The world of music rights and royalties is complex, with multiple types of royalties to track. For artists, ensuring their data is updated correctly across all platforms to avoid missing earnings is a tiresome task that distracts from creative work.
Mogul, a platform founded by former SoundCloud head of creators Jeff Ponchick and former SoundCloud VP of engineering Joey Mason, announced it has helped artists track 1.5 billion dollars in lost royalties since its launch last year. The startup also raised 5 million dollars in a new funding round led by the Yamaha Music Innovations Fund, with participation from the Urban Innovation Fund, Mindset Ventures, and Fairway Capital Partners, alongside existing investors Amplify LA and Wonder Ventures. The company has now raised more than 6.3 million dollars in total funding.
Mogul currently employs six people and plans to grow its team with this new capital. Andrew Kahn, managing partner at Yamaha Music Innovations Fund, expressed confidence in Mogul’s founding team and their product’s advantage, which lies in its data layer. He stated that Mogul has built the most comprehensive first-party data pipeline for residual income earners, offering superior accuracy and speed compared to competitors who have limited connectivity to payers.
Since its launch, Mogul’s product has evolved. It initially provided users with a list of recommendations for better cataloging but now offers more actionable insights. These include better formats for lists and cross-platform corrections to catalog data. For example, the platform can identify if songs distributed to Spotify are missing from a user’s Sound Exchange account, which collects digital performance royalties from services like Sirius XM. The tool can then ask the user for missing information and complete the registration for them. Mogul has also added a bulk registration tool. On average, users have seen a twenty percent increase in royalty revenue by using the platform.
The company has rolled out a catalog valuation tool that estimates an artist’s catalog value across recording and publishing, breaking down valuations by individual tracks and revenue sources like Spotify and Apple Music. The core goal is to help artists better manage and monetize their catalog.
Mogul previously offered a free tier but found it unsustainable to provide automation tools at that level. Many musicians starting out or earning little were using it, yet the platform wasn’t useful for them long-term. To focus on providing more value, the company eliminated its free tiers.
The platform is also considering how to address the complexities of AI-generated music for royalty tracking. Performing rights organizations currently allow registration of music partially created with AI, but fully AI-generated music may face scrutiny on certain platforms. Tracking AI music presents challenges like volume complexity, ownership ambiguity, and attribution disputes. The existing infrastructure was built for a human creator ecosystem, and high-volume, probabilistic authorship could make tracking and allocating royalties more difficult. Mogul is waiting to see how the regulatory landscape develops but believes it is well-positioned to track royalties for any kind of music.
Mogul competes with other platforms like Notes.fm and Claimity. The industry is also changing at a structural level; for instance, the U.S. performing rights organization AllTrack launched a new division in 2024 allowing creators to collect performance and mechanical royalties from one place.