State of Sync 2026: what independent music actually licenses for

Sync is one of the least transparent corners of the music business. Fees are quoted, not published, so nobody outside a handful of agencies has a reliable picture of what independent music costs. This study publishes the aggregate figures from the Melody marketplace in full: what tracks are priced at, what genres rights-holders are actually supplying, and where the gaps between supply and brand demand sit.

1. Indie sync pricing is bimodal, not average

The median active track licenses for $25. The mean is $131. When those two numbers are five times apart, the average is describing a distribution that does not exist — and that is exactly what is happening here. Independent sync pricing has two clusters and a thin middle.

Two in five tracks (42%) are priced at $10 or under, and roughly one in three (34%) at $100 or above. The interquartile range runs from $5 to $100, which is another way of saying the middle half of the catalogue spans a twentyfold price difference. There is no going rate for indie sync; there are two distinct markets sharing a search box.

The practical read for a brand: if you are budgeting per track, $25 is the number to plan against, not $131. If you are a label setting a price, the $11–$99 band is where competition is thinnest — most catalogue either undercuts it or steps over it entirely.

2. The whole marketplace sits below the traditional floor

The single most expensive track in the marketplace licenses for $500. That is the bottom of the range typically quoted for a three-month single-market social ad through a traditional library, and it is a rounding error against the $25,000–$150,000+ band for national TV. The entire distribution of independent, pre-cleared catalogue fits underneath the cheapest tier of the conventional market.

That gap is not a discount on the same product. Traditional fees price a negotiation: bespoke terms, per-deal legal review, agent commission of 20–50%, and re-clearance when a campaign extends. Pre-cleared marketplace pricing removes the negotiation entirely — clearance happens once, in advance, for every future buyer — so what remains is the price of the rights themselves. Our sync licence cost guide breaks down the traditional bands in detail.

3. Supply is concentrated in four genres

Rock, Pop, Electronic and Hip-Hop account for 75% of active catalogue. Everything else — folk, indie, classical, country, Latin and unclassified material — shares the remaining quarter.

The interesting number here is the smallest one. Classical sits at 4.3%, Country at 2.0%, and Latin at well under 1% — categories that appear constantly in brand briefs for luxury, heritage, outdoor and international campaigns. For a label deciding what to supply, thin categories are where a well-produced track has the least competition, not the least demand.

A further 7.1% of catalogue carries no primary genre at all. That is a self-inflicted discoverability problem: an untagged track is effectively invisible to a brand filtering a library, however good it is.

4. Catalogue is built for advertising tempo

Mean tempo across the catalogue is 113 BPM, and 42% of all tracks fall between 90 and 130 BPM. That is not a coincidence — it is the tempo range that cuts cleanly against paid social and pre-roll edits, where a beat every half second gives an editor usable hit points for product reveals and captions.

It also means the fast and slow extremes are comparatively empty. Briefs asking for sub-80 BPM atmospheric beds or 140+ BPM high-energy material are competing over a much smaller pool, which is worth knowing whether you are searching or supplying.

5. Rights-holders outnumber artists

121 labels and rights-holders supply 392 tracks from 77 distinct artists — an average of roughly five tracks per artist. Independent sync supply is not a handful of large catalogues; it is a long tail of small rights-holders each contributing a few tracks. That is why per-track pricing varies so widely: there is no central rate card, and every supplier is pricing independently.

It also explains why the 75/25 revenue split matters more here than in traditional sync. When a rights-holder has five tracks rather than five thousand, the share reaching them per licence is the difference between sync being worth supplying and not. Our sync royalties guide covers how those splits work end to end.

Methodology and limitations

Supply-side figures — catalogue size, pricing distribution, genre mix, tempo, artist and rights-holder counts — cover every active track on the Melody marketplace as of 1 August 2026. They are a census of the catalogue rather than a sample, so there is no sampling error, but they describe one marketplace and should not be read as an estimate of the global independent sync market.

Demand-side activity covers 108 licences issued between October 2025 and August 2026. That volume is too small to support claims about licensing rates by genre or price band, so we have deliberately not made any. We will publish demand-side breakdowns when the sample supports them.

All figures are aggregate. No individual artist, label, brand, licence or fee is identifiable from anything on this page, and none of the underlying records are published. Percentages are rounded to one decimal place and may not total exactly 100%.

Citation: Melody, State of Sync 2026, August 2026. https://usemelody.co/sync-licensing/state-of-sync

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