You can still just about get away with calling Musixmatch<\/strong> a \u201clyrics company\u201d \u2013 but doing so might raise a quizzical look from Massimo \u2018Max\u2019 Ciociola<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The Italian entrepreneur acknowledges that his company has built its reputation on cataloging the words behind the songs \u2013 at last count, working with almost 250,000 rightsholders, and being used by over 80 million people worldwide (Musixmatch\u2019s lyrics scroll under songs on Spotify<\/a><\/strong>, YouTube<\/a><\/strong>, Apple Music<\/a><\/strong>, Instagram<\/a><\/strong>, and many more). In fact, Ciociola agrees that lyrics will probably always form the bedrock of Musixmatch<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Yet by archiving and policing lyrics in over 250 languages, he notes, Musixmatch<\/strong> is already established as a \u201csophisticated royalty management company\u201d \u2013 monitoring usage online, and paying through royalties to rightsholders large and small.<\/p>\n Speaking to MBW<\/em> in the summer air of New York\u2019s meatpacking district, Ciociola<\/strong> notes: \u201cWe have evolved into a kind of fintech company \u2013 our main job is processing royalties.\u201d<\/p>\n What comes next? Plugging Musixmatch\u2019s<\/strong> lyrical foundation into the new world of prompt-based content, while accelerating the firm\u2019s industry services by embracing new technologies.<\/p>\n As Ciociola<\/strong> puts it: \u201cWhen we started, lyrics were broken. They were the most-searched term across any geography on Google<\/a><\/strong>, but the value chain didn\u2019t work. It was very complex, everyone was scraping and not paying for rights. But we solved it. And as we solved it, music entered the world of \u2018eyes on a screen\u2019 \u2013 it was no longer just about listening.<\/p>\n \u201cThat has opened up a world of possibilities. The focus now is becoming a multi-agent rights administration company, helping protect rightsholders, and helping songwriters protect their own work.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMusic has entered the world of \u2018eyes on a screen\u2019 \u2013 not just listening.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n On that topic, the past year has been a transformational one for Musixmatch<\/strong>, which was founded 16 years ago by Ciociola in Bologna, Italy.<\/p>\n In October 2025, Musixmatch<\/strong> quietly announced<\/a> that it had inked \u201cAI innovation\u201d deals with all three major music publishers \u2013 securing a catalog of 15 million songs with which to build tools that enabled \u201cresponsible AI development\u201d.<\/p>\n At the time, all of that sounded a little theoretical and \u2018sandbox-y\u2019. But in 2026, it\u2019s started to bear real fruit \u2013 and look impressively ahead of the curve.<\/p>\n First, in March, Musixmatch announced<\/a> Sentinel<\/strong>, a real-time copyright detection service designed for user-generated content (UGC) platforms. Sentinel, developed following investment from Musixmatch-backer TPG<\/strong>, is able to figure out (as someone is typing a prompt) whether even partial infringement of lyrical copyrights has taken place.<\/p>\n The company intends to expand Sentinel\u2019s capabilities beyond lyrics into a broader menu of copyright identification services. And it\u2019s already bagged a keystone client: Suno<\/strong>. The controversial AI music company confirmed in August<\/a> that it was adopting Sentinel\u2019s tech to \u201cidentify when copyrighted compositions, lyrics, and music may be present.\u201d In practice, when a Suno user tries to create a piece of music by inputting the copyrighted lyrics of an existing song, Sentinel will catch it.<\/p>\n Sentinel will also scan the outputs of both AI music and UGC music more widely \u2013 on YouTube, for example \u2013 to detect the use of copyrighted lyrical fragments.<\/p>\n One major advantage for rightsholders? A near-instant tool for music publishers and labels to discover (and claim against) cover versions on UGC platforms. Sentinel could hardly have arrived at a more timely moment. Look at regulation: the EU AI Act<\/strong> now presses generative-AI developers to show their models are trained in a way that respects copyright, while US takedown rules push platforms to catch infringing material fast. Sentinel, Musixmatch says, is built for exactly these requirements, returning a verdict in under 100 milliseconds.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Warner Music<\/a><\/strong> was the first major to license Suno last year; BMG<\/a><\/strong> followed this summer. And even as Universal Music Group<\/a><\/strong> and Sony Music Entertainment<\/a><\/strong> press on with their lawsuits against Suno, the platform has publicly committed to watermarking and detection ahead of launching a new, licensed model.