MusicInfra CEO Talks Amazon Music Partnership & Song Clearance: ‘People Told Me I Was Crazy’
Categoria: Musica
Co-founder Björn Lindvall says a growing number of music execs think tech infrastructure is essential to efficient data processes, licensing agreements compliance and revenue growth.
Por Billboard | 20/10/2026
There is a tech maxim that says the road to 21st century progress isn’t paved with asphalt, but with fiber optic cables and data centers. If that’s true, The Music Infrastructure Company (MusicInfra) is aiming to be the road crew bringing progress to royalty collections. Founded in 2023, MusicInfra is an independent business-to-business music technology and rights management company that provides modular tech infrastructure, like data processing, rights-matching engines and royalty clearinghouse services, to digital streaming platforms and rights-holders. Related Reactional, Interactive Music Engine for Gaming, Signs With MusicInfra for Rights Collection Diddy Moved From New Jersey Prison to Similar Facility in Pennsylvania Weezer to Receive Legend of Live Award at 2026 Billboard Live Music Summit Its backers include Raine Group, UTA Ventures, and Peter Thiel ’s Snö Ventures, and starting this week MusicInfra is the rights management support provider for Amazon Music on music used in videos, a connection that opens the door to working with any of the National Music Publishers’ Association’s (NMPA) roughly 800 members. Landing Amazon as a client presents more than just a step-change in scale for MusicInfra. MusicInfra co-founder and CEO Björn Lindvall says, “We’ve reached this kind of inflection point where both publishers and the platform are actually trusting us to do something.” Billboard sat down with Lindvall to talk about what it’s like to land a contract with one of the largest music streaming companies at one of the world’s biggest tech companies, and how the music industry is warming to MusicInfra’s idea of a worldwide clearinghouse for music rights. I asked Claude for an analogy to describe what MusicInfra does for clients like Amazon Music, and it said MusicInfra is like Plaid/AWS/Shopify. It provides universal financial plumbing like Plaid, scalable, customizable tech in the background like AWS and inventory tracking and a cashier like Shopify. Do you agree with that? Björn Lindvall: I haven’t heard that before, but I don’t disagree. We basically do four things. [First] We match this whole thing, and then we give Amazon a bucket of songs that are clear to use. Second, these songs are consumed on Amazon in one way or the other and then our deal engine [determines] how much are you getting paid per video? How much are you getting paid per stream? Whatever it is we send reports back to publishers and back to the platform, and then we pay people. Those are basically the four steps. Does bringing on a partner the size of Amazon help you scale MusicInfra’s tech stack? What challenges did you encounter? Lindvall : Yes. Standing up a machine of the size that is required for Amazon … a 15-person team cannot do that manually. It all has to be built with repeatable processes and data. For instance, Amazon wants clearance information on what videos they can and cannot use every 24 hours. So we run tha