BMI to Acquire Soundmouse From Orfium in Mid-2026 Deal, Creating Largest Global Cue Sheet Database
US performing rights organization BMI announced on Tuesday May 19, 2026 that it has agreed to acquire London-headquartered Soundmouse from Los Angeles-headquartered music rights management tech firm Orfium in a cash deal expected to close mid-2026.
BMI has committed to operate Soundmouse as an independent company under President and COO Todd Horvath and the combined cue sheet operations will produce what BMI says will become "the largest and most comprehensive cue sheet database in the global audiovisual marketplace." The transaction will be funded through BMI's operating cash and will not impact the PRO's distributions to its songwriter, composer, and publisher affiliates, according to the company. BMI CEO Mike O'Neill described the global audiovisual marketplace as "one of the fastest growing sectors of our industry, and the income stream it provides for our creators continues to grow in importance," adding that "by establishing the most comprehensive cue sheet database in the industry, BMI will be in the best position to collect and distribute the royalties our songwriters, composers and publishers are entitled to whenever their music is used in an AV production, anywhere around the world." Orfium CEO Rob Wells, the former Universal Music Group digital chief who acquired Soundmouse for Orfium in 2023, said that during the three years under Orfium ownership the company "invested significantly in both the business and its technology, transforming it into one of the world's leading cue sheet management platforms" and described BMI as "the ideal partner to take Soundmouse through its next stage of growth for the benefit of composers and songwriters around the world."
The Independent Music Brief | May 20, 2026
Cue sheets are the document-of-record that report, track by track, the musical elements included in a film, television episode, commercial, video game, streaming production, or any other audiovisual work. They identify the song, composer, publisher, master-rights holder, duration of use, type of use (background, featured, end credits, theme), and the percentage shares each rightsholder receives. Without an accurate cue sheet, the performance-royalty pipeline does not function.
Soundmouse is headquartered in London with operations in Japan, Korea, Sri Lanka, Bulgaria, and Greece. The company monitors television, radio broadcasts, and music production worldwide to generate cue sheets for music rights organizations, and under Orfium's ownership expanded into new markets including a three-year partnership announced in 2024 that made it the official music reporting partner for broadcasters in South Korea via its deal with BROMIS. The K-pop and K-drama AV-production economy has been one of the fastest-growing royalty-throughput corridors inside the global cue-sheet-management market across 2024 and 2025, and the BMI acquisition brings BROMIS's South Korean cue-sheet reporting volume inside a for-profit US PRO's institutional control.
What the Cue Sheet Actually Does
When a film, a television episode, a commercial, a video game, or a streaming production includes music, the production company is responsible for preparing a cue sheet that documents every musical element, the cue start time, the cue end time, the cue duration, the song title, the composer or composers, the publisher or publishers, the master-rights holder, the use type, the percentage of each rightsholder's share, and the unique identifying information that lets the PRO match the cue to its registration system. The cue sheet is then submitted to the PRO that licenses the broadcast or streaming platform, and the PRO uses the cue sheet to calculate the performance-royalty payment owed to each rightsholder when the AV work is broadcast, streamed, or otherwise performed publicly. Without an accurate cue sheet, the royalty either does not flow at all (the PRO has no information identifying the music being used) or flows to the wrong rightsholders (the cue sheet contains errors that misidentify the music or its rightsholders).
Cue sheets are produced under the time-pressure and cost-pressure constraints of the AV production economy, typically by production-side music supervisors and music editors who have limited bandwidth, limited tooling, and limited incentive to ensure the cue sheet is complete and accurate. The indie composer working on a TV-movie cue, a procedural-drama background score, a video-game soundtrack element, or a commercial-spot music bed has historically faced the risk that the cue sheet documenting their work does not get filed, gets filed incompletely, gets filed with errors that prevent the PRO from matching the cue to their registration, or gets filed to the wrong territorial PRO and never reaches the working composer's home PRO at all.
Why the Audiovisual Royalty Stream Is the Most Important Non-Streaming Income Line for Indie Composers
Performance royalties from audiovisual use have been one of the most reliable and most resilient income streams in the working composer economy across the past two decades, and its importance has only grown as the streaming-royalty economy has compressed per-stream payouts to the long-tail composer community. For an indie composer scoring a TV procedural, an indie series episode, a documentary, or a streaming-platform original production, the AV performance royalty is typically the largest single revenue line from the underlying work.
BMI CEO Mike O'Neill's characterization of the global audiovisual marketplace as "one of the fastest growing sectors of our industry" maps to the streaming-platform-original-production economy that has continued to expand the working volume of audiovisual production requiring music cues. The video-game industry's $200B+ annual revenue base continues to grow the commissioned-music demand across both major-publisher and indie-developer productions, and the commercial-advertising economy's shift toward content-marketing-and-branded-content production has continued to expand the AV-music-cue demand outside the traditional 30-and-60-second-spot framework.
Key Questions for Independent Songwriters, Producers, Labels, and Publishers
Have you mapped your current cue-sheet-throughput exposure to Soundmouse's existing infrastructure, including the BROMIS South Korea broadcaster reporting partnership and the broader global Soundmouse cue-sheet operations across Japan, Korea, Sri Lanka, Bulgaria, and Greece, and have you reviewed your historical cue-sheet-matching error rates as the working baseline for monitoring any post-close operational shifts in how the BMI-operated Soundmouse platform serves your AV royalty pipeline? The structural read is that the indie composer community needs to be building the working monitoring infrastructure to detect any operational changes in how the consolidated cue-sheet-database layer serves non-BMI affiliated rightsholders, and the only way to detect those changes is to establish the pre-close baseline now.
