Notes.fm has raised $5 million from a group of prominent artists, music executives, managers and strategic investors as the music royalty technology company expands a platform designed to help independent artists identify, collect and manage all of the money they are owed. The financing includes participation from Benny Blanco, Zach Bryan and his managers Stefan Max and Danny Kang, Tainy, Blake Slatkin, Mt. Joy frontman Matt Quinn, WME Group Executive Chairman Ari Emanuel, Chord Music founder Sam Hendel and longtime Atlantic Records chief and 26.2 founder Julie Greenwald.
Industry organizations participating in the round include Foundations, Mick Management, Twenty Ten Management, Triple 8, KMGMT, Good Boy, Mexican Summer and Breakaway.
The funding will support continued product development and scaled marketing as Notes.fm expands its offering to artists globally.
Notes.fm was founded by Stem co-founder Tim Luckow and is building what it describes as a new financial layer for the music economy.
The company combines music distribution, publishing administration, royalty discovery and financial-management tools within one platform, giving artists and music companies greater control over both their creative output and the income it generates.
The broader problem Notes.fm is addressing is the fragmentation of music royalties.
Artists can generate income through streaming platforms, publishing rights, performance royalties, mechanical royalties and other sources, with payments flowing through different collection societies, distributors and rights organizations.
That complexity can result in royalties being delayed, misallocated or left unclaimed.
Notes.fm has built technology that reviews an artist’s catalog across streaming services, collection societies and registries including The Mechanical Licensing Collective and SoundExchange.
Users can begin the process with only an artist name and song list.
The platform then identifies potential royalty gaps, helps correct the underlying data or registration problems and assists artists in directly claiming money generated by those corrections. It also works to ensure future payments flow properly once the issues have been resolved.
Notes.fm said it has already identified more than $10 million in previously unclaimed royalties since its public launch last year.
Artists and catalogs associated with those discoveries include James Blake, Zach Bryan, Mt. Joy and Girl In Red.
The company recently expanded beyond royalty recovery with the launch of Releases, a feature intended to bring distribution, publishing administration and money management into a single music-release workflow.
Notes.fm also announced a partnership with Stripe supporting the new product.
The combination allows artists to use Notes.fm for both distribution and royalty collection rather than relying on separate systems for releasing music and tracking the revenue generated from it.
Notes.fm uses a subscription-based business model rather than taking a percentage of artists’ distribution or publishing royalties.
The company charges a flat monthly fee and takes 0% participation in distribution and publishing royalties, aligning the platform around helping artists retain more of their income.
That structure differentiates Notes.fm from many traditional music distribution and publishing-administration arrangements where service providers participate directly in royalty revenue.
The company has also introduced integrated financial accounts intended to give artists additional flexibility in how they collect, store, transfer and earn on music income.
Those capabilities are part of Notes.fm’s broader effort to build financial infrastructure specifically around the operating needs of musicians and rights holders.
Another part of that strategy is Credits.fm, a free and open music credits database launched before Releases.
Credits.fm indexes more than 150 million song codes and credits, providing a centralized resource for organizing and verifying the information that determines how royalties are attributed and distributed.
Accurate music metadata has become increasingly important as the industry grows more complex and as AI-generated and AI-assisted music creates additional questions around ownership, attribution and compensation.
Notes.fm sees improving that underlying data infrastructure as a critical part of ensuring that artists receive the money they have earned.
The company estimates that hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties go unclaimed by artists every year because of outdated, fragmented and complicated royalty systems.
The new financing is notable because much of the capital comes directly from people operating inside the music industry.
Notes.fm said the round was funded almost entirely by artists, managers and strategic music-industry investors with first-hand experience navigating the royalty and payment problems the company is attempting to solve.
The participation of artists including Blanco, Bryan, Tainy, Slatkin and Quinn alongside executives such as Emanuel, Hendel and Greenwald gives Notes.fm a group of investors with relationships spanning songwriting, recording, artist management, agencies, labels and music rights.
For Notes.fm, the financing provides additional resources to develop its technology while expanding adoption among both emerging and established musicians.
The company’s longer-term goal is to bring royalty discovery, distribution, publishing, payments and financial management into one system, creating an infrastructure layer where artists can release music, monitor ownership information and collect revenue without navigating multiple disconnected platforms.
KEY QUOTES:
“Music is evolving quickly, and the finance systems around it need to evolve at a faster rate.”
“Between all of the actions required to properly release, credit and collect on music, there are a lot of places where money falls through the cracks. We built Notes to bring all of that into one platform — so artists can release music and collect every royalty from day one, and recover what’s historically been missed.”
Tim Luckow, Co-Founder and CEO of Notes.fm
“Having spent our careers working with artists at every level, we’ve seen firsthand how much value gets lost to fragmented, unnecessarily complex systems.”
“This raise gives us the resources to keep building the infrastructure and applications that we believe the next generation of artists deserves.”
Derek Davies, Co-Founder of Notes.fm
