Thirty partnerships do not happen by accident, and they definitely do not happen by treating every deal the same way. Over the past several years, Sunset Music has built out a partner network that spans two continents and seven distinct categories of the licensing business, from stock marketplaces to in-flight entertainment systems to the backend infrastructure that quietly pushes music into hundreds of commercial clients at once.

Taken individually, each relationship solves one specific problem. Taken together, they form something closer to a map of every place a song can legally travel once it leaves an artist’s hands, and we think our roster deserves to see that map laid out in full.

Where Volume Meets Scale

Start with China, because it is the region most Western catalogs never manage to enter cleanly, and it is where a disproportionate share of our newest energy has gone. The anchor of that presence is Visual China Group, a company routinely described as the Getty Images of China for good reason. VCG manages more than seven hundred million digital assets and controls something in the neighborhood of sixty percent of the entire mainland Chinese visual licensing market, and its commercial music catalog has been growing fast enough to matter to us directly.

Sitting alongside VCG in the same regional ecosystem are three marketplaces built for the exact pace at which Chinese creative teams work: 588ku, known locally as Qianku, supplies design templates, graphics, video, and audio to a huge base of working designers; Ooopic covers similar ground with its own catalog of photos, video, and creative resources built around commercial music and multimedia licensing; and Gaoding Design operates as something close to a Chinese answer to Canva, an AI-powered design platform built for speed, with licensed music and stock media baked directly into the workflow. Rounding out the region is Coolvox, a dedicated music licensing marketplace built specifically for audio and video productions inside China, already carrying millions of tracks and adding more on a fast, steady clip for the content creators, broadcasters, and advertisers who rely on it.

Volume Versus Curation

On the global side, the marketplace layer looks different, less about volume and more about editorial identity. Pond5 remains one of the largest creative media marketplaces in the world, covering everything from raw footage to fully produced scores, and its scale alone makes it a dependable outlet for a wide catalog. AudioJungle sits in a similar volume-first category, one of the largest royalty-free music marketplaces anywhere, built for creators and brands who need production music, stock tracks, and sound effects fast and at commercial-grade licensing terms.

Musicbed sits at the other end of that spectrum, an exclusive, tightly curated platform built for filmmakers and brands chasing music that can genuinely carry a story rather than just fill space behind one, and that curation is precisely why placement there tends to mean something different than placement on a wide-open library. Lickd rounds out this tier by solving a problem none of the others touch directly: it specializes in pre-cleared licenses for mainstream commercial music, built specifically so YouTubers and influencers can use real, recognizable songs without triggering a copyright strike or losing monetization, a corner of the business that keeps growing as more of our writers see their work adopted by full-time online creators.

Where Creators Actually Build Things

A separate layer of the network exists purely inside the software people use to actually make things. Canva anchors this group, an official commercial audio library embedded directly inside a design platform used by more than one hundred eighty million people every single day, searchable by mood, genre, or tempo, and feeding everything from Instagram Reels to corporate pitch decks to basic website promo videos. Wondershare runs three separate products in this same category that each carry their own licensed audio pipeline: FilmoraGo, its mobile-first video editing app built for fast, social-ready output; DemoCreator, the desktop screen recording and editing tool aimed at creators; and DemoAir, its screen recording and presentation software built for education and business use. None of these tools is a household name the way Canva is, but each one represents thousands of individual creators reaching for licensed music without ever thinking about where it came from, which is precisely the kind of quiet, high-volume exposure that adds up over time.

The Plumbing Nobody Sees

Behind the consumer-facing tools sits a layer most listeners never think about at all, the actual plumbing of the licensing business. MediaNet operates purely as backend infrastructure, now part of the MusiqHub family, ingesting music into one of the largest white-label catalogs in the world and pushing it out to hundreds of downstream commercial clients simultaneously, from fitness apps to in-store retail radio to international streaming services, with mechanical and performance royalties generated automatically every time one of those clients uses a track. Audible Magic performs a different but related function, running the content identification and rights enforcement infrastructure that platforms, labels, and studios lean on to fingerprint audio and video and automatically decide whether a match gets blocked, monetized, or simply tracked, including screening built for AI-generated content, which is quickly becoming one of the more important corners of this business.

