AudioShake Copyright Compliance System: Music Detection, Identification, Removal, & Compliance
Studios, broadcasters, sports teams, and distributors are sitting on enormous catalogs that are blocked from release because licensed music is baked into the original mix. As FAST channels, streaming archives, and social distribution have multiplied, copyright compliance has become a meaningful bottleneck on monetization. Teams struggle to meet the demand while maintaining accurate reporting and ensuring their content is cleared for distribution. And the content driving that volume — noisy stadiums, loud effects, multiple overlapping speakers — is exactly the kind of audio that traditional automated identification systems struggle to recognize.
Today, AudioShake is launching its Copyright Compliance System: an end-to-end workflow for detecting, identifying, removing, and documenting copyrighted music in mixed media files. These processes, many of which previously involved manual work, are built into one automated system that puts rightsholders back at the center of music identification and clearance.
AudioShake’s Copyright Compliance System is already in use across broadcast, sports, post-production, and rights administration, with early customers including ESPN, NFL Films, Jaywalker Music, CrunchLabs, Music Reports, and amp.
What the Copyright Compliance System Brings Together
The Copyright Compliance System is modular: customers can use the full pipeline or adopt individual components (detection, identification, removal) inside their existing workflow. Extending upon AudioShake’s Music Removal model, AudioShake’s Copyright Compliance System combines:
- Music detection flags whether music is present in a piece of content, including noisy, fully-mixed audio where music is buried under dialogue, crowd noise, and effects. This helps downstream cue sheet teams know where music is present and where to fill out the relevant information.
- Music identification isolates the music in any media file and identifies the artist, song title, album, label, release date, and ISRC for each segment. Teams can quickly QC the identified music, combine repeated segments, and correct start and end times to accelerate cue sheet creation and approval.
- Music removal removes music from a clip, while preserving dialogue, ambient sound, and effects. In scenarios such as social distribution, archival re-licensing, or platforms where rights would otherwise create friction, AudioShake opens the downstream path for rightsholders to license replacement tracks, swap in their own catalog, or recoup royalties on music that previously went unreported.
How Cue Sheets Close the Copyright Compliance Loop
Cue sheets are the connective tissue between content production and rights administration. Rights administrators like PROs (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, PRS, etc.) use them to identify which compositions are owed royalties.
Cue sheet accuracy depends on identification accuracy, and identification fails most often on “noisy”: fully mixed content where music is buried under dialogue, crowd noise, and effects. Traditional fingerprinting tools were built for clean audio—a song playing on the radio, a track on a streaming service. Run them against the actual mix of a sports broadcast or a TV episode and segments may get missed, mislabeled, or under-or over-estimated. Those errors flow downstream into delayed royalty payments, missed cues, and disputes between rights holders, distributors, and PROs that can take months to resolve.
By isolating the music from the mix before identification, AudioShake’s system gives the recognition layer a clean signal to work against—the same principle that produces more accurate speech transcription when dialogue is cleaned before transcription. The cue sheets that come out reflect what's actually in the content, not what could be guessed through the noise.
That accuracy matters most for content where the music is staying in, which is most broadcast and streaming output. An accurate cue sheet, which can correctly note both what's playing and exactly when it starts and stops, is what makes royalty reporting correct, compliance documentation clean, and previously unreported music recoverable for rights holders. When music does need to come out, the same identification feeds precise removal—and the cue sheet opens the downstream path to licensing replacements, swapping in catalog tracks, or shipping a music-free clip for social and digital distribution.
Refreshing Legacy TV Content for Global Distribution
Award-winning music and sound company Jaywalker Music, founded by composer Raney Shockne and the acclaimed production company Fifth Season, uses AudioShake to help studios modernize classic TV catalogs with expired or limited music rights. AudioShake isolates and removes legacy music without access to original stems, preserving dialogue, laughter, and sound effects while seamlessly integrating newly composed cues. This process has enabled the replacement of more than 200 expired tracks for broadcast-ready distribution, unlocking new revenue and licensing opportunities for beloved television series.
“AudioShake completely changed the way we approached this project. In the past, replacing music without stems would’ve taken weeks per episode—if it was even possible at all. With AudioShake, we were able to isolate the music cleanly and focus our time where it matters: composing and integrating new tracks. That kind of efficiency didn’t just save us time—it made the entire project possible. It opened up new distribution paths for the series and gave Jaywalker a powerful tool for helping content owners bring legacy material back to life.” – Raney Shockne (Award-Winning Music Composer, Founder of Jaywalker Music)
Unlocking Sports and Archival Content for Streaming Distribution
ESPN manages a vast library of live, archival, and digital content distributed across the sports industry's leading digital products and the #1 sports social media footprint. Across that ecosystem, audio constraints such as copyrighted arena and walkout music, expired licenses on archival programming, dialogue entangled with crowd noise, have all historically limited what could be redistributed and how quickly.
ESPN uses AudioShake to remove or isolate copyrighted music from sports highlights, preserve authentic commentary and crowd energy, and accelerate turnaround of rights-cleared assets across television, streaming, digital, and social platforms. Similarly, NFL Films and the Calgary Flames use AudioShake for the same reasons: to clear sports clips and game footage for broadcast and social distribution, where music rights would otherwise create friction.
