A century ago, music was treated as something you could not really own once you let it out into the world. Then the industry built the machinery that turned it into a durable, licensable, multi-billion-dollar asset class. Social video is standing almost exactly where music stood in 1914.
In 1917, a restaurant owner named Shanley thought he had an obvious argument. His establishment had an orchestra. The orchestra played a song from a Victor Herbert musical. He charged for the food, not the music — so why should he owe the composer anything?
The case reached the Supreme Court. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes disagreed with Shanley in two sentences that quietly built an industry:
“If music did not pay, it would be given up. Whether it pays or not, the purpose of employing it is profit, and that is enough.”
Herbert v. Shanley established that a performance has economic value even when nobody buys a ticket to it specifically — even when it is, in effect, “free.” That single idea is the seed of the entire modern music-rights economy. And it is the idea the video industry has still not fully absorbed.
Recorded and performed music has a structural problem: it is non-excludable. Once a song exists, it can be played, copied, and re-performed almost without friction. Left alone, that makes it nearly impossible to monetize. Any individual rights holder trying to police every venue, every broadcast, every reuse would spend more on enforcement than they could ever collect. Economists have a name for this: the transaction costs of one-by-one licensing are so high that the market simply fails to form.
Music did not get more protectable by accident or by waiting. The industry deliberately built three pieces of infrastructure, in sequence, over the better part of a century.
In 1914, a group of composers and publishers founded the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers — ASCAP. The premise was simple and powerful: no single songwriter can negotiate with every bar, radio station, and ballroom in the country, but a collective can. ASCAP offered a blanket license — pay one fee, get the right to perform the entire catalog — and then distributed the proceeds back to members. BMI followed in 1939, adding competition and dramatically widening the range of music (including genres ASCAP had historically underserved) that could be licensed and paid for.
The blanket license was the breakthrough. It collapsed millions of impossible individual negotiations into one. A radio station did not have to track down the writer of every song it might play; it paid the collective and was covered. That is the move that turned an administrative impossibility into a functioning market.
Each time technology created a new way to consume music, it also created a new way to leak value — and the industry responded by building rails to capture it rather than litigating the format out of existence. When digital and satellite radio arrived, Congress recognized a digital performance right in sound recordings (1995), and the industry stood up SoundExchange in 2003 to collect and distribute those digital royalties. A new distribution channel became a new revenue stream instead of a new threat.
None of the licensing works without enforcement. The reason a venue buys a blanket license is that not buying one has a real, predictable cost. The PROs built the monitoring and the legal follow-through to make “just use it for free” the more expensive option. Enforcement is not the opposite of licensing — it is what makes licensing rational.
The result is one of the most quietly resilient asset classes in media. When Napster and unlicensed file-sharing hit, recorded-music revenue fell by more than half — from roughly $14.6 billion in 1999 to about $7 billion by 2014 (US, RIAA). It looked, for a decade, like the asset had been permanently destroyed.
It had not. Because the underlying rights infrastructure was intact, the industry could plug streaming into the same licensing-and-collection machinery — and revenue did not just recover, it set a new all-time high of about $17.7 billion in the US in 2024, roughly 84% of it from streaming. Globally, recorded music reached $28.6 billion in 2023, its ninth straight year of growth.
The thing that saved music in the streaming era was not a better product. It was that the rights infrastructure built decades earlier was still standing. When a new format arrived, there was already a way to license it, collect on it, and enforce it.
Social video today generates an astonishing amount of economic value. On YouTube alone, more than 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute. The broader creator economy — the people and businesses producing this content — was estimated by Goldman Sachs at roughly $250 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach about $480 billion by 2027. By raw attention and dollars, short-form video is one of the largest media categories on earth.
And structurally, it is sitting almost exactly where music sat before 1914. The value is enormous. The content is trivially copyable. A single clip can be reposted thousands of times across accounts and platforms within days. And there is—still—no mature collective infrastructure to license it, meter it, and enforce it.
That gap is not a footnote. It is the entire opportunity. Detection — knowing where your content is being used — is necessary but not sufficient. Music did not become an asset class because someone could find unlicensed performances. It became an asset class because finding them was wired directly into a system that could license, collect, and enforce at scale.
Here is the part that rights holders consistently underestimate. Enforcement does not just recover money from past misuse. It changes the future price of the asset. When unlicensed use reliably carries a cost, two things happen: legitimate users start paying for a license, and the underlying right becomes genuinely scarce — which is what gives it durable value. That value funds better content and better infrastructure, which attracts more rights holders into the system, which makes the collective more valuable still.
Music has been turning that flywheel for a hundred years. That is why a song from 1965 can still generate income in 2026 — the rights are clear, the licensing is standardized, and misuse has consequences. The asset is maintained, not just created.
Verights exists to build the missing layer for video: the licensing-and-enforcement infrastructure that turns a viral clip from a thing that gets taken into a thing that gets paid for. Our platform detects unlicensed use across the major platforms, reviews each claim under a documented standard (including good-faith fair-use analysis), and resolves it — through licensing where there is an ongoing relationship to build, settlement where there is not, and removal where there is no other path.
We are deliberately following the music blueprint, in order: build credible enforcement so that unlicensed use has a real cost, use that to make licensing the rational choice, and route the whole thing through transparent, documented process so the system is defensible end to end. We have written openly about why we publish our process, about our methodology, and about the fair-use standard we hold ourselves to.
The timing is not arbitrary. Detection technology has finally matured to the point where cross-platform matching at scale is real. That was the missing precondition — the equivalent of the moment music had enough monitoring capability to make collective licensing enforceable. The infrastructure is now buildable. The only question is who builds it, and whether rights holders recognize the moment for what it is.
A century ago, a restaurant owner argued that music he did not sell tickets for was free to use. The Supreme Court said otherwise, and an industry was built on the difference. Social video is waiting for the same idea to finish arriving.
See how the enforcement-to-licensing engine works for your library.