<\/p>\n The result is a music-AI market suddenly required to prove what it is \u2013 and isn\u2019t \u2013 using. That is precisely what Sentinel<\/strong> sells, and it lets Musixmatch supply both camps at once: the rightsholders policing their catalogs, and the AI companies trying to stay legal. Musixmatch is positioned as neutral infrastructure, rather than a participatory combatant.<\/p>\n Rio Caraeff<\/strong>, the founder of Vevo<\/strong>, who joined Musixmatch in 2023 and is now Co-President, says that Sentinel\u2019s Suno deal is indicative of a \u201cbroader landscape\u201d that calls for \u201crobust infrastructure to help platforms understand what is being created and whether copyrighted material is being submitted\u201d.<\/p>\n Built alongside Sentinel, Musixmatch has also taken the wraps off<\/a> Music Lens<\/strong>, dubbed the world\u2019s first AI \u201cmusic agent\u201d. The tool allows music publishers to analyze meaning, mood, sentiment, and context across the metadata contained in their catalog \u2013 even when that catalog spans millions of compositions. This can surface key insights regarding the royalty framework of trending music \u2013 but also, for example, can produce AI-informed catalog picks to match a potential licensor\u2019s sync brief.<\/p>\n To Ciociola, the market opportunity ahead of Musixmatch is vast, and powered by two themes: (i) Lyrics becoming an ever-more important \u2013 and increasingly monetizable \u2013 component of songs; and (ii) AI technology enabling Musixmatch\u2019s engineers to rapidly increase the company\u2019s tool-building productivity.<\/p>\n The under-monetization of lyrics is often spotlighted at the National Music Publishers\u2019 Association<\/strong>\u2019s AGM. For example, the NMPA<\/a> estimated that lyrics licensing was responsible for just 1% of publishers\u2019 and songwriters\u2019 revenues in 2024. (More recently, lyrics income has been folded into an \u2018Other\u2019 category.) In Ciociola\u2019s telling, that 1% radically undersells the potential market. Lyrics, he says, are the connective tissue between a song and whatever meaning a listener takes from it \u2013 and the revenue line badly lags their true strategic worth. As discovery tilts toward AI, he believes that gap will close fast, with the category set to explode in importance \u2013 and value.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the language of AI, lyrics are becoming the LLM of the music industry,\u201d says Ciociola. \u201cThey are literally the language of the music.\u201d Search and discovery of music as we know them, he predicts, will soon \u201cbe forever gone,\u201d replaced within a few years by prompts: build me a playlist of songs about heartbreak<\/em>, rather than a query for a track by name. Lyrics, he suggests, will be at the center of this shift.<\/p>\n As for AI empowering the development of additional tools at Musixmatch, underpinned by the company\u2019s giant catalog, Ciociola says: \u201cWhen you pair AI coding with the best engineers, you can suddenly transform a company\u2019s vision into working [prototypes] much faster. It\u2019s like Aladdin\u2019s lamp!\u201d<\/p>\n Another accelerant in Musixmatch\u2019s growth has been TPG. The private equity firm\u2019s investment in Musixmatch in 2022, says Ciociola, was less about a cash injection than about entering \u201ca new league\u201d \u2013 trading the seed-stage grind for backers who brought a blueprint for scaling a tech company. (TPG\u2019s other music biz-adjacent investments have included Spotify, CAA<\/a><\/strong>, and Fender<\/strong>. More recently, it\u2019s taken an anchor stake in OpenAI<\/strong>\u2019s new enterprise-deployment venture \u2013 a bet on precisely the kind of AI adoption Ciociola is trying to drive in his own company.)<\/p>\n \u201cWe need more curiosity. We need to be under review every day.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Not everything in today\u2019s music industry, however, gives Ciociola cause for excitement. He balefully notes that, when Musixmatch launched in 2010, it did so surrounded by \u201camazing young talent breaking through in music tech\u201d \u2013 naming Daniel Ek<\/a><\/strong> (Spotify), Alex Ljung<\/strong> and Eric Wahlforss<\/strong> (SoundCloud<\/a><\/strong>), and the teams behind Songkick<\/strong> and The Echo Nest<\/strong> as both contemporaries and inspiration.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t see young talent breaking through with fresh [music-tech] ideas like that today, and that worries me,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Ciociola<\/strong> frets that music has become too comfortable letting its technology drift. His prescription is simple. \u201cWe need more curiosity,\u201d he says. \u201cWe need to be under review every single day.