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.
If you read Part 1, you know what “Overload” became.
The Billboard chart.
The Chainsmokers remix.
The bootleg community.
100 million streams.
A creative chain that spread further than we ever imagined.
That became vers1ons.
What I didn’t tell you in Part 1 is the other side of that story.
The part that still gets me.
I made those songs in my bedroom.
Not in a Sony studio.
Not with their equipment.
Not with their engineers.
Not with their money.
“Overload” existed before the contract.
I brought finished work to the table — work I made with my bandmates in a house in West London, writing and producing every day since we were 16 before any label was involved — and they acquired it.
At 24, I signed contracts I didn’t fully understand because I was broke, overwhelmed, and convinced signing was the only path forward.
The advance felt like oxygen.
The fine print felt so far away.
“In perpetuity, throughout the universe” sounded almost poetic at the time.
It wasn’t.
Legal language designed for Hollywood studios, not for a kid in a bedroom with a laptop and a dream.
The moral of the story isn’t that I was naive.
It’s that the system was built to work exactly this way.
And I spent a long time sitting with that.
Spring 2022.
A tiny one-room studio in LA.
Barely enough space to think.
So I started covering the walls with diagrams.
Then the ceiling.
Then the floor.
Copyright maps.
Royalty waterfalls.
Version trees.
Licensing logic.
Flowcharts connecting music, technology, law, and creative ownership.
Page after page taped across the room.
Most people probably thought I was losing my mind.
Maybe I was.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about the same question:
Why does the internet let creativity spread infinitely…
but not its value?
I retooled completely.
I went deep into copyright and IP law.
I learned the difference between transferring rights — what I did with Sony — and licensing them.
I learned what it means to build a company that owns IP rather than surrenders it.
I found mentors who taught me to think about business the same way I’d always thought about music:
understand the structure before you touch the sound.
And eventually I realized something important.
What happened to me wasn’t personal.
It was structural.
And structures can be replaced.
Four years of building.
An extraordinary team.
Engineers, lawyers, operators, artist relations — people who believed in the same thing.
And about two months ago I was finally able to invite my music friends onto vers1ons for the first time.
vers1ons is the infrastructure I wish existed when I signed those contracts.
Not a label.
Not a distributor.
Not another streaming platform.
Infrastructure.
The layer underneath.
The system that lets creators set their own terms before the internet runs with their work.
Automated licensing.
Royalty splits flowing through every generation of derivative work.
Creative lineage tracked automatically.
No negotiations.
No middlemen.
No fine print designed to obscure what you’re giving away.
Your music.
Your terms.
Full stop.
We’re now opening applications for the vers1ons private beta.
For artists, producers, remixers, and rightsholders who believe collaboration deserves better infrastructure.
Apply at vers1ons.com/apply
Next: AI, ownership, and the opt-out problem!
Here (blog.vers1ons.com) is where I’m going to document the journey.
The artist side.
The founder side.
The mistakes.
The discoveries.
And everything I learned after signing away rights I didn’t fully understand.
I'm David Johnston.
Founder & CEO of vers1ons.
And I think the next era of music should finally work for the people who actually make it.