Mogul says it has tracked $1.5B in music royalties, raised $5M in funding | TechCrunch

Music rights and royalties are a complex world. There are multiple types of royalties, and artists need to make sure that their data is updated across all platforms so they don’t miss out on potential earnings. For them, ensuring that they have all the information in the right place while maintaining creative output is a tiresome task.

Mogul, a platform founded by former SoundCloud head of creators Jeff Ponchick and former SoundCloud VP of engineering Joey Mason, announced Tuesday that it has helped artists track $1.5 billion in lost royalties since its launch last year.

The startup also raised $5 million in a new round of funding 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 raised more than $6.3 million in funding to date.

Mogul currently has six people on staff and plans to grow the team with the funding.

Andrew Kahn, managing partner at Yamaha Music Innovations Fund, believes that Mogul’s founding team has the credentials and experience to ship products that can help artists manage their careers better. He noted that Mogul’s product advantage lies in its data layer.

“We believe that Mogul has built the most comprehensive, first-party data pipeline that exists for residual income earners,” Kahn told TechCrunch over email. “Most companies that we have looked into in this space purport to have robust coverage when in actuality, they have limited connectivity to payers. This means that Mogul can be trusted for both accuracy and speed.”

Since Mogul opened last year, its product has evolved. While it earlier gave users only a list of recommendations for better cataloguing, the company now offers more actionable insights, including better formats for lists, and cross-platform corrections to catalog data in some instances.

“For example, Sound Exchange is an entity that collects royalties for digital performance for when your music gets played on SiriusXM,” Ponchick said. “If your Sound Exchange is linked, we’ll say, hey, we see you distributed these songs through DistroKid to Spotify; half of them are not in your Sound Exchange account.”

He noted that if there is missing information, the tool can ask the user and then complete the registration for them. The company has added a bulk registration tool as well to add data to a source in mass quantities. Ponchick noted that on average, users have seen a 20% bump in their royalty revenues by using Mogul.

The company has also rolled out a catalog valuation tool that can give an estimation of an artist’s catalog value across recording and publishing. The tool breaks down valuations by individual tracks and revenue sources such as Spotify and Apple Music. Ponchick said that the core thesis is to help artists manage and monetize their catalog better.

The company earlier had a free tier, but it was not sustainable for the startup to offer automation tools at that tier, according to Ponchick, adding that a lot of musicians who were starting out or didn’t earn much royalties were using that tier, and long-term, Mogul wasn’t useful for them. To focus on providing more value to artists, the company got rid of its free tiers.

The platform is also considering how to tackle the complexity of AI-generated music for tracking royalties. Ponchick noted that performing rights organizations allow registration of music partially created with AI, but fully AI-generated music might face scrutiny on certain platforms. Yamaha Music Innovations Fund’s Kahn said tracking AI music will bring challenges like volume complexity, ownership ambiguity, and attribution disputes in royalty tracking.

“The current infrastructure was built for a human creator ecosystem. High volume, probabilistic authorship could make tracking, allocating, and defending claims to IP and royalties more difficult,” he said.

Mogul is currently playing a waiting game to see how the regulatory landscape plays out. Ponchick said that despite this, the company is well-positioned to track royalties for any kind of tracks.

Mogul is competing with other platforms in the area, including Notes.fm and Claimity. Things are changing at the structural level, too. The U.S. performing rights organization AllTrack launched a new division in 2024, allowing creators to collect performance and mechanical royalties from one place.