Mogul Tracks $1.5B in Royalties, Secures $5M Funding
▼ Summary
– Mogul is a startup that helps artists track lost music royalties and has identified $1.5 billion in such royalties since its launch last year.
– The company recently raised $5 million in funding, bringing its total funding to over $6.3 million, and plans to expand its team.
– Mogul’s platform provides actionable insights and tools, like bulk registration, which has helped users increase their royalty revenues by an average of 20%.
– The company has shifted its business model by eliminating its free tier to focus on providing sustainable value to artists.
– Mogul is monitoring the regulatory landscape for AI-generated music, as tracking its royalties presents new challenges like volume complexity and ownership disputes.
Navigating the complex world of music royalties is a daunting task for artists, who must ensure their data is accurate across countless platforms to secure every dollar they’ve earned. Mogul, a platform founded by former SoundCloud executives Jeff Ponchick and Joey Mason, has now tracked an impressive $1.5 billion in previously lost royalties for artists since its launch. The company recently bolstered its mission with a $5 million funding round, bringing its total capital raised to over $6.3 million.
This new investment was led by the Yamaha Music Innovations Fund, with additional support from the Urban Innovation Fund, Mindset Ventures, and Fairway Capital Partners, alongside existing backers Amplify LA and Wonder Ventures. Mogul intends to use this capital to expand its current six-person team. Andrew Kahn, managing partner at the lead investment fund, emphasized the strength of Mogul’s founding team and its technological edge. He stated that Mogul has built “the most comprehensive, first-party data pipeline that exists for residual income earners,” providing a critical advantage in accuracy and speed over competitors with more limited connections to royalty payers.
The platform itself has evolved significantly. Initially offering basic recommendations for catalog management, Mogul now provides actionable insights and tools for cross-platform data correction. For instance, it can identify when songs distributed to Spotify are missing from a creator’s Sound Exchange account, a key entity for collecting digital performance royalties. The company has also introduced a bulk registration tool and reports that users see, on average, a 20% increase in royalty revenue after using its services.
A major new feature is a catalog valuation tool, which estimates the worth of an artist’s entire catalog across both recording and publishing. It breaks down valuations by individual tracks and revenue sources like Spotify and Apple Music. This aligns with Mogul’s core goal: helping artists better manage and monetize their life’s work. To sustain this level of service, the company recently discontinued its free tier, choosing to focus on providing substantial value to artists who can most benefit from its automation.
Looking ahead, Mogul is preparing for the complexities introduced by AI-generated music. While current systems can handle partially AI-assisted works, fully AI-generated music presents new challenges for royalty tracking, including volume, ownership ambiguity, and attribution disputes. Kahn notes that the existing infrastructure was designed for a human creator ecosystem and may struggle with “high volume, probabilistic authorship.” Mogul is monitoring the regulatory landscape but believes its technology is well-positioned to track royalties for any type of music, be it human or AI-created.
The company operates in a competitive space with rivals like Notes.fm and Claimity, and faces broader industry shifts, such as the 2024 launch of AllTrack’s new division for consolidated royalty collection. Despite these dynamics, Mogul’s significant funding and proven ability to recover vast sums in lost royalties position it as a formidable player dedicated to simplifying the financial lives of music creators.
(Source: TechCrunch)