\u201d<\/p>\n That includes music publishers, labels, and collecting societies who, he says, should by now be running on modern software \u2013 exposing data through APIs, letting rightsholders pull real-time reports instead of waiting months for a statement, and wiring AI \u201cagents\u201d into functions from finance to catalog management.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the language of AI, lyrics are becoming the LLM of the music industry. They are literally the language of the music.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The building blocks, he points out, are cheap and available in a way they never were before; what is missing is curiosity, not capability. \u201cThere are no excuses\u201d for a company not to modernize, he argues \u2013 a conviction that reads less like damning commentary on the industry than a description of the products Musixmatch has spent the past year shipping.<\/p>\n What of the litigation from music rightsholders facing Anthropic<\/strong> \u2013 specifically regarding the use of lyrics \u2013 as well as Musixmatch\u2019s banner new client, Suno? Ciociola\u2019s instinct is plain. \u201cI fully stand on the IP owners\u2019 side,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cTheoretically, reading about [AI companies] pirating and scraping books, for example, to train their models? It\u2019s wrong. All of these things need to be fixed. And if you\u2019re an IP owner, you\u2019re right to be mad \u2013 it\u2019s like entering a famous museum and stealing things for your own gallery. \u201cBut I also think back to when Google and YouTube launched, and how angry rightsholders were, including the news business. Most of that tension was solved by technology, and I\u2019m hopeful it will be similar [with music and AI].\u201d<\/p>\n On Anthropic specifically, he expects settlements will be struck with the music rightsholders. \u201cThey absolutely have to fix it,\u201d he says, \u201cand they will.\u201d<\/p>\n More generally, Ciociola suggests that in any business where two parties are reliant upon one another for the next growth spike, \u201clitigation is a failing moment\u201d, adding: \u201cIt always wastes time and costs a ton of money.\u201d<\/p>\n Ciociola\u2019s own governing rule, learned from his father, is almost monastic: \u201cYou need to sleep well at night. That means no blame, no lies, no secrets.\u201d (This may be spoken with a nod to the litigation Musixmatch itself faces from rival LyricFind<\/a><\/strong>, which accuses Ciociola\u2019s firm of anticompetitive practices, citing an exclusive licensing agreement with Warner Chappell<\/a><\/strong>. Musixmatch says the claim is \u201cwithout merit\u201d. Ciociola doesn\u2019t add to that statement in our discussion.)<\/p>\n A technologist by background \u2013 he built and sold an early mobile business before music, and later served on the European Commission<\/strong>\u2019s high-level expert group on AI \u2013 Ciociola<\/strong> has always approached the music industry the way an engineer approaches a broken system: by asking what isn\u2019t working, and why. In the early days, this led him to conclude that the sector of the industry seeing the very worst in value \u201cleakage\u201d was also its most essential: songwriters.<\/p>\n Ask him what a songwriter is actually up against today, and Ciociola<\/strong> walks the gauntlet: getting a work correctly registered, having its usage collected across dozens of territories and platforms, actually being paid what is owed, then policing the open web for unlicensed copies. Value leaks at every stage, and the writer is often the last to see it. Closing those gaps with data and software is, in his telling, Musixmatch\u2019s<\/strong> central mission. \u201cWhen there is an amazing painting, we talk about the painter,\u201d he says. \u201cBut when there is a song, we so often only talk about the performer \u2013 not about the songwriter.\u201d<\/p>\n For more than a decade and a half, Musixmatch<\/strong> has propelled lyrics from something fans scrape for free into a multimillion-dollar business. If Ciociola\u2019s<\/strong> right, the next chapter will see them become a linchpin of how music and machines finally learn to work together. He doesn\u2019t sound like a man who considers the job done.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This article originally appeared in the latest issue of MBW\u2019s premium print publication, Music Business Worldwide Magazine, which is out now.<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Music Business Worldwide Magazine is available as part of a MBW+ subscription \u2013 details through here.<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\n
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