By Keith Bernstein, founder of Crunch Digital

Right now, music startups face a quandary — launch without licenses and cross your fingers that the industry lawyers don’t come after you, or wait until you can get licenses and watch as other rule-breaking players with deep pockets launch a similar product. Labels and publishers, on the other hand, face a daily deluge of emails and pitches from innovators and startups, and even those content owners with the best of intentions who want to move tech forward are often overwhelmed by the number of inquiries vying for their attention. The music startup landscape has cooled off and bifurcated in recent years, as many potential entrepreneurs and investors have simply become too frustrated with the licensing process and decided to give other verticals a shot. This leads to a lack of innovation, which stymies new business models and new revenue in the music business. Who knows which startup may do something groundbreaking?

At Crunch Digital, we saw this was happening and decided to take action to help. With the launch of our new music licensing “Sandbox”, we’ve created a platform where application developers can prove their concepts and features before engaging in big music licensing negotiations.  With our sandbox, approved startups will have a chance to access full catalogs of music (subject to some restrictions) from participating major record labels and publishers as well as some indies, and not just the stuff that nobody wants to hear, either. After all, no matter how great your idea is, if all your music is pulled from a slush pile, it won’t help you to find an audience.

Read the post on Hypebot