How Kingsway Music Library Turned a Legacy Archive Into a Growth Engine
Background
Sample clearance is famously painful, months of chasing rights and burning budget before a record ever sees daylight. Grammy-winning producer Frank Dukes built Kingsway Music Library in 2015 to skip all that: an archive of original, pre-cleared compositions made to be sampled. If you've heard Drake, Travis Scott, or Taylor Swift, you've heard Kingsway.
For nearly a decade it's been a go-to for hitmakers like Metro Boomin and Boi-1da, sold on Shopify one volume at a time. But that model always waits on the next drop to drive sales. Dukes wanted to give creators more freedom than that, so he used Single to reinvent the format.
Strategy
The idea was simple: flip the economics. Rather than sell the archive piece by piece, Kingsway bundled its entire decade-deep collection into one All-Access Pass.
For a flat $150, a producer got the whole library for a year:
- The full archive, master stems included.
- On-demand downloads, redeemable anytime.
- One flat price for the whole year.
The window to sign up ran for two weeks only, a one-time drop. No tiers, no upsells, no subscription to renew. A producer either wanted the library or didn't, and the ones who did were in with a click.
Results
Repackaging the music didn't just sell more to the usual buyers—it reached an audience Kingsway had never sold to.
- 68% of buyers were brand new customers who had never bought a single thing from Kingsway.
- 67% of the year's revenue came from those first-time buyers, up from 50% the year before.
- Average revenue per customer jumped 40%, as one full-catalog purchase replaced a scatter of smaller ones.
The best part? Zero operational uplift. The pass ran through Single inside Kingsway's existing Shopify store, so all that new traffic and data landed without a migration or a broken setup.
Instead of all this music just sitting on my hard drive, I wanted to put it out into the world. Producers can approach it like any music they would sample, they can interpret it how they would interpret it.
Why it works
Kingsway was built to lower barriers, and the All-Access Pass removed the biggest one: the decision itself. Buying pack by pack means weighing every purchase, and plenty of producers never get around to it. One flat price for the whole catalog cleared that away, and the producers who'd circled Kingsway for years finally jumped in.