For digital properties like ESPN's cult-favorite The Ocho, licensed music has restricted modern distribution. AudioShake detects and isolates copyrighted music embedded in sports footage, removes it while preserving commentary and natural stadium sound, and prepares archival content for streaming and digital distribution. Content that was previously unusable becomes available across new platforms and new audiences, extending the lifespan and reach of ESPN's archive.
The same capability played into a recent ESPN production. For ESPN's 2026 Super Bowl ad, AudioShake isolated legendary quarterback Phil Simms' voice from the clip of his iconic post-game "I'm going to Disney World!" catchphrase. Because of ambient in-stadium music, licensing the full clip would have been cost-prohibitive for just a few seconds of a 60-second commercial. AudioShake removed the ambient music and extracted Simms' vocal, making the clip usable.
“As ESPN continues to expand the ways we reach and serve sports fans in an age of content abundance, it’s important to lean into groundbreaking technology solutions that can help us bring the right content to the fans that want it as quickly and efficiently as possible. Working with AudioShake to leverage their innovative audio separation lets us unlock more content for fans by accelerating and modernizing workflows and ensuring we can deliver more high-quality sports content to fans wherever they are.” — Kevin Lopes (Vice President, Business Development & Innovation, ESPN)
Localizing and Repurposing Viral Video Content
Mark Rober's CrunchLabs, creators of some of the internet's most-watched science and engineering videos, use AudioShake's music removal and sound separation tools to localize, remix, and clear content for global audiences. The team isolates dialogue, removes commercial music, and prepares sponsor-ready edits while preserving the humor, reactions, and sound design that define the brand. With automated cue sheet generation now part of the workflow, CrunchLabs can move from raw footage to copyright-compliant, distribution-ready content at scale.
“AudioShake’s production-grade quality gives us the flexibility to reformat videos for different platforms, languages, and partnerships so we can create copyright-compliant or localized versions without losing the energy and emotion that make Mark’s videos special.” – Luke Hale (Head of Media, CrunchLabs)
Building on a Rights Administration Foundation
Cue sheet accuracy isn't just a workflow concern; it's a payment concern. Cue sheets generated alongside detection and removal, rather than reconstructed by hand after the fact, reduce errors that delay royalty payments and create disputes among rights holders, distributors, and PROs. That alignment between content production and rights administration is what makes the Copyright Compliance System a workflow system rather than a point tool.
AudioShake has partnered with Music Reports, a global leader in music rights administration since 1995, to bring AI music identification and automated cue sheet generation directly into the workflows that broadcasters, streaming platforms, and production studios already use to manage music rights. With this partner, AudioShake is positioned to further help close the gap between what's actually in a piece of content and what gets reported to PROs.
AudioShake also powers tools like amp, a WPP company and global leader in sonic branding for brands like Mastercard, Mercedes-Benz, and Deloitte. amp has embedded AudioShake into its new Music Copyright Check, using AudioShake to detect unlicensed copyrighted music in branded content, even when obscured by voice-overs or ambient noise. With AudioShake, assets are scanned and flagged in real time, eliminating copyright risk at the source for brands and content creators producing at scale.
Available Now Across Live and Post-Production Environments
Thanks to AudioShake’s Copyright Compliance System, content previously locked due to music rights can now be opened to distribution. Compliance teams stop spending hours on paperwork that the system can produce in a single pass. And rights holders get cue sheets that reflect what's actually in the content, generated at the source rather than reconstructed after the fact.
The Copyright Compliance System is available today through the AudioShake API, and starting to roll out to customers on AudioShake’s Enterprise platform, AudioShake Live.
To learn more or start building, visit developer.audioshake.ai.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the AudioShake Copyright Compliance System? The AudioShake Copyright Compliance System is an automated workflow that combines AI music detection, identification, and removal in a single pipeline. It's built for broadcasters, post-production teams, and rights holders who need to detect copyrighted music, build accurate cue sheets at scale, clear content for distribution, and document everything for compliance and royalty reporting.
- What is a music cue sheet? A music cue sheet is a document listing all music used in an audiovisual production, including the song title, composer, publisher, timing, and type of use. Broadcasters and distributors submit cue sheets to performing rights organizations like ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC so that composers and publishers receive royalty payments for their work.
- How does AudioShake's AI music identification work? AudioShake's AI models isolate the music in a piece of mixed audio and identify what's there, surfacing the artist, song title, album, label, release date, and ISRC for each segment. Because music identification runs against the isolated music rather than the full mix, it works on the kind of noisy, fully-mixed audio that traditional content recognition tools tend to miss. Teams can then QC the identified music, combine repeated segments, and correct start and end times before deciding what happens next.
- Can AudioShake identify music in noisy or mixed broadcast audio? Yes. AudioShake is built for the audio that traditional fingerprinting tools struggle with: stadium broadcasts, live events, post-production mixes, and archival footage where music is layered under dialogue, crowd noise, and effects. The system isolates the music from the mix before identification runs, which gives the recognition layer a clean signal to work against. This addresses the speech-masking problem that causes conventional detectors to miss or mislabel music in broadcast conditions.