Made in India, SyncMama launches the world’s first royalty-included, subscription-based, AI-powered music licensing platform targeted at digital video content creators.  

The emergence of user-generated content (UGC) fueled the phenomenal growth of the streaming market and created a thriving community of creators: podcasters, YouTubers, gamers, influencers, vloggers, and more. The global UGC market grows at a CAGR of 26.6%, and social media advertising is expected to reach US$250 billion in 2026.

Music is a vital driver of this new economy. Traditional music labels have overlooked the need for this new class of creators to obtain micro-licenses. It was at the low-end of the market and did not fit their complex licensing process. Like Nature, markets abhor a vacuum, and nimble tech companies quickly filled the void. What began as a niche ten years ago has grown today into a substantial business that SyncMama intends to service uniquely.

SyncMama’s founder, Achille Forler, says: “These new platforms adopted the ‘eat-all-you-can’ subscription-based Spotify model, but they invested massively into copyright buyouts, or ‘royalty-free’ music, to bypass the royalty system. Such predatory practice was prevalent in the music and film industry before Parliament banned it by amending the Copyright Act in 2012. Isn’t it a sweet tribute to the wisdom of Indian lawmakers that the solution to this vexing problem — how to reconcile micro-licensing with the global royalty system? — should originate in India?”

In ‘royalty-free,’ or copyright buyout, composers are expected to create music for a one-time fee instead of receiving continuing income whenever their work is used. This practice, which challenges the foundations of copyright and threatens the livelihood of music creators, has become a global concern.

Gadi Oron, Director General of CISAC, the Paris-based apex body representing four million lyricists and composers, says: “Copyright buyouts are a growing concern for creators and CISAC societies that represent them and protect their interests.” ABBA co-founder, Björn Ulvaeus, adds: “The issue of copyright buyouts matters more to creators than ever before. Their future livelihood is at stake.”

Achille Forler says of the venture: “SyncMama is an innovative and sustainable solution that addresses the whole spectrum of the market. Unlike ‘royalty-free,’ it delivers personalized licenses valid worldwide and in perpetuity while ensuring a fair and transparent income distribution across the value chain. Last but not least, our ‘royalty-included’ approach has the support of the global community of composers: we start with 400,000 high-quality music tracks when the largest ‘royalty-free’ platform, after nine years of operation and tens of millions of dollars spent, has hardly 35,000 tracks.”

SyncMama hosts music from over five thousand professional artists, many award-winning composers with a stellar track record. The company continuously strengthens its library to satisfy the broadest range of content creators with competitive pricing plans. SyncMama relies heavily on automation and artificial intelligence to power its audio search engine, copyright management tools, and royalty distribution.

Says Forler: “SyncMama launches in South Asia but is built to be a global platform. We aim to provide a fair, transparent, and virtuous ecosystem for all the stakeholders in the creative industries.”

Born in France, Achille Forler is very much Indian. Following a chance encounter in Bangalore with the former President of India, Bharat Ratna, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, he began the study of Sanskrit and Indian culture. To pay for his studies and his Ph. D. research, he created the Alliance Française in Ahmedabad in 1982. After a four-year stint as Attaché in the French Embassy in New Delhi — where he reported on the radio, television, cinema, and music — he set up India’s first music publishing company, Deep Emotions Publishing, in 1996. Bertelsmann became a shareholder in 2007, and the company was sold to Universal Music Group five years later.

For three decades, Forler has been a vocal advocate of the inalienable right of creators to receive royalties which, he says, “are their salary and Provident Fund. Without royalties, the life of artists is an education in survival while enriching the owners of their copyright. Royalties provide the longevity an artist needs to stay creative.” He has been called “the unsung hero of the 2012 Copyright Amendments” that gave songwriters the unassignable and non-relinquishable right to royalty. “This unique clause in the Indian Copyright Act gave me the idea for SyncMama,” sums up Forler.