Origin & Purpose
The music industry loses more than $2.5 billion every year to royalties that never reach the artist who earned them. The money is there. The problem is that no one can agree on who the artist is — because the metadata that identifies them is broken, inconsistent, and scattered across hundreds of disconnected systems. We built mysetlist.ai to fix the identity layer at the source, before the money starts moving.
Every time a song is streamed, a chain of metadata lookups fires in the background — from the DSP to the distributor, from the PRO to the label. Each lookup tries to match the track and the artist to a payment record. When the metadata matches cleanly, money moves. When it doesn't, the money sits in a suspense account — or disappears entirely into what the industry calls the "black box."
The breakage point is almost always the same: the artist's name is spelled differently across systems, the ISRC was entered manually and has a typo, the ISNI was never registered at all, or the carrier access permissions were never formally set and the distributor guessed. These are not edge cases. They are the default experience for the majority of independent artists.
The solution isn't more software layered on top of broken records. It's fixing the record itself — at registration, with verification, using a pipeline that doesn't depend on a human typing the same string the same way across a dozen different forms.
Industry estimates from the IFPI, music royalty auditors, and PRO annual reports consistently place annual unclaimed royalties above $2.5 billion globally. The cause is almost never fraud. It's metadata failure — a name mismatch, a missing code, an unresolved identity.
Scale of the problemA single incorrect ISRC means a DSP cannot match a stream to a recording. A PRO cannot match that recording to a rights holder. The royalty cannot be distributed. The error cascades silently — the artist sees zero revenue for that track, with no error message and no way to trace the failure.
Cascade failureOur AI pipeline uses large language models to ingest conflicting metadata from multiple sources and resolve discrepancies in context — not with brittle find-and-replace rules, but with language understanding. The methodology is protected by U.S. Provisional Patent Applications No. 64/060,499 and No. 64/074,013, filed May 2026.
Patent-protected pipelineBecause the Artist Node record is verified at the point of registration, any carrier that queries the API receives a single authoritative payload. No manual re-keying. No format conversion. No ambiguity about which version of an artist's name or ISNI is canonical. The record is clean because the pipeline made it clean, not because a human checked it twice.
API-first designEvery Artist Node record includes a machine-readable carrier access decision: full stream and sync rights, recording-only streaming, or no access. Carriers query the API and receive a structured response — no emails, no negotiation loops, no interpretive guesswork. The artist sets the rule once. Every qualified carrier reads it the same way.
Consent layerEarly registration is free. The founding window closes when platform capacity reaches its initial threshold. After that, standard access tiers apply. Registering now locks in your Artist Node record, establishes your priority date, and ensures your metadata is correct before the next royalty cycle runs.
Act nowThe EU AI Act entered into force on August 1, 2024. Its obligations for high-risk AI systems — including AI used in rights management, royalty distribution, and access control decisions affecting individuals — apply from August 2, 2026.
Any AI system that makes or informs decisions about an individual artist's access rights, payment eligibility, or identity verification is likely to fall under the high-risk classification once it operates within the EU or processes data belonging to EU-based artists. That includes carrier platforms, PROs, and any automated metadata ingestion pipeline.
High-risk AI systems must have documented risk management systems, technical documentation, logging, transparency measures, and human oversight in place. Carriers and distributors operating in or serving the EU that use automated metadata matching, royalty routing AI, or AI-assisted access control need a compliant, auditable consent and identity layer. The mysetlist.ai Artist Node API provides exactly that infrastructure — a verified, artist-controlled record that AI systems can query with a documented, auditable response.
Beyond the AI Act, the EU Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (DSM Directive) requires transparent, timely, and accurate royalty reporting to creators. An unverified metadata record makes DSM compliance structurally impossible for any carrier serving EU markets. A clean Artist Node record removes that liability.
A U.S. provisional patent application establishes a priority date — the date from which any subsequent full patent application can claim its invention was first disclosed. The two provisional applications filed in May 2026 cover distinct but complementary aspects of the mysetlist.ai pipeline.
Both applications were filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Provisional applications establish a 12-month priority window during which a full non-provisional application may be filed. Unauthorized reproduction, reverse engineering, or implementation of the described methodology is prohibited.
The founding window is open now. Registration is free. Claiming your Artist Node record takes less than five minutes and ensures your identity, your codes, and your carrier access decisions are correct before the next royalty cycle.