When recovery begins before the money gets lost
Notes.fm has just raised $5 million after finding more than $10 million in royalties that had never reached catalogs including James Blake, Zach Bryan, Mt. Joy and girl in red. Recovering that money solves the problem once it has already happened, but the more interesting part sits a little farther upstream, at the point where incomplete or fragmented data first sends value in the wrong direction. By bringing distribution, publishing administration and collection into the same infrastructure, Notes is beginning to work closer to that point, before the money needs to be found because the information carrying it has already lost the way.
Klem Loden
9/22/20266 min read
There is something rather peculiar about an industry capable of counting billions of streams almost as they happen while some of the money generated by those same plays can spend months, sometimes years, looking for the person it belongs to. The music has already been exploited and the value has already been created, yet somewhere between the recording, the composition, the rights holder and the organizations responsible for paying them, an identifier goes missing, a split is wrong, a work is absent from a registry or two databases simply fail to recognize the same piece of music in quite the same way. The money has not vanished. The thread carrying it has broken.
Notes.fm has built much of its business by picking up that thread. On September 17, 2026, the company announced a $5 million funding round backed almost entirely by people and companies already inside the music business, including Zach Bryan, Benny Blanco, Tainy, Blake Slatkin, Mt. Joy’s Matt Quinn, Ari Emanuel, Julie Greenwald and several management companies. The funding is intended to support further development of the platform and its expansion towards more artists internationally, but the amount raised is perhaps less revealing than what Notes had already found before the new capital arrived.
More than $10 million in previously unclaimed royalties had already been identified across work connected to artists including James Blake, Zach Bryan and Mt. Joy, after Notes examined catalogs whose combined streams run into the tens of billions. That $10 million did not suddenly appear with the September announcement either, because Notes had already been reporting substantial historical recovery work before this funding round, which leaves a rather obvious question sitting behind the recovered money. If millions can be found after losing their connection to the people entitled to receive them, where exactly did that connection break in the first place?
The money did not disappear, the path broke
A royalty can exist perfectly well without knowing where to go. One play may generate value on the recording side, the composition side or both, while payment depends upon a chain of information capable of identifying the work, identifying the people attached to it, carrying the correct splits and allowing separate systems to understand that they are all looking at the same thing. Remove one useful piece somewhere along that route and the exploitation does not reverse itself, the stream still happened, the broadcast still happened and the money may still have been generated, only its journey towards the correct recipient has become considerably less certain.
This is the territory Notes enters when it reviews an existing catalog. Its system checks information across streaming services, collection societies and registries, including The MLC and SoundExchange, looking for registrations, identifiers and other data that may explain why royalties have failed to reach their destination. The company estimates that more than $1 billion remains unclaimed across the music industry every year, although that figure belongs to Notes and should be read as the company’s estimate rather than an independent measurement of the entire market. What matters here is the mechanism beneath it, because money can become stranded long after the error responsible for stranding it has disappeared into the catalog’s history.
Recovery consequently begins by walking backwards. A missing payment leads towards a registration, the registration towards a composition or recording, then farther back towards the credits, identifiers and ownership information that should have travelled with the work in the first place. Follow enough royalties in that direction and another possibility eventually appears, because once the places where the thread tends to break become visible, there is little reason to wait several years before looking at them.
From repairing the catalog to building the release
This is where Releases changes the direction of the picture. Notes now combines distribution, publishing administration and royalty collection within the same release flow, delivering recordings to more than 50 platforms while connecting songs, credits, splits and identifiers to them and handling composition registration through PROs and The MLC. Recording and songwriting ownership remain separate, with two independent 100% pools, but the information describing both sides can begin its journey from the same environment.
That distinction matters because a release does not remain administratively where it began. The master travels towards DSPs, the composition towards publishing and collection systems, performance and mechanical royalties take their respective routes, and eventually several organizations may need to recognize the same work from information that has travelled through entirely different places. When those journeys begin from fragmented or inconsistent data, a tiny discrepancy near the start can spend months moving downstream before anybody encounters it as missing money.
