Epidemic Sound Acquires Song Sleuth, Launches Aentidote to Help Revolutionize Music Monetization in User Generated Content (UGC)

• Epidemic Sound Group acquires Song Sleuth to accelerate the advancement of music tracking and monetization of  user-generated content (UGC) for music rights holders globally.
• The acquisition sees the launch of Aentidote, a unique new service within the Epidemic Sound Group, offering unrivalled identification success rate of up to 95%, helping platforms pay out more accurately to artists and rights holders.
• This is Epidemic Sound’s third major acquisition in three years, strengthening its world-leading role in music licensing and content creation.

Stockholm, Tuesday 29th April 2025 – Epidemic Sound, the world’s leading soundtracking platform, today announced the acquisition of Song Sleuth, a pioneering music recognition technology company specializing in identifying and monetizing music used in user-generated content (UGC). The deal marks the launch of Aentidote, a new service under the Epidemic Sound Group, designed to help platforms pay out more accurately so that artists and rights holders globally get paid—fairly and efficiently—for the use of their music across online platforms.

This marks Epidemic Sound’s third major acquisition in as many years, following AP Records (now Overtone Studios) in 2022 and Soundly in 2023. These strategic moves further solidify the company’s unique leadership in music licensing and the creator economy.

Aentidote combines Song Sleuth’s cutting-edge AI technology with Epidemic Sound’s deep industry expertise to identify music usage that traditional detection systems struggle to find—including remixes, covers, and live recordings. Offering a reported identification success rate of up to 95%, Aentidote is the most comprehensive UGC music usage tracking and monetization service in the market.

“From day one, our mission has been to create a win-win situation for everyone involved in this rapidly evolving creator economy,” said Oscar Höglund, CEO and Co-founder of Epidemic Sound. “We’ve built a platform that helps artists thrive, generating over three billion daily plays across platforms like TikTok and YouTube. With Aentidote, we’re pairing that expertise with Song Sleuth’s cutting-edge technology to bring even greater value to the broader creator industry — giving music rights holders powerful tools to track usage and ensure they get paid, while supporting both creators and platforms with scalable, accurate identification solutions.”

Song Sleuth’s technology has already helped its clients achieve a significant uplift in content identification, highlighting existing challenges for rights holders to track and monetise their work online. With creation and consumption of UGC expected to surge—Goldman Sachs predicting the total addressable market of the creator economy will approach half-a-trillion dollars by 2027—the future holds increasing opportunities for rights holders, the industry, and artists to capture the full value of their work.

“The complexity of music use across a plethora of digital platforms both officially distributed and user-generated, requires a different approach,” said Jordan Gross, CEO of Song Sleuth. “By joining forces with Epidemic Sound, we’re scaling our vision to offer  unprecedented clarity and control across the entire music ecosystem, providing platforms with ever more accurate identification systems, while giving artists, labels, and publishers confidence that their work is being both found and rewarded.”

Following strong financial results in 2024, Epidemic Sound is doubling down on its commitment to innovation in music monetization—building on initiatives like its soundtrack bonus, 50/50 streaming royalty split and now, with Aentidote, offering a new level of transparency and fairness in UGC monetization.

About Song Sleuth

Song Sleuth is a technology company focused on solving the music industry's UGC problem. We are the first company of our kind to do this by ‘finding the unfindable’ - hard-to-detect user-generated content that nobody else is able to identify. In doing so, we enable rights owners to claim undiscovered royalties.