On the China side, Kingsoft brings serious scale as a major national software and cloud services company with licensed audio libraries built into its creative tooling, Agora supplies the real-time engagement and live-streaming infrastructure that a huge share of creator apps run on top of, Duo Deer serves as a creative platform built for China’s broader content-creator ecosystem, and Tiao Tiao She, run under Tencent, connects our catalog to one of the largest creator and video platform ecosystems on the planet.

The Paperwork That Pays

Music needs someone handling the paperwork behind it too, and that is where our publishing and rights partners come in. Sentric manages global publishing administration end to end, covering song registration, royalty collection, and neighboring rights across more than two hundred territories, which is the kind of unglamorous, essential work that determines whether a songwriter actually gets paid correctly years after a placement happens. Jamendo Artists Services has been running commercial licensing and artist management since 2004, covering film licensing, advertising placements, and subscription-based commercial licenses, a track record long enough that it predates most of the platforms it now sits alongside. On the community side, SoundClick continues to operate as one of the largest independent music communities anywhere, home to more than five and a half million songs and a genuinely active beat marketplace, giving artists a discovery channel that looks nothing like a traditional sync platform but still moves real music into real projects.

Four Studios, Four Specialties

China’s production side rounds out the network with four studios that each specialize in a different kind of branded output. Tyger Media works across digital media and branded content production broadly. New Studios focuses specifically on advertising production and branded media. Heely Media runs digital marketing and influencer campaign work, a category that keeps expanding as brand budgets shift toward creator-led content. And Le Fit brings its own angle entirely, a fitness and lifestyle brand producing its own branded media and licensing workout music directly into that pipeline.

Alongside them sits MassiveMusic, a global B2B music agency and sonic branding firm operating under the Songtradr portfolio, which functions less like a single studio and more like a full-service music partner for brands and agencies, covering sonic identity design, music supervision and sync licensing, backend distribution technology, and increasingly, AI-driven catalog metadata work that helps the right track actually surface when a brief comes in.

Where Music Finally Meets an Audience

Then there is the placement layer, the part of the network where a song stops being background infrastructure and starts reaching an actual audience in a specific physical or digital moment. Mood Media sits at the center of this category as the world’s leading experiential media company, redefining what on-premise retail feels like through in-store music, digital signage, messaging, scent design, and an entire retail media network built around physical spaces.

Peloton represents one of the most engaged licensing relationships in the entire network, a fitness platform with millions of daily active subscribers where tracks played during live rides and runs surface directly on screen with a tap-to-save feature straight into Spotify or Apple Music, meaning a single placement can keep generating discovery for years inside Peloton’s on-demand class archive long after the live class itself has ended. And Air China closes out this category through its in-flight entertainment system, with music approved specifically for boarding and deplaning loops, the ambient backdrop behind the safety video every passenger watches, and featured programming across the aircraft’s internal radio and video channels, a captive audience measured in the millions of travelers a year.

The Pattern Underneath It All

Look at the network as a whole and a pattern becomes obvious fast. No single partner does everything, and that is precisely the point. A marketplace like AudioJungle rewards volume and speed. A platform like Musicbed rewards restraint and editorial trust. Infrastructure players like MediaNet and Audible Magic operate entirely out of view, making sure the business side works correctly regardless of where a track ends up. Placement partners like Peloton and Air China put music directly in front of a captive, specific audience, while the publishing and rights side makes sure that exposure actually turns into a royalty check months or years down the line.

Thirty partners, two regions, seven categories, and one underlying idea holding it together: a song only creates value once it reaches the right room, and building this many doors into this many different rooms is how we make sure it eventually does.