Merlin Announces New Partnership with Canva to Bring Merlin Member Music to the Visual Communications and Graphic Design Platform
For the first time, paid and education Canva customers will be able to access thousands of popular song clips to add to their videos, social posts, education content and more.
SYDNEY/LOS ANGELES, June 29, 2023 – Today, Canva, the world’s first all-in-one visual communication platform, announced partnerships with Warner Music Group (including Warner Recorded Music and Warner Chappell Music) and Merlin, which for the first time will grant paid and education Canva customers in many countries unprecedented access to use music clips from some of the world’s biggest artists in their designs.
Canva will be the first visual communication platform to add commercially released music clips at the point of creation, for content that can be shared across multiple platforms. Canva customers can access clips from these industry-leading collections beginning this fall.
By making today’s most popular music accessible in the Canva editor, customers can fully realize their creative vision, instantly resize their design for any channel, and export it directly to social platforms, content management tools, collaboration software and more. Canva is home to a community of 135 million people globally, who create an average of 250 designs every second. Labels and artists now have an opportunity to get their music in front of millions of engaged creators in the United States, Europe, Brazil, Canada, and Australia and will earn royalties when clips of their songs are used in published Canva designs.
“Music is such a fundamental expression of creativity, and offers an inspirational starting point for many. We are thrilled to welcome Warner Music Group and Merlin to the Canva content ecosystem, and can’t wait to see what millions of music fans, content creators, educators and beyond design using content from their favorite artists.”
Silvia Oviedo, Head of Content, Discovery & Print at Canva.
In addition to using the popular songs trending across social platforms in videos or carousels for social media, Canva customers can also add clips of their favorite tracks to presentations, internal training videos, educational videos, and more. On-trend templates and the drag-and-drop editor make it simple to create professional-looking designs, and take them to the next level with animations, graphics, audio tracks, filters, and special effects. Canva also recently launched Beat Sync, a tool in the Canva editor that helps users match their video footage to the beat of their selected soundtrack.
Content creation for social media on Canva has grown exponentially in recent years, as video-based social platforms drive the growth of the emerging visual economy. Online video usage represents more than 80% of global internet traffic (according to Cisco), and exports of Canva designs using TikTok templates has more than tripled in the last year. The number of videos created on Canva has grown by 70% in the last 12 months, and an increasing number of searches are for specific audio tracks.
Warner Music Group’s and Merlin’s libraries will be available for Canva Pro, Canva for Education, and Canva for Nonprofit customers to add music clips to their designs, with small teams using Canva for Teams to follow. Later this year, Canva will share more information on additional efforts to expand design possibilities for music fans.
“We are excited to partner with Canva, a dynamic platform that empowers creativity and self-expression. Merlin prides itself on being a market leader in bringing independent music to new discovery platforms — this partnership with Canva will allow creators to connect with the vast array of Merlin member music from around the world. This is yet another significant milestone in Merlin’s commitment to drive the evolution of the digital music landscape and open up new forms of revenue opportunities for our members.”
Jeremy Sirota, CEO of Merlin
About Canva
Launched in 2013, Canva is a free online visual communications and collaboration platform with a mission to empower everyone in the world to design. Featuring a simple drag-and-drop user interface and a vast range of templates ranging from presentations, documents, websites, social media graphics, posters, apparel to videos, plus a huge library of fonts, stock photography, illustrations, video footage, and audio clips, anyone can take an idea and create something beautiful.
About Merlin
Merlin is the independents’ digital music licensing partner. We’ve negotiated premium deals with Apple, Facebook, SoundCloud, Spotify, TikTok, YouTube, and 40 other innovative platforms around the world. Our global membership is from nearly 70 countries around the world, representing 15% of the recorded music market. We are independent record labels, distributors, label services companies, and other rightsholders. We are a mission-driven organization that operates like a not-for-profit and is funded entirely by our members at a 1.5% admin fee. Merlin’s world-class relationships, white-glove support, and suite of partnerships helps independents compete at the highest level.
