Key Takeaways

• Funding Success: Notes.fm raised $5 million from notable figures in the music industry.
• Royalty Recovery: The platform aims to recover over $10 million in unclaimed royalties for various artists.
• Service Offerings: Notes provides a free music credits database and a subscription service for music distribution and financial management.
• Competitive Edge: Tim Luckow’s experience with Stem gives Notes an advantage in the crowded royalty collection market.

Notes.fm, a music royalty collection platform started by Stem co-founder Tim Luckow, said on Thursday (Sept. 17) it raised $5 million from artists and music industry leaders, including Benny Blanco, Zach Bryan, Ari Emanuel, Sam Hendel and Julie Greenwald.

Launched in 2024, Notes was built to review catalogs across streaming services and collection societies, including the Mechanical Licensing Collective and SoundExchange, to recover what now is more than $10 million in previously unclaimed royalties for songs performed by James Blake, Zach Bryan, Mt. Joy and Girl In Red and more.

“Everyone that is basically investing in this round is investing because we found them money,” Luckow tells Billboard, adding that Notes has found money for 95% of the people who use the platform. “Artists should be able to release music and collect every royalty from day one. We built Notes to recover what has historically been missed.”

Founded on Luckow’s belief that distribution and publishing need to be combined for artists to collect all the money they are owed, Notes will use the funding to scale marketing efforts and expand internationally. Tainy, Mt. Joy frontman Matt Quinn and companies including Foundations, Mick Management and Twenty One Management also joined the funding round.

Notes service offerings are Credits, a free music credits database with more than 150 million song codes and credits that rights owners can use to organize and verify royalty data and correct registration issues; Releases, which combines music distribution, publishing administration and financial management in one workflow for a subscription fee of around $5 a month; and financial accounts, which partners with payment processor Stripe to help artists collect and manage their money.

Notes faces a crowded field of competition from both tech-forward collection platforms and distributors. But Luckow attributes his background helping to build Stem, the fintech distributor that became an artist favorite for handling split digital royalty payments, gives Notes an edge because many of those relationships have followed him to Notes.

Notes has around 10 full and contract employees and counts artists, catalog funds and other rights holders, but Luckow has big ambitions.

“We want to become the best music collection royalty platform on the internet worldwide, and we want more people to release music with us from the start so we can go straight away and collect their money,” he says.