Acrylic 🎶

Sports organizations are sitting on some of the world's most valuable social audiences -- and squandering them with generic production music that carries both legal liability and zero audience signal.

Active lawsuits from Kobalt (vs. NBA teams) and Sony (vs. USC Athletics), plus countless unreported settlements, content strikes, and mutes, make the compliance pain acute and the buyer urgent.

Stock music incumbents (Artlist, Epidemic Sound) are built on work-for-hire catalogs -- music engineered to be inoffensive and invisible. It's grey paint. It has no fans by design, which means it carries no audience signal and creates no cultural connection. This isn't a feature gap. It's a structural ceiling they cannot cross without destroying their own business model.

The live music market makes this preference impossible to dismiss: consumers are paying record prices to be in a room with a human making music. In a world of infinite AI-generated content, human provenance is the premium product -- and that dynamic is accelerating.

5.2 billion people use social media. Sports content is among the most-watched material on every major platform. Without a company like Acrylic, this remains the single most underutilized distribution channel in the music industry -- and emerging artists pay the price.

Acrylic closes that gap: sports orgs get engagement-optimized, legally safe music, and independent artists get paid plus discovery-level exposure to audiences their label budgets could never reach. And for music lovers? Sports social media content will now deliver a powerful engine for recommendation and discovery. A win-win-win.

Proven Engagement Lift: PSG proof-of-concept shows Acrylic-powered posts consistently rank in top 8% of engagement, compelling evidence that real music outperforms stock.

Dramatic Cost Savings: 95% average reduction in licensing costs vs. expectations fundamentally changes the economics of music-in-content for sports orgs. Real music & sports social belong together, Acrylic connects them. 

It’s a Data Company: Every campaign generates proprietary signals -- which artist fanbases moved which content, in which markets, at what engagement levels. That feedback loop compounds with every new client and every new post. No stock library has this data or any structural path to build it.

Deep Industry DNA: CEO Jeremy Da's 20+ years in music across A&R, brands, distribution, and marketing give Acrylic authentic credibility and existing relationships on both sides of the marketplace.

Real Client Roster: Signed clients include PSG, Olympique de Marseille, AS Monaco, Montreal CF, Samba Digital (agency), and the French Pro League -- over 3B+ combined reach across multiple leagues and geographies.

Clear Legal Tailwind: Active high-profile lawsuits (Kobalt vs. NBA teams, Sony vs. USC) make the pain acute and the buyer urgent. Acrylic is selling aspirin, not vitamins.

Winner-Take-All Wedge: Sports is the entry point into a much larger content performance optimization market. The data asset being built here has application across brands, media companies, and the broader creator economy.

Concentration Risk: Early traction is heavily dependent on a single flagship client (PSG) and the French football ecosystem. Expansion beyond European soccer is unproven.

Revenue Still Early: Enterprise pricing ($5K–$10K beta) has not been validated at scale. The jump to $15K–$25K per team is aspirational.

Small Team: Two FTEs + 6 PTEs building a platform that requires sophisticated AI/data infrastructure and complex music rights operations simultaneously. Execution risk is real.

Music Rights Complexity: Scaling a global music clearance marketplace involves navigating fragmented rights ownership, regional licensing laws, and label relationships that are notoriously slow-moving.

Data Moat Must Be Built Quickly: The winner-take-all dynamic cuts both ways. A better-capitalized competitor that internalizes the same thesis could threaten the window if Acrylic doesn't convert its first-mover position into a sufficient data lead fast.

Geographic Expansion Still Ahead: Current traction is strongest in European football and the French market. North American teams are still largely unproven.