Bringing distribution and publishing administration into one environment cannot remove every boundary the music industry places between those journeys, but it can move some of the checking closer to the moment at which the information is created. Notes allows credits, roles, splits, ISRCs, UPCs and IPIs to remain connected to a release while the recording and composition sides are handled separately, which means the platform is no longer working exclusively with a catalog after something has gone wrong. It can stand much nearer the beginning of the route.
The business model follows the same architecture rather than taking a percentage from each royalty stream. Notes operates through a flat subscription, with a musician tier that becomes $5 per month after its free tier, while company plans begin at $100 per month, and the company says it takes no percentage of recording or songwriting royalties. The significance here is not really the price itself, but that distribution, publishing administration and collection are being treated as parts of one account rather than separate commercial relationships that happen to concern the same music.
Value begins to get lost long before payment
Credits.fm makes the movement farther upstream easier to see. Launched by Notes in June 2026, the open database indexes more than 150 million song codes and credits across rights databases, collection societies and registries, making ISRC, ISWC and IPI information searchable while providing infrastructure through which that attribution data can be used elsewhere. Put beside catalog review, distribution, publishing administration and collection, Credits.fm begins to look less like an isolated metadata product than another point along the same journey.
The journey starts with knowing what the work is and who belongs to it. From there come registrations, exploitation, the different royalties generated by that exploitation and finally payment, so when the person waiting at the other end discovers that money is missing, the error may already be several systems and several years behind them. Looking only at the payment therefore means arriving rather late at a problem whose first visible trace may have existed before the recording was ever delivered.
None of this makes the institutional fragmentation disappear. DSPs, PROs, The MLC, SoundExchange and the many other organizations involved in music rights continue to perform different functions under different rules, while the recording and composition remain distinct rights even when their information is managed through the same platform. Notes cannot collapse that landscape into one system, nor does its own product architecture suggest that it can. What it can attempt to preserve is the thread travelling through more of it.
The pattern
The $5 million funding round gives Notes more capital with which to continue building, while the more than $10 million in royalties already identified gives us something more useful to examine than a technology promise. Those recovered royalties are evidence of what Notes has encountered while looking backwards through existing catalogs, and Releases places the company at another point entirely, near the moment when some of the information it previously had to reconstruct is first being assembled.
For years, music technology has often met fragmentation with another specialized layer, one company distributing the recording, another administering publishing, another collecting a particular royalty and another searching for whatever slipped between them. Notes is assembling several of those functions inside the same environment, not because the rights themselves have become one thing, but because the information travelling beside them may have rather less distance in which to lose contact with itself.
That difference reaches directly into Value Flows. When a royalty becomes unclaimed because the exploitation can no longer be reliably connected to a work, a right or its owner, the music has already done its part, somebody listened, watched, broadcast or otherwise used it and value entered the system. What failed farther along the route was the information required to carry that value home.
Historical recovery will remain necessary while old catalogs still contain those ruptures, and Notes has already found millions of dollars by walking back through them. The more interesting possibility begins when the same infrastructure turns around and faces the other direction, towards releases whose data has not yet had time to become a recovery problem, because perhaps the most useful lesson hidden inside $10 million of lost royalties is not simply how to find them again. It is where to stop losing them.
Verified Sources and References
Music Business Worldwide, “Stem co-founder Tim Luckow raises $5M for royalty platform Notes.fm; Zach Bryan, Benny Blanco and Ari Emanuel among the backers”, September 17, 2026.
Billboard Pro, “Notes.fm raises $5 million to help artists recover lost royalties”, September 17, 2026.
Notes.fm, press release announcing its $5 million funding round, September 17, 2026.
Notes.fm, “Unclaimed (Black-Box) Royalties”, documentation on unclaimed royalties, metadata mismatches and royalty recovery.
Notes.fm, documentation on Releases, distribution, publishing administration and royalty collection.
Music Business Worldwide, “Neon Gold Records, Avenue A unite to launch Futures Music Group”, October 23, 2024.
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