Why NPREX Is the Natural Price Mechanism for Music Licensing’s Future
Music licenses have economic value. There is no question about it. The harder question is how that value becomes an actual price.
For decades, the collective licensing paradigm offered the simplest workaround. Consolidate the entire sell‑side into a single entity so every buyer has just one counterparty. Bundle everything together. Establish broad, one‑size‑fits‑all rates through antitrust regulators and rate-tribunals who have little choice but to get involved. Apply the rates universally.
Did the system work? Of course it did. With no alternative, it had to work and, because meaningful innovation in the music licensing business comes slow, if it comes at all, it continues to work.
But the past doesn’t have to be the future. The future of music licensing is something entirely different. It’s a trading mechanism that costs little to operate and enables copyright owners and music users to improve their economic welfare at little or no extra cost. In short, the future of music licensing is a market mechanism, NPREX (the National Performing Rights Exchange). NPREX doesn’t just break the mold — it rewrites the underlying math of music licensing.
Pricing as a Function, Not a Guess
At the heart of NPREX is a deceptively simple idea: price is a function of agreed-upon variables.
Think of the price of a license as a mathematical function:
Price = f (x, y, z)
where the variables x, y, and z are licensable attributes that can be directly negotiated and agreed upon by both buyer and seller. These might include factors such as:
Bargaining Power of the Catalogue
Relative Extent of the Right to Use (e.g., 5 percent of the duration of the license period)
Ability to Pay of the Buyer of the License
The exact mathematical specification of the function f ( . ) is the subject of a patent authored by the founder of NPREX.
The specifics of the math, while interesting to some, don’t matter nearly as much as the following principle:
once both parties agree on the variables, the price, given by this function, is no longer subjective. It is deterministic.
There is no haggling after the fact. No opaque rate card. No retroactive re-interpretation. The price simply falls out of the function. It’s a matter of plug-and-chug. And when “x” is the relative extent to which the music user may use the catalogue in question during the license period, the amount of the license fee, as determined by NPREX, can be paid by the buyer before music has been performed. This means the rights holders and music owners can be compensated before their works are performed, not months after the fact. This is not a hypothetical. This is NPREX…
The Real Challenge: Agreement at Scale
If pricing can be that simple (and other than the derivation of the function f ( . ) itself, pricing is that simple), why hasn’t the industry already done this?
Because the other trick, beyond understanding the mathematics behind the price mechanism, is coordination.
In a direct licensing world, a buyer may need to transact with:
Multiple publishers
Multiple songwriters
Possibly multiple performing rights interests
Each of those sellers must agree not only to license, but to license under the same agreed-upon variables (x, y, and z). Historically, that coordination has been prohibitively complex.
Without infrastructure, every direct license looks like a snowflake:
Custom negotiations
Manual reconciliation
Legal overhead
Operational friction
At scale, that friction becomes fatal.
NPREX Solves the Coordination Problem
NPREX doesn’t just propose a better pricing mechanism—it operationalizes it.
The platform is designed specifically to:
Normalize licensable variables
Make those variables transparent to all parties or, at least, communicable to the mechanism itself
Enable buyers and sellers to align on them efficiently
Execute licenses consistently across many rights holders simultaneously
This is not theoretical. This is mechanical.
By standardizing how x, y, and z are expressed, validated, and agreed upon, NPREX turns what used to be a negotiation nightmare into a repeatable marketplace transaction.
That’s the real innovation - a non-trivial solution to the coordination problem between a licensee and licensor.
The Composite License: Direct Licensing, Without the Pain
The culmination of this design is NPREX’s Composite License.
Rather than forcing buyers to stitch together dozens—or hundreds—of individual agreements, NPREX bundles aligned direct licenses into a single, coherent instrument. The buyer gets:
One agreement
One price
One operational relationship
Meanwhile, sellers retain:
Direct participation
Transparent economics
Pricing integrity tied to actual usage
This is direct licensing without the administrative chaos that historically made it impractical.
Why This Beats Collective Licensing
Collective licensing optimizes for aggregation at the expense of precision. NPREX flips that equation:
Precision first
Aggregation powered by first principles and technology
In a world where music use cases are exploding—across platforms, formats, audiences, and technologies—pricing must be flexible without becoming arbitrary.
The f(x, y, z) model delivers exactly that:
Flexible inputs
Predictable outputs
Fairness through transparency
The Licensing Mechanism of the Future
NPREX isn’t proposing a tweak to the old system. It’s proposing a replacement logic.
By treating license pricing as a function of agreed variables—and by building a marketplace optimized to help parties reach that agreement—NPREX makes direct licensing not just possible, but preferable.
The result is a system that:
Scales with the industry
Respects rights holders
Serves buyers efficiently
And aligns incentives instead of obscuring them
That’s why NPREX isn’t just another licensing platform.
It’s the price mechanism music has been waiting for.