the song as written and comes from every publisher and songwriter who owns a piece of it.

Finding all of those people by hand takes a licensing team days per song. The song stakeholder finder does the first pass in under a minute. An admin pastes a Spotify link, a YouTube link, or "title - artist", and gets back the song and a list of everyone who has to clear it.

It is part of the sync licensing demo in the admin God View. It is admin only, and nothing is ever sent to anyone.

What each row shows

The finder also writes plain notes about anything shaky: splits nobody has confirmed, sources that disagree, a publisher that changed after the song came out, or a remix that adds writers.

How it finds them

Cheapest first:

1. The link. Spotify and YouTube say the title, the artist and the cover for free.
2. MusicBrainz, a free open music database. It gives the recording code (ISRC), the album, the label, and the songwriters and publishers it knows about. Zooly asks politely, at most once a second.
3. One web research pass with a Gemini Flash model and Google Search. It fills what MusicBrainz misses: current publishers and administrators, splits when they are public, parent companies, sites and contact routes. Every row it adds must carry a source.
4. Merge. The same company found twice becomes one row. A row two independent sources agree on is raised to high confidence. A row with no source is marked low. A single master owner is set to 100% of the master side. Shares that add up past 100% are flagged, never quietly changed.

If a step fails or a key is missing, the lookup still answers with what it has, and says what is missing.

Splits are a starting point. Public data rarely shows exact publishing shares. Every quote must be confirmed with each publisher before money is discussed.

What it costs

Each lookup has a 10 cent cap. If the research pass would go past it, it is skipped and the notes say so. The answer is saved for 30 days and shared across the whole team, so a song is only paid for once.

The EA demo song (Levitating by Dua Lipa) is answered from a hand-checked research file, so the demo is instant, free and the same every time. The team can turn on the same file for every lookup when no keys are set, for an offline demo.

Stakeholders become accounts

When the admin saves the list, every stakeholder gets an account in Zooly:

• Already in Zooly. Matched by website first, then by name. The existing account is used and nothing new is made.
• Not in Zooly yet. A real unclaimed account is created, the same kind the team creates from admin. It has no owner and is marked as made by a God View simulation, the same as a God View starter. Until someone claims it, it has no public page, but it can be matched and take offers and deals. Nothing is emailed or texted to it on its own: an offer to it waits on the Outreach page for an admin to approve or skip. It can be claimed later with an invite link, like any staff-created account.

Labels, publishers and administrators become agency accounts, since they manage rights for artists. Songwriters and producers become talent accounts. Performing rights organizations such as ASCAP and BMI are shown for reference only and never become accounts.

After the save, each new account gets light research and a contact search in the background, under the same daily research cap as the rest of Zooly. Any public licensing email or contact form found is added to the account, without replacing anything already there. The admin never waits for this.

Saving the same list again never makes duplicates. The second save finds the accounts the first one made.

Why it matters

Each song researched leaves real accounts behind. The next brief that needs a Warner song starts with Warner already in Zooly, already researched. Once a label or publisher claims its account, the agents can approach it for real.