Why TrackForge Exists
The problem: Music catalogues generate billions in royalties, but there is no standard way to verify whether the underlying data is correct. Buyers cannot tell good catalogues from bad ones. Sellers cannot prove their catalogue is well-maintained. The result is a classic "market for lemons" — prices are depressed, deals fall through, and over $1 billion in royalties go uncollected every year because the metadata is broken.
The cost of the status quo: Due diligence on a single catalogue costs $100,000–$300,000 and takes 4–8 weeks. This is workable for $500M megadeals but economically impossible for the mid-tier catalogues ($1–50M) that represent the majority of the market. Capital that wants to deploy into music rights simply cannot price what it is buying.
The solution: TrackForge is a rights rating agency. Individual tracks are rated Gold, Silver, Bronze, or Declared based on how thoroughly their metadata has been independently verified. These track assessments aggregate into a portfolio grade from AAA to D, weighted by revenue — so buyers can see both granular track quality and overall catalogue health. Every rating is independently verifiable using cryptographic proofs. No trust in TrackForge is required.
The result: For the first time, catalogue owners can prove their asset quality. Buyers can compare catalogues on a level playing field. Lenders can underwrite music rights with quantified risk. The market gets price discovery, and capital flows to where it should.
The information problem
A music catalogue is not a physical asset you can inspect. What changes hands in a catalogue transaction is the right to collect royalties — and royalties only flow if the data is correct.
Every recording needs the right identifiers to be paid. Every composition needs to be registered with the right collecting societies. Every writer's ownership share needs to be accurately recorded. If any of this data is wrong, the money still flows — it just flows to the wrong place, or to no one at all.
The problem is that there is no standardised way to know whether a catalogue's data is in good order before you buy it. The seller knows. The buyer doesn't. Economists call this information asymmetry, and it is the single biggest structural barrier in the music rights market today.
What information asymmetry does to a market
In 1970, economist George Akerlof described what happens when buyers cannot distinguish high-quality goods from low-quality ones. Buyers assume everything is average and price accordingly. Sellers of genuinely good assets withdraw because they cannot get fair value. Over time, the market is left with only the worst goods — a "market for lemons."
The music catalogue market exhibits exactly this dynamic:
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If you're selling: You may have spent years maintaining clean metadata, registering works correctly, and chasing down missing royalties. But you have no credible, standardised way to prove it. Your catalogue gets priced the same as one riddled with gaps.
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If you're buying: You have no way to quantify metadata risk before committing to a deal. The only option is bespoke consulting work costing $100K–$300K per engagement — feasible for billion-dollar deals, prohibitive for everything else.
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If you're lending or investing: You cannot underwrite what you cannot measure. Music rights look attractive on paper — long-duration, inflation-linked, uncorrelated with equities — but without standardised quality metrics, the risk remains unquantifiable.
The result is a market starved of capital at exactly the tier where the best risk-adjusted returns exist.
What TrackForge does
TrackForge is a rights rating agency for music catalogues. It provides what the market is missing: a standardised, independent, and verifiable measure of catalogue quality.
TrackForge operates at two levels:
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Track-level certification: Every track is rated Gold, Silver, Bronze, or Declared based on how thoroughly its metadata has been independently verified. Gold means fully corroborated across multiple sources. Declared means owner-submitted data only.
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Portfolio-level grade: Track ratings are aggregated into a portfolio grade from AAA (95%+ of revenue secured by verified metadata) through D (less than 1%). Revenue weighting matters — a catalogue might have 500 Bronze tracks and 50 Gold tracks, but if those 50 generate 90% of revenue, the portfolio grade reflects that concentration.
The methodology is versioned and public. The ratings are comparable across catalogues.
Critically, every TrackForge rating is independently verifiable. Using standard cryptographic techniques, any third party — a buyer's lawyer, an auditor, a competing advisor — can confirm that the data has not been altered since certification, that specific tracks were included in the certified batch, and that the certification happened when it claims. No step requires contacting or trusting TrackForge.
This is infrastructure the market has never had. Bond markets have Moody's and S&P. Real estate has standardised appraisals. Music catalogues, until now, have had nothing.
Who this documentation is for
- Catalogue owners and rights holders — What you will receive, how to read your certificate, and how to verify it independently. Start with What is Golden Record Certification?.
- Lawyers and legal professionals — The precise scope of certification, liability boundaries, and evidentiary weight. Start with What Certification Does and Does Not Mean.
- Engineers and auditors — API documentation, cryptographic specifications, and data formats. Start with the Methodology.
A detailed reading guide is available at Who This Documentation Is For.
If you are preparing a catalogue for acquisition, audit, or licensing review, TrackForge can provide a readiness assessment and certification plan.
Contact TrackForge
Sources and notes