Cédric Pistol is the founder and President of Payd, a B2B platform building the infrastructure layer for music rights management. Its ambition: every work should carry its rights with it, machine-readable, from the moment it is created. Releasing music worldwide is now something any artist can do alone. Payd exists so documenting who owns it is just as accessible.

Across six modules, Payd covers the chain from contract to cash: a multi-jurisdiction AI contractual engine, connectors to collective management organisations, a rights graph, exploitation tracking, payouts. The studio is the right place to capture a right, with everyone present, so what reaches a society is complete and ready to pay. Rights become data that travels with the work.

Before founding Payd, Cédric spent more than a decade building Next Play Music Group, with catalogues accumulating over 3 billion streams and fifty-plus gold, platinum and diamond certifications. Working inside the collection system as a client, he saw how much more it returns when a declaration arrives complete. Payd's position is deliberately collaborative: Payd equips upstream, the society distributes downstream.

Payd Labs is the technology company; its subsidiary Payd Copyright is a music publisher and collective management body. Designed for worldwide coverage with a go-to-market beginning in the ten largest IFPI markets, the platform connects to SACEM, PPL, SOCAN and SoundExchange. Its most distinctive work is a SACEM laboratory in the French overseas departments: seventy-five member creators across Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana, over twenty weeks, at zero commission.

Cédric builds Payd from Guadeloupe, with a team across Europe: Nick Green on industry partnerships in London, Jeffrey Ble on commercial development in the Netherlands, Jean-Christophe Lhotellier as CTO and Rémi Coquet as lead engineer, and George Ergatoudis, formerly of BBC Radio 1, Spotify and Apple Music, as strategic advisor. Engineering and governance are European by design: rights data is sovereign data, and where it sits in law is a structural choice rather than a compliance formality.

At Music Frontiers, he makes the case for equipping the fastest-growing part of the industry: ninety-six per cent of what is released each day arrives through independent and DIY channels, millions of creators generating rights every week. Building that capability where the works are made is, in his view, the industry's most valuable next step.