For indie composers whose primary PRO affiliation is with ASCAP, SESAC, GMR, or any of the international CISAC member societies, what commitments are you willing to ask BMI to make about Soundmouse's continued operation? The pre-close window is the opportunity for the indie composer community to negotiate concrete guarantees about the cue-sheet-database's continued horizontal-utility posture.
Today's Indie Radar
Warner Music Group and Thailand's GMM Music announced on May 18, 2026 that they have launched GLIIDE, an artist development platform designed to build Asian pop acts for global audiences from their first release, sitting inside GMM Global, the joint venture established in 2024 when Warner Music Asia took a strategic investment in GMM Music valuing the company at over 25 billion baht (USD $700M after Tencent and Tencent Music Entertainment subsequently acquired a 10% stake in June 2024 for $70 million)
The platform's first signing is SVRN, a performance-driven artist whose debut single "WHY" was released Thursday May 14, 2026, and the GLIIDE three-pillar framework, Lift (strategic amplification of cultural and emotional momentum), Design (holistic shaping of artist identity and visual narrative), Glide (facilitating movement across diverse markets), operationalizes Warner's institutional argument that Asian artists "aren't built for one place" and need cross-border-from-day-one infrastructure rather than the conventional single-territory-then-export development model. The structural significance for the indie sector is that GLIIDE is the latest in a structurally significant Thailand-market consolidation cycle that has been intensifying across 2024-2026: Warner Music Asia struck a partnership with Thai indie label What the Duck in 2022; UMG completed its acquisition of the RS Group recorded music catalog (Thailand's second-largest) in September 2024 after taking a 70% stake in 2023, then acquired a stake in What the Duck itself in March 2026 (with the indie label's founder becoming Managing Director of Universal Music Thailand); Sony Music Publishing opened its first Thailand office in January 2025; and Tencent Music Entertainment took its 10% GMM stake in June 2024 alongside a Commercial Joint Venture Label Agreement between Warner Music Thailand, Warner Music Asia, and GMM Global. The operational read for the indie sector is that Thailand, IFPI's 29th-largest global recorded-music market in 2024 with USD $100.9M in revenue and 91.9% streaming share, has been transitioning across 2024-2026 from an indie-aligned national market with a working independent-label tier (What the Duck, the broader Thai indie scene) into a structurally consolidated major-label-and-major-PE-controlled market in which the cross-border-artist-development infrastructure (GLIIDE under Warner-GMM, the parallel cross-border infrastructure UMG is building inside its What the Duck stake and its RS Group acquisition, the Sony Music Publishing office buildout) is being institutionalized at the major-label scale. The institutional implication for working indie labels and indie artist development infrastructure operating outside the major-label-aligned Thai market architecture is that the cross-border-from-day-one development model GLIIDE is operationalizing, major-label infrastructure plus boutique creative-led philosophy, is now the working benchmark Thai indie labels and indie cross-border artist-development infrastructure will be competing against across 2026 and into 2027, and the strategic question is whether the indie tier in Thailand and across Southeast Asia can develop institutional financing, infrastructure, and cross-border-artist-development partnerships at sufficient scale to operate as a meaningful counterweight to the major-label-aligned cross-border-development architecture the GLIIDE launch operationalizes.
Spotify has raised Premium subscription prices in Canada by up to CAD $3 per month, marking the first time the streaming platform has raised Canadian prices since October 2024.
The Canadian increase positions Spotify Premium structurally above its main DSP competitors in the market, Apple Music charges CAD $10.99 and Amazon Music Unlimited charges CAD $11.54 for Prime members for an individual subscription, both still below Spotify's new CAD $13.99 Individual rate, and the move marks the latest in a global pricing cycle Spotify has pursued across more than 150 markets since 2023. The structural reading for the indie sector is that Spotify is now executing a clearly bifurcated international pricing strategy: emerging-market price cuts (the May 14 reversal in India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and South Africa, covered in the May 19 brief) targeting subscriber-volume growth in conversion-bottlenecked markets, paired with developed-market price hikes (Canada CAD +$1.30-$3.00, US January 2026 to $12.99, UK and Switzerland late 2025, multiple Europe-Latin America-Asia-Pacific markets across 2025) targeting per-subscriber-revenue growth in markets where the subscriber base is structurally mature. Spotify's Canadian Individual plan has now risen 27% since 2023 across two rounds of hikes (CAD $10.99 → $12.69 → $13.99), and the company's Loud & Clear Canada report (March 2026) said Canadian artists generated more than CAD $544M in royalties on the platform in 2025, up 19% year-over-year and nearly 60% over four years, with 92% of those royalties coming from listeners outside Canada and over 370 Canadian artists generating over CAD $100,000 with nearly 70 crossing the CAD $1M threshold. The institutional read for the indie sector is that the developed-market pricing-power Spotify has demonstrated across the past 18 months, converting users to Premium at higher rates while extracting higher per-subscriber revenue, is now operationalized as Co-CEO Alex Norström's stated "part of our toolbox" approach, and the per-stream royalty math for the indie sector will continue to depend on the geographic mix of subscriber-revenue flowing into the global royalty pool. The October 2024 Canadian price hike came amid the CRTC "streaming tax" 5% levy debate (currently paused by a federal court December 2024 pending Federal Court of Appeal ruling), but Spotify's spokesperson did not reference the CRTC dispute when announcing the May 2026 hike, a strategic positioning shift suggesting Spotify is now operating the price increases as a baseline business architecture rather than a defensive response to regulatory cost pressure, which is the working environment the indie sector should be reading the per-stream royalty math against across the rest of 2026.