Photo credit: MusixmatchMax / Ciociola, Founder and CEO of Musixmatch
The lyrics giant is adding a 31-year-old copyright registry, a licensing platform and cue-sheet software. The goal: know who owns every song and make sure they get paid.
You know Musixmatch as the company that puts lyrics on your screen in Spotify and Apple Music. On Monday (Oct. 19), it made it clear that it wants to be much more than that.
The Bologna-based company has acquired Music Reports, Inc., the Los Angeles firm that owns the Songdex copyright registry. It is the first acquisition in Musixmatch’s 16-year history. Financial terms weren’t disclosed, and the deal was financed by Tikehau Capital, which also gave Musixmatch senior financing in 2024.
Music Reports was founded in 1995 and works from Los Angeles, London and Nashville. Its assets are the unglamorous plumbing of the music business, and that is exactly why they matter: Songdex, that is a copyright registry that records who owns which songs. Blokur is a London-based rights-matching and licensing platform that Music Reports bought in January 2024. And Cuetrak that is a software that helps streaming services and broadcasters produce cue sheets, the documents that list every piece of music used in a show or film.
Musixmatch, for its part, already works with more than 250,000 rights owners and publishers and nearly 3 million songwriters, and its partners include Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and Amazon Music. TPG Growth took a controlling stake in the company in 2022.
Musixmatch calls the deal its biggest step yet toward becoming a “full-stack rights and royalties platform” that covers rights administration, royalty processing, cue sheets, licensing and lyrics in one place. It also wants to use the combined data for what it calls “agentic royalty management,” where AI agents identify, match and reconcile music use while people stay in control.
The company says Songdex will remain independent and unbiased. The bigger promise is to shrink the industry’s “black box,” the pool of royalties that can’t be paid out because no one can match a recording to its owners.
“Music is being created and used faster than the industry can track it, and AI is only accelerating the trend,” founder and CEO Max Ciociola said. “When no one can identify who wrote a song, who owns it, or who should be paid, creators lose.” His one-line summary of the plan: “Every use of music identified, every owner known, every creator paid.”
The acquisition caps a run of moves into rights and AI. In October 2025, Musixmatch signed licensing deals with Sony Music Publishing, Universal Music Publishing Group and Warner Chappell Music covering more than 15 million works for non-generative AI tools. In March, it launched Sentinel, a real-time copyright detection service, and AI music company Suno became its first customer in August.
Not everything is smooth. Rival lyrics provider LyricFind is suing Musixmatch and TPG, arguing that Musixmatch’s exclusive lyrics deal with Warner Chappell breaks U.S. antitrust law. Musixmatch says the claim is without merit.
For songwriters, the question is simple: will one company holding lyrics, registry data and licensing tools mean more royalties found and paid? Musixmatch is betting that it will.
Sources: Music Business Worldwide · Digital Music News · Ropes & Gray
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