Could NPREX Be the Bloomberg Terminal for Music Licensing?
For decades, music licensing has operated in the shadows — governed by blanket agreements, opaque royalty pools, and negotiation rituals that feel more like folklore than finance. But what if music rights could be priced, traded, and analyzed with the same precision as stocks or commodities? What if there were a Bloomberg Terminal for music licensing?
Enter NPREX — the National Performing Rights Exchange — a patented platform that redefines how music performance licenses are valued and transacted. Designed and built by Nashville economist and attorney Lee Greer, Ph.D. and the NPREX team, NPREX doesn’t just digitize licensing. It markets it.
What Makes Bloomberg Bloomberg?
The Bloomberg Terminal is revered for its ability to deliver real-time financial data, price discovery, analytics, and execution — all in one place. It’s not just a tool; it’s an ecosystem. Traders, analysts, and portfolio managers rely on it to make decisions with confidence.
NPREX offers a similar promise — but for music rights:
Real-Time Pricing: Instead of relying on historical royalties, NPREX uses a revealed preference algorithm to determine the market-clearing price of a license based on actual buyer behavior.
Transparent Transactions: Buyers and sellers interact directly, with pricing driven by demand — not legacy formulas or opaque negotiations.
Data-Rich Environment: Every transaction generates insights into genre value, platform demand, and licensing trends — data that could be gold for DSPs, publishers, and investors.
Why Music Needs a Terminal
Music rights are now viewed as investable assets. The booming catalog sales of the last 10 years have subsided, and the buyers now find themselves in the same boat that writers and publishers have been stuck with for 100 years. Meanwhile, streaming platforms and other music users are hungry for efficiency. Yet, the licensing process remains stubbornly analog.
NPREX changes that. It introduces market discipline to a space that’s long resisted it. It allows rights holders to understand what their music is worth — not in theory, but in practice. And it gives buyers a way to license music with clarity and control.
The Mind Behind the Machine
Lee Greer’s background blends economics, law, and industry experience. As the former head economist at Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), he saw firsthand how licensing lacked transparency. His solution? Build an exchange — not just for music, but for any market where pricing is broken.
Greer also founded SPECCX (Specialty Crop Exchange) and NASHLX (Nashville Lumber Exchange), applying the same market mechanism to agriculture and hardwood lumber. But NPREX was the first — a chance to bring modern economics to the music licensing industry.