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Epidemic Sound Group AB
Epidemic Sound is a music company that licenses royalty-free songs and sound effects to creators and businesses for use in videos, podcasts, and social media.
Epidemic Sound is a music company built for the internet video era. It owns a huge catalog of songs and sound effects and rents them out by subscription, so a YouTuber, podcaster, or brand can drop music into a video without worrying about copyright strikes or messy per-view licensing deals. Instead of paying the artists per stream like Spotify does, it buys the rights to tracks outright, often for a flat fee, and then lets subscribers use them as much as they want.
The basic problem it solves is ugly and real: if you upload a video with a popular song in the background, the platform will often mute it, block it, or hand the ad money to the music rights holders. Epidemic Sound's answer is a catalog it fully controls, so the moment you pay the subscription, you are cleared to use anything in it. That is why it has become a standard tool for professional creators who post constantly and cannot afford a copyright headache on every upload. The customers are individuals and teams who make money from content: video creators, podcasters, agencies, and companies running social channels. Epidemic Sound charges them a recurring subscription, with tiers that depend on whether you are a solo creator or a business and which platforms you post to. The appeal over a competitor like Artlist or a big label's licensing arm is simplicity — one flat fee, a searchable library organized by mood and genre, and no per-song negotiation.
The company is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, and it has grown into one of the better-known names in the creator economy. Its pitch to musicians is a steady upfront payment instead of a lottery ticket on streaming royalties, which is a real trade-off: artists give up upside in exchange for cash now. For the business, that model means it must keep signing and retaining artists and keep its catalog fresh, because the subscription only stays worth paying if the music keeps getting better.
Saved answer · last researched 10 Nov 2026
BIG PICTURE
Most brands say their old social videos might not survive a music-licensing audit
- 83% Brands worried past music use would fail an audit
- 17% Brands not worried about an audit
Epidemic Sound asked 500 brands in the US and UK about the music in their social videos. About eight in ten said they doubt their past use would hold up in a formal audit or legal challenge, and 56% had already run into a copyright or takedown problem in the last two years. Brands buy subscriptions precisely to avoid that kind of surprise, so fear of an audit is a strong reason to pay. Source: Epidemic Sound, The Content Shift: How Brands are Adapting in 2026, data from 2026
Timeline
Epidemic Sound Is Founded in Stockholm
In 2009, two problems sat side by side. Anyone making a video had to hunt down music, deal with labels and publishers, and worry about getting sued — while most musicians still struggled to make a living. Epidemic Sound started in Stockholm to fix both at once, with a simple idea: flip the model so that the artists become the winners of the music industry.
First Deals With Swedish Broadcasters
The first customers were broadcasters and production companies, and soon the company had licensing deals with Sweden's big TV players, TV4 and SVT. It was a sensible start: sell to the people who need music at scale.
A Subscription for YouTube Creators
Then came the move that changed everything. Epidemic launched an industry-first subscription plan aimed at YouTube creators — a simple, flat way to use music without the usual licensing headache — and began paying artists a 50/50 split when their tracks played on streaming platforms. The company was no longer just selling to broadcasters; it was betting on the creators.
A Unicorn Valuation
That bet paid off. In 2021 the company raised a huge investment round at a valuation north of a billion dollars, making it a unicorn, with heavyweight backers including EQT Growth and Blackstone Growth. It also brought in Andrew Fisher, the former boss of Shazam, to chair the board.
Cash-Flow Positive and a Sound Effects Deal
After years of growth, something important happened in 2024: the business became cash-flow positive for the first time — it was finally making more money than it spent. It also bought Soundly, a leading sound effects platform, pushing beyond music into the sounds that fill out a video.
Going All In on AI
Then the ground shifted. Generative AI threatened to remake how content gets made, so the board and management made a deliberate call to embrace the shift at full speed. That meant heavy spending on acquisitions, its own AI, cloud computing and commercial infrastructure — and expensive new products: Voices, Adapt, Assistant and Studio, plus the purchases of Song Sleuth and VXA. Deliberately, 2025 became an investment year, with losses on the bottom line.
A New CEO and a New Name
The spending spree came with a changing of the guard. Co-founder Oscar Höglund stepped down as CEO and moved to the board, with CFO Sara Börsvik stepping in as interim CEO. Then in July the group bought Blenda Labs, an AI-native video production company, and renamed itself Epidemic Group. By October, Blenda's founder Erik Wahlberg was CEO, Börsvik had become joint COO and CFO, and the group was back to profitable growth in the first half of the year.
From Music Library to Creative Platform
The bigger picture became clear: Epidemic was no longer just selling a catalog of music. It was building a next-generation creative platform, with AI tools like Studio, Adapt, Assistant and Plenty Labs helping people make entire videos, not just soundtrack them. And in a world where AI-generated content raises more and more legal questions, the company pitched its owned music and bullet-proof licensing as exactly what creators need.