We reported on the launch of Hookd in September: the British startup is launching a ‘pre-cleared, commercial music licensing solution for online video creators’. Basically a way for YouTubers to license labels’ tracks for use in their videos for as little as £6.
In the weeks since, there’s been a change: Hookd is now known as Lickd: a different name, if the same distrust of the letter ‘e’.
In January this year, we spotted a new British startup called Hookd that was planning to offer “the world’s first pre-cleared, commercial music licensing solution for online video creators”.
Today, Hookd is launching its service officially. It will use a ‘pay-per-licence’ model, charging YouTubers from £7 to £150 per track based on their average video viewership, with “the lion’s share” of these revenues going to rightsholders.
The company is launching with a catalogue of thousands of tracks, with independent firms Hospital Records, Sentric Music and Wipeout Music among the first music companies to sign up for the service.
As predicted, Facebook announced plans yesterday to turn its Facebook Messenger app into a bona-fide platform for external developers, while also confirming that the messaging app now has 600 million monthly active users.
(Or, to channel Xzibit: ‘Yo dawg, Facebook heard you like messaging apps, so it put some more messaging apps in your messaging app’.)
It’s a strategy that makes sense, given the similar platforms and developer communities being developed by the likes of WeChat, Line and KakaoMusic in Asia.
