Pretzel Fawkes is a licensing and clearance portal for compositions (musical works) and sound recordings (masters).

The process to clear compositions and sound recordings with rights holders is complicated. When we first started working on Pretzel the team mostly focused on rights holders who hold "200% rights".

What are "200% rights"?

"200% rights" means 100% of the composition and 100% of the sound recording for any given work.

100% + 100% = 200%.

Sometimes multiple people own shares in a work. For example, Publisher A owns 60% of the composition and Publisher B owns the other 40% of the composition, then Record Label A owns 100% of the sound recording. In this case, you need to have a signed licenses with Publisher A, Publisher B and Record Label A for that track to be 200% cleared.

When we first started Pretzel, we sought out rights holders that solely controlled 200% of the rights necessary to license for the Pretzel platform. While this worked well in the beginning, it limited our ability to license any music which had complex ownership.

However, ownership is complicated, messy, and difficult to track. So we decided to build a platform to take on this job.

Enter Fawkes.

Fawkes is a web-based portal for rights holders to provide Pretzel and maintain complex ownership splits for compositions (works) and masters (recordings).

How does it work?

Rightsholders provide Fawkes with their ownership metadata in many different ways.

For recordings, Fawkes supports industry-standard DDEX ingest messages such as ERNs. Fawkes has already partnered with many distributors such as (FUGA, CI, and Symphonic Distribution) to target the Pretzel platform.

For compositions (musical works), Fawkes supports CSV import as well as importing catalogs that have been exported from PROs (ASCAP, BMI, PRS, etc.)

Once the compositions and masters have been linked, and completely cleared in Fawkes, they can then be made available on the Pretzel Rocks DSP.