Musixmatch buys Songdex owner Music Reports in its first acquisition in 16 years, and plans AI royalty agents

Musixmatch just made the first acquisition in its 16-year history, and it bought the company that keeps track of who owns songs.

The Bologna lyrics and music data company announced on October 19, 2026 that it has bought Music Reports, the Los Angeles firm behind the Songdex copyright registry. Blokur, the London rights-matching company Music Reports bought in January 2024, comes with it, and so does Cuetrak, its cue sheet software.

Terms weren’t disclosed. Tikehau Capital financed the deal, Music Business Worldwide reports.

Musixmatch says the deal turns it from a lyrics company into “a full-stack rights and royalties platform” covering mechanical, sync, print and performance rights, Music Ally notes. In plain words, that’s the money from copying a song, placing it in film and TV, printing it as sheet music and playing it in public.

What Musixmatch gets with Music Reports, Songdex and Blokur

Songdex sits at the center of the deal. Music Reports calls it “the world’s largest and most comprehensive registry of music rights and related business information,” with metadata on hundreds of millions of recordings and compositions, who owns which share, and how each owner wants to be paid, per Music Reports’ own write-up.

That’s a different model from the free, open Credits.fm database from Notes.fm: Songdex is a privately owned registry, built by Music Reports and now owned by Musixmatch.

Ownership data matters because every stream pays two sides. The recording and the song underneath it (the composition) usually belong to different people, and the song side only gets paid when someone links the two.

Blokur does that linking. Music Reports says folding Blokur’s matching into its recording database, a system it brands Trakdex, lifted its baseline match rate by 10 percentage points.

Music Reports dates back to 1995. Private equity firm MidOcean Partners bought it in 2020 from ABRY Partners and the co-founders. Its Cuetrak software handles cue sheets for TV and film, and AudioShake started drafting those cue sheets inside Cuetrak in September.

On the other side, Musixmatch says it works with more than 250,000 rights owners and publishers, nearly 3 million songwriters, and services including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and Amazon Music.

“

Music is being created and used faster than the industry can track it, and AI is only accelerating the trend. When no one can identify who wrote a song, who owns it, or who should be paid, creators lose.

How Musixmatch wants AI agents to reconcile royalties after buying Music Reports

Musixmatch calls the deal “the foundation for the next generation of agentic royalty management.” That means AI agents that “identify, match, and reconcile music use continuously, with people in control.”

The people-in-control part gets spelled out too. “A model can suggest a match, but verified data and catalog records decide whether it holds,” Musixmatch said, per Digital Music News.

Ciociola went further with Il Sole 24 Ore, which ran the story under the headline “Copyright and AI.” He told the paper that at least 30% of streams go unpaid because the information linking tracks to their creators is missing. That number is his, the paper gives no source for it, and its English edition is translated from Italian.

His plan for it: every rights holder “will have an agent issued by us that reconciles data, tracks the music wherever it has gone, collects royalties and ensures payment.” He put the integration at a year.

This is the same Musixmatch that screens Suno prompts through Sentinel, and whose CEO told MBW in September it had become “a kind of fintech company” (my 8 insights from that interview cover the rest). It’s also still fighting rival LyricFind, which says Musixmatch’s exclusive Warner Chappell lyrics deal breaks US antitrust law, a claim Musixmatch calls without merit.

If Ciociola’s one-year timeline holds, Songdex, Blokur and Musixmatch’s own data will run as one platform by around October 2027.