Every product starts with a frustration. SMOH started with a question we kept hearing from sync reps, A&R managers, and production library owners: why is there no CRM that actually built for music licensing?

This is the story of why we built it, and how.

1- The Problem we kept saying

A world running on email thread and spreadsheets

Before we wrote a single line of code, we spent months talking to music licensing professionals. Production libraries. Sync agencies. Independent publishers. The picture was remarkably consistent.

Briefs arrived by email, got forwarded internally, and lived in inboxes. Deals were tracked in spreadsheets updated by whoever had time. Contracts were written in Word and chased manually. Invoices were raised in a separate accounting tool. And at any given moment, no one had a clear view of the pipeline.

‘The pipeline isn’t in the spreadsheet. It’s in everyone’s heads. That’s the problem.‘

The invisible cost of a broken system

The teams we spoke to weren't inefficient people. They were skilled professionals running on inadequate infrastructure. And the cost wasn't just time - it was deals that quietly died because no one had visibility at the right moment. A brief that sat unanswered for three days because it got buried. A follow-up that never happened because no one was tracking it.

The average music licensing team spends 30–40% of their time on admin that should be automated. That's time not spent on relationships, on catalogue, on creative work.

Why generic CRMs didn’t solve it

The obvious answer was a CRM. But the teams that had tried Salesforce, Airtable or HubSpot told us the same thing: the adaptation cost was too high, and the fit was never right. Music licensing doesn't map onto standard sales concepts. You don't just have leads and opportunities - you have briefs linked to playlists linked to deals, with licensing types, territories, media specifications, and contract terms baked into every transaction.

When the structure isn't native, teams build workarounds. Custom fields nobody fills in correctly. Processes that exist only in a training doc nobody reads. And inevitably, the CRM becomes just another thing to maintain alongside the spreadsheet it was supposed to replace.

2- Why We Decided to build rather than adapt

The gap was structural, not cosmetic

We considered building on top of an existing CRM. The problem was that the gap between what generic tools offered and what music licensing teams actually needed wasn’t a configuration problem, it was an architectural one. You can’t bolt on a brief-linked-to-playlist-linked-to-deal structure after the fact. It has to be the foundation.

So we made a decision: build from scratch, with music licensing workflows as the starting point, not an afterthought.

The brief-to-invoice principle

The core design principle behind SMOH was simple: every action in the licensing process – from the moment a brief arrives to the moment an invoice is paid – should happen in one place, without re-entering data. Not six tools. Not email plus spreadsheet plus Word plus DocuSign plus accounting. One flow.

3- How we built the smoh

Starting with the workflow, not the feature list

We mapped the end-to-end music licensing workflow before we designed a single screen. A brief arrives. It gets assigned. The music team builds a playlist and links it to the brief. The deal is negotiated. Terms are set. A license agreement is generated. It’s signed. An invoice is raised. Payment is tracked. The deal is closed.

Every feature in SMOH exists to support a step in that workflow – not to replicate what a generic CRM already does.

What we built – and why

4- what smoh actually changes in practice

Before and after: a real example

Here’s what the same deal looks like with and without SMOH, for a mid-sized production music library receiving a brief from a streaming platform supervisor.

before: 6 tools, zero integration

after: one tool. one flow

5- Who SMOH Is Built For

SMOH is designed for production music libraries, sync agencies, and music publishers who manage a volume of licensing deals and need operational infrastructure that matches the complexity of their work. If your team is skilled but your operation runs slowly, the bottleneck is almost certainly your systems, not your people.

We didn’t build SMOH for teams who want to customise a generic CRM for six months before getting any value. We built it for teams who want to start working the way they should have been working all along, from day one.

6- faq – questions about smoh

What is SMOH?

SMOH is a CRM built specifically for music licensing teams. It centralises briefs, playlists, deals, agreements, and invoicing in a single workflow, from the moment a brief arrives to the moment payment is received.

Why did you build a new CRM instead of adapting an existing one?

Because the gap between what generic CRMs offer and what music licensing teams actually need is architectural, not cosmetic. The brief-to-playlist-to-deal structure, the licensing terms, the automatic agreement generation, these can’t be bolted on. They have to be the foundation.

Who is SMOH designed for?

Production music libraries, sync agencies, and music publishers who manage a volume of licensing deals. If your team is spending significant time on admin, re-entering data, chasing agreements, updating spreadsheets manually, SMOH is built for you.

Does SMOH generate license agreements automatically?

Yes. When deal terms are entered: license type, media, territory, term, tracks, etc., the license agreement generates directly from the deal record. E-signature is built in. No third-party tool required.

How quickly can a team get started with SMOH?

We designed SMOH to deliver value from day one, not after months of configuration. Book a 30-minute demo and we’ll show you the full brief-to-invoice workflow live in the product.