---
title: "Content and rights"
description: "Licensed content, rights to music and media, curricula, libraries of templates and assets. A moat made of contracts and production rather than of code."
canonical: https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/12/
locale: en
---

# Content and rights

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- Sheet 12 / 35

## Passport

- **Rock**: Rules
- **Depth**: 2.5 · Drill rig
- **Time to dig**: 3–10 years
- **Capital**: ● · high
- **Solo**: ~ partly
- **AI**: → eroding
- **Rent**: ~ partly

## Sample

- **Share of apps**: 10.5%
- **No-rate**: 44%
- **Median price**: $14.99

Figures from the canivibecodeit sample. No-rate is the share of apps carrying this tag that cannot be vibe-coded — a proxy for structural strength. Only the first thirteen mechanics were measured.

## Essence

Licensed content, rights to music and media, curricula, libraries of templates and assets. A moat made of contracts and production rather than of code.

## How it is built

### Spotify and Apple Music — licences on the catalogue

Agreements with the three majors and thousands of independents: years of negotiation, minimum guarantees in the hundreds of millions, and a legal machine for accounting royalties. A startup cannot reassemble the catalogue — rights holders do not talk to small players on acceptable terms. Audible adds exclusives of its own production on top of the licences.

### MasterClass and Brilliant — production instead of licensing

The content is made in-house: for MasterClass, celebrities and cinema-grade production; for Brilliant, years of building an interactive curriculum. The moat is the cost and the time of producing the library — the interface can be copied in a month, a thousand interactive lessons cannot.

### Canva — the library as half the product

Templates, fonts, stock photography and illustration with the rights cleared: the user is not paying for an editor but for the fact that everything is already inside and it is legal. A combination of licences, in-house production and contributions from the community.

## How it is bypassed

### Generated content — Suno against catalogues, AI stock against Getty

Generation creates a substitute for licensed content at zero rights cost: music to fit a mood instead of a licensed track, a generated image instead of a stock one. Shutterstock's answer was telling — it started selling its archives as training data for models, so the rights holder becomes the raw-material supplier for the thing that replaces it. The moat holds where a specific piece of content is required — this song, this course by this author — and melts where "something suitable" is enough.

### User-generated libraries — the community produces for free

Figma Community and the Notion template galleries are libraries users fill themselves for the sake of their own visibility. The attacker does not have to license or produce anything; it has to build the motivation to share. The incumbent's curated library now competes with an endless free one.

### Past the aggregator to the author — Substack and open podcasts

You need not buy the rights if the author comes to you: Substack gave writers direct monetisation and the catalogue assembled itself without a single licence. Podcasts set the opposite precedent — Spotify's bet on exclusives, hundreds of millions for individual shows, lost to the open RSS ecosystem, and Spotify largely retreated from exclusivity. Distributed open content proved stronger than bought content.

## Verdict

Built with licences, with production, or with a rights-cleared library. Bypassed by generating a good-enough substitute, by the economics of user-generated content, and by dealing with authors directly.

## Related

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