Case study · Biblo.tv · Music licensing

A music catalogue so automated that two people run it.

Biblo.tv licenses independent African music to productions around the world. Its founder, Markus Wormstorm, is an Annie Award-winning composer, and we've been his technical partner since 2018. The platform does the searching, protecting and licensing, so the business runs on two people.

Visit biblo.tv

Who it's for: Ad agencies, film and TV productions
Our role: Technical partner: product, engineering and hosting
Working together: Since 2018; current platform since 2025
Run by: Two people

A world-class catalogue, a team of two.

12,000hours of music cleared for licence

2people run the business

+220%search clicks, year on year

1 in 4search clicks from the USA and UK

Heard in campaigns for the world's biggest brands.

Agencies and studios license Biblo music for TV commercials, streaming series and global sports campaigns. Every brand here has used a track from the catalogue.

Hyundai × FIFA
Prime Video: Good Omens and American Gods
American Airlines × Citi: “Karl Shakur”
Ally × NASCAR
Google: “Football” and “Mechanic”
Adidas: Co-creation
Asics: “What the Gel”
Audi: “Lane 8”
Nissan: “Hill Start”
Absa: “Africanacity”
Takealot: “Roadtrip”
Philips × Nelson Mandela Foundation: #ShaveToRemember, Ogilvy Johannesburg

Licensing music shouldn't need a phone call.

Sync licensing has long meant a shortlist by email and a negotiation by phone. That works for a big music house with a sales team. Biblo has two people and a catalogue of 12,000 hours.

Briefs are written in sentences

Agencies brief music by mood and scene, not by keyword. Tag filters can't answer a brief written the way a director talks.

Every licence was a conversation

Which project, what use, which territory, how long: each licence took emails and calls. With two people, that caps the business.

Auditions can't leak masters

Producers need to hear the real track before they license it. An unprotected master in an audition is a free master.

A small team needs the right next bet.

We don't build everything on the list. Each phase starts by deciding what not to build, then ships, then checks the numbers before the next bet.

1Discover
Three bets, one runway
Biblo runs on a founder's runway, not a corporate budget. Before the current build, a planning phase weighed three candidate next bets against the money available and picked one. Two epics were cut from scope before anyone wrote code.
2Ship
Fixed price, delivered inside it
The build was priced at the conservative end of the range and held there. It shipped in focused sprints rather than a drip, so the founder could plan launches around them.
3Measure
Follow the demand
Search clicks are up 220% year on year, and a quarter come from the USA and UK. Most searches still name Biblo, which shows where to aim next: people looking for the music, not the brand.

From brief to licence, without a call.

A producer can find a track, hear it, license it and download it in one sitting. Behind them, two people keep the catalogue growing.

Search the way agencies brief

Type the brief in plain words. Search matches tracks by meaning, across genre, mood, instrument and more, not just by tag.

License without a phone call

Pick the tracks, name the project, choose the use (commercial, TV, film, streaming) and the period, from three months to forever. The download link arrives by email.

Audition safely

Everyone hears watermarked audio. Only licence holders download the masters. Watermarks are added automatically on upload.

Playlists agencies can share

Curated and personal playlists, reordered by drag and tagged in bulk, so a shortlist is easy to pass round an agency.

A catalogue two people can run

Bulk upload skips duplicates, tags apply in bulk, and long jobs show their progress. Failures stay on screen until someone deals with them.

A rate card anyone can quote

A calculator holds the full rate card: 12 categories, four client tiers, blanket deals and territories. Benchmarked against the published industry rates.

Under the hood.

The hard parts are finding music by meaning and protecting it until it's paid for. Both run on their own services, deployed together, so the founder never has to think about them.

Meteor 3
React
TypeScript
Vite
Tailwind
MongoDB
Elasticsearch 8
Python · gRPC
Sentence embeddings
ffmpeg
S3
Kubernetes · Helm
GitLab CI

Search by meaning

Each track's metadata is written out as a sentence (its genres, moods and instruments) and turned into a 768-dimension vector by a Python embedding service. Elasticsearch finds the nearest tracks to a brief, so plain words land on music that fits.

Watermarks in the pipeline

On upload, ffmpeg draws the waveform and stamps the watermark. Originals are served only to accounts allowed to read them, and admins can switch between the two to check the watermark.

Every download is a licence

A download link only exists with a licence behind it: the project, its uses and the period. 324 were issued self-serve by May 2026.

No silent failures

Uploads and re-indexing run as tracked jobs that report progress. A failure stays visible until someone dismisses it. The rule came from a real bug, where processing failed after upload and nobody knew.

Maintenance as code

Duplicate tags, orphaned images, playlist clean-up and track counts are fixed by scripts, not by hand, so the catalogue stays tidy without a third person.

One deploy, three services

GitLab CI builds the image and Helm installs it to Kubernetes, with Elasticsearch and the embedding service alongside. Only the main branch deploys to production.

Built in focused sprints.

Biblo moves when the business is ready to. Work lands in concentrated sprints, with the biggest in late 2024 and each September since. Every release goes to production from the main branch through the same pipeline.

1BuildA Docker image from the main branch
2PublishTo the GitLab registry
3ReleaseHelm upgrade on Kubernetes
4RunApp, search and embeddings together

777commits since 2024

136working days of build

43,874lines of TypeScript

322automated tests

Competing on the world stage.

“Codeswop is part of the team. I feel like I have super powers with them by my side. We have worked together since 2018, when the project was in its infancy, and today our product is stronger than ever and competing on the world stage.”

Markus WormstormComposer · Founder, Biblo.tv

Music licensed through Biblo has travelled. Kidwithamatch's “Man on the Hill” scored Ogilvy Johannesburg's #ShaveToRemember for Philips and the Nelson Mandela Foundation, a campaign that went on to win a Loeries Grand Prix. Today a quarter of Biblo's search traffic comes from the USA and the UK.

More of our work.

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