Notes.fm Raises $5M to Unify Music Royalty Infrastructure

Music royalties can fail long before the payout. A recording, composition, credit, ownership share and registration can each be correct in one system and incomplete in another, leaving the musician to audit a supply chain that most listeners never see.

Notes.fm is financing an attempt to collapse that work into one account. The New York music-technology company has raised $5M from artists, managers, executives and strategic music-industry participants to expand a platform that combines royalty discovery, distribution, publishing administration, credit management, collection and payouts.

What Notes.fm Raised

Notes.fm announced the financing on September 17, 2026. The company did not name a lead investor or a round stage, so the transaction should not be called a Seed, Pre-Seed or Series A round based on conflicting database labels. Valuation, security type, ownership, board changes, financing terms and advisers were also not disclosed.

The participant list is unusually close to the product's target market. It includes Benny Blanco, Zach Bryan, Tainy, Blake Slatkin, Mt. Joy frontman Matt Quinn, Bryan's managers Stefan Max and Danny Kang, WME Group Executive Chairman Ari Emanuel, Chord Music Partners co-founder Sam Hendel, 26.2 founder Julie Greenwald, and music companies including Foundations, Mick Management, Twenty Ten Management, Triple 8, KMGMT, Good Boy, Mexican Summer and Breakaway.

That investor mix does more than fill a cap table. Artists, managers, labels and music executives sit inside the networks where musicians choose distributors, administrators, business managers and royalty tools. Their participation can help Notes.fm cross a trust barrier, although the company did not disclose any customer-acquisition agreements, governance rights or commercial arrangements tied to the round.

One Account for Both Sides of a Song

A recorded song creates separate rights and payment paths. The master recording can generate distribution and neighboring-rights income, while the composition can generate mechanical and performance royalties. Credits, identifiers, ownership splits and registrations have to remain consistent enough for each system to connect the use of a song with the people entitled to payment.

Notes Releases brings more of that workflow together. Musicians can deliver recordings to more than 50 platforms, connect compositions and credits, maintain separate recording and songwriting split pools, register compositions, collect supported royalties and manage earnings. The musician plan has a free tier followed by a $5 monthly or $50 annual subscription, while company plans begin at $100 per month. Notes says it takes no percentage of distribution or publishing royalties.

The company has also placed money movement beside catalog administration. A Stripe customer case study says Notes uses Stripe Connect and Stripe Treasury to provide financial accounts and payouts inside the same product where customers manage catalogs, credits and royalties. Notes says eligible funds are held at Fifth Third Bank, N.A., Member FDIC.

The Missing-Money Problem Is a Data Problem

Notes begins its Royalty Review with a musician's name and song list, then checks streaming services, collection societies and registries for missing registrations, mismatched recordings and incomplete ownership data. The company says it has identified more than $10M in previously unclaimed royalties across catalogs connected to James Blake, Zach Bryan, Mt. Joy and girl in red. “Identified” matters here: Notes has not published an independently audited product-wide figure showing how much of that amount has been collected and paid.

The wider problem exists beyond the company's marketing. The Mechanical Licensing Collective reported that, as of its February 2026 distribution, it held about $614.9M in U.S. blanket mechanical royalties still pending distribution, including about $260.5M classified as unclaimed. Those figures cover one statutory part of the royalty system and should not be treated as Notes.fm's addressable market, but they show the cost of records that remain unmatched, incomplete or unclaimed.

Notes is also trying to improve the data before it becomes a payment problem. The company says the free Credits.fm database indexes more than 150M song codes and credits. That record layer supports searches across recordings, compositions and contributors, giving artists and rights holders another place to see whether the identifiers behind payment agree.

A Second Music-Infrastructure Company for Tim Luckow

CEO and co-founder Tim Luckow has already built around a similar administrative burden. Luckow previously co-founded Stem, which handled independent distribution, collaborator splits and payments before Concord acquired Stem Distribution in March 2025. Notes.fm expands the problem from distributing new releases into correcting historical catalog records, registering compositions, collecting multiple royalty types and holding the resulting earnings in one account.

Co-founder Derek Davies brings artist and label experience through Futures Music Group. Co-founder and product leader Montalis Anglade and CTO Drew Baker round out the publicly identified founding and technical team. The current financing announcement does not disclose a new board member or a change in leadership.

Prior support includes Better Tomorrow Ventures, identified in first-party founder materials as Notes.fm's lead pre-seed investor. The amount of that earlier financing has not been publicly reconciled, so $5M should be treated as the current announced raise rather than an official total-funding figure.

What the $5M Has to Prove

Notes says the new capital will fund continued platform development and scaled marketing as the company reaches artists globally. It did not provide a hiring target, product-release calendar, country sequence or budget allocation. The immediate commercial opportunity is clear: a low-cost subscription with no royalty cut can be attractive to independent musicians and music companies that want more control over catalogs and earnings.

That model also creates a demanding operating equation. Notes has to make complex rights administration simple without making it shallow, support catalogs across changing platforms and societies, and turn identified discrepancies into money that reaches the correct account. The company has not disclosed subscribers, revenue, retention, margins, customer concentration, average recovery time or collection-conversion rates.

The financing gives Notes.fm more room to connect the record of who made a song with the systems that decide who gets paid. Its artist-heavy investor group can open doors, but the durable evidence will live in quieter places: cleaner registrations, fewer unresolved claims, faster corrections and more money arriving in the account attached to the right name.