Could NPREX Be the Bloomberg Terminal for Music Licensing?
For decades, music licensing has operated with limited transparency—dominated by blanket agreements, pooled royalties, and informal negotiation practices. The process has lacked the analytical rigor found in financial markets. But what if music rights could be priced, traded, and evaluated with the same precision as equities or commodities?
That is the vision behind NPREX—the National Performing Rights Exchange. Developed by Nashville-based economist and attorney Dr. Lee Greer and his team, NPREX is a patented platform that transforms music performance licensing into a structured marketplace. It does not merely digitize the process; it introduces market discipline.
A Bloomberg Terminal for Music Rights
The Bloomberg Terminal is renowned for integrating real-time data, analytics, and execution tools into a single ecosystem. Financial professionals rely on it for informed decision-making.
NPREX offers a parallel solution for music rights:
Real-Time Pricing: A revealed preference algorithm calculates license value based on actual buyer behavior, replacing reliance on historical royalty data.
Transparent Transactions: Buyers and rights holders engage directly, with prices determined by demand rather than legacy formulas.
Data-Driven Insights: Each transaction generates valuable analytics on genre performance, platform demand, and licensing trends—critical intelligence for publishers, digital service providers, and investors.
The Need for Market Infrastructure
Music rights have become recognized as investable assets. Following a surge in catalog acquisitions, buyers now face the same inefficiencies that have long challenged publishers and songwriters. Meanwhile, streaming platforms seek licensing solutions that offer speed and clarity.
NPREX addresses these gaps by enabling rights holders to assess the real-time value of their works and empowering buyers with a streamlined, data-informed licensing process.
The Architect of NPREX
Dr. Greer brings a multidisciplinary background in economics, law, and industry operations. As former corporate economist at Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), he witnessed the limitations of traditional licensing firsthand. His response was to design an exchange—initially for music, and later for other sectors where pricing mechanisms were underdeveloped.
Greer also founded SPECCX (Specialty Crop Exchange) and NASHLX (Nashville Lumber Exchange), applying similar market principles to agriculture and lumber. NPREX, however, was the original blueprint—an effort to apply modern economic theory to the music licensing ecosystem.