The Team
Great companies aren’t built by finding the smartest people. They’re built by finding people who feel the problem deeply enough to spend years solving it together.
David Johnston
Vers1ons Blog
Stories, build logs, and updates from the Vers1ons team — a music-rights platform built for artists, labels, and the writers who back them.
What vers1ons Actually Is
Most people think vers1ons is a remix platform. It isn't. It's infrastructure that connects original works to every version that follows, allowing creators to license, distribute, and participate in the value they create together.
David Johnston
The Walls: They’ll think it’s AI.
The walls didn't became vers1ons, they taught me the values underneath it: creative freedom, collaboration, transparency, community, excellence, and education.
David Johnston
From Artist to Founder
I never planned to become a founder. I wanted to make records. This is the story of how signing contracts I didn’t fully understand led me from artist to entrepreneur, and why the obsession with fixing creative rights eventually became vers1ons.
David Johnston
Why Every Version Creates Value
Five years after I uploaded a song to BeatStars, a licensed version appeared on Britain’s Got Talent. The creativity worked. The collaboration worked. The infrastructure didn’t. This is why every version creates value.
David Johnston
The Version Economy: Why Every Creative Work Is the Beginning of Something Else
The internet gave us distribution. It never gave us participation. The Version Economy is what happens when every creative work becomes the foundation for what comes next—and everyone who contributes can share in the value created.
David Johnston
The AI Opt-Out Problem
The next rights battle isn’t about AI. It’s about ownership, consent, and whether creators get to set the terms before their work becomes training data.
David Johnston
The Song That Changed My Life Doesn't Belong To Me. Part 2 - The Contract That Cost Everything
“In perpetuity, throughout the universe.” At 24, those words sounded almost poetic. Years later, they sent me on a journey through copyright, ownership, and the infrastructure creators have been missing all along.
David Johnston
The song that changed my life doesn’t belong to me. Part 1 - The opportunity that got away.
Overload went Billboard Top 40. The Chainsmokers remixed it. Bootlegs and mashups spread across the internet for years. Millions of streams followed, but nobody in the creative chain could properly monetize any of it. This is the story that eventually became vers1ons.
David Johnston