When recovery begins before the money gets lost

Notes.fm has just raised $5 million after identifying more than $10 million in previously unclaimed royalties across catalogs including those of James Blake, Zach Bryan, Mt. Joy and girl in red. Yet behind those recovered millions lies a question far more interesting than recovery itself... why wait for the money to get lost before repairing the data that allowed it to find its way? By bringing distribution, publishing administration and collection into the same infrastructure, Notes is gradually moving the problem toward the place where value actually begins to flow.

Klem Loden

9/22/20266 min read

There is something rather peculiar about an industry capable of counting billions of streams almost in real time while allowing part of the money they generate to spend months, sometimes years, searching for its owner. The music has been exploited, a royalty has been generated, somewhere the value exists... yet a missing identifier, an incorrect split, an improperly registered composition or a piece of data that failed to travel correctly between two systems can sometimes be enough for the thread to break.

Notes.fm has built its business precisely around that rupture. On September 17, 2026, the platform co-founded by Tim Luckow, himself a co-founder of Stem before its acquisition by Concord in 2025, announced a $5 million funding round intended to support the development of its platform and its international expansion. Its backers include Zach Bryan, Benny Blanco, Tainy, Blake Slatkin, Mt. Joy’s Matt Quinn, Ari Emanuel, Julie Greenwald, several managers and management companies, in a round Notes describes as funded almost entirely by professionals directly involved in the music ecosystem.

The company says it has already identified more than $10 million in previously unclaimed royalties across catalogs including those of James Blake, Zach Bryan, Mt. Joy and girl in red. That figure did not, incidentally, appear with the September funding round, Notes had already announced it when the platform emerged from beta in October 2025, after examining the catalogs of more than 400 artists representing over 50 billion streams. As early as 2024, Futures Music Group also reported that the platform had uncovered seven figures in unrealized historical revenue for its launch artists.

At first glance, then, this could simply be the story of another royalty recovery tool, capable of digging through a catalog’s past to find money that somehow lost its way. Yet that would mean stopping at the visible result, when the mechanism that made recovery necessary tells us something considerably deeper about the way value travels through the music industry.

The money did not disappear, the path broke

An unclaimed royalty does not necessarily correspond to an exploitation that generated no revenue. In many cases, the money was indeed generated, only the available data can no longer connect it correctly to the person entitled to receive it. A missing or incorrect ISRC, ISWC or IPI, a composition absent from a registry, incomplete splits or a mismatch between databases can be enough to interrupt that connection.

Notes estimates that more than $1 billion remains unclaimed across the music industry every year. The figure is an estimate advanced by the company rather than an independent measurement of the entire market and should therefore be read as such, but the mechanism it describes is very real, since economic value may have been created while the information chain responsible for telling it where to go failed to remain intact all the way to its destination.

To recover that value, Notes examines catalogs across streaming services, collection societies and registries, including The MLC and SoundExchange, searches for missing royalties, identifies registration problems that may have prevented payment and then works on the underlying data so that recoverable amounts can be claimed. That is the curative side of the model, yet the infrastructure Notes is now developing begins to raise a considerably more interesting question... what if intervention happened before the rupture occurred?

From repairing the catalog to building the release

With Releases, Notes now brings distribution, publishing administration and money management into the same environment. The platform delivers recordings to more than 50 services while registering compositions with the relevant organizations, including PROs and The MLC, then centralizes the collection of multiple royalty streams. Its business model is subscription-based, with a musician plan starting at $5 per month, rather than taking a percentage of distribution or publishing royalties.

Presented this way, the offering could look like little more than an additional convenience, several services that were once scattered now available in the same place. Yet the proximity of those functions matters less than the proximity of the data they handle, because when a distributor manages the master while a publishing administrator manages the composition, each receives the portion of information required for its own function, according to its own timeline and within its own environment. Months later, however, when exploitation begins generating different categories of royalties, those systems still need to recognize the same work, the same rights holders, the same identifiers and the same shares. An administrative distance that appeared inconsequential at release can therefore become a financial rupture much further down the chain.

Notes is attempting to shorten precisely that distance. When distribution and publishing data originate and are administered within the same environment, the issue is no longer simply finding, several years later, the missing identifier or incorrectly registered composition that prevented a payment, it becomes possible, at least in principle, to prevent some of those ruptures from producing the very money that will later need to be found. Recovery therefore changes its temporal direction, it no longer looks only backward.

Value begins to get lost long before payment

The shift becomes even more visible with Credits.fm, the open database launched by Notes in July that now indexes more than 150 million music codes and credits. Placed alongside distribution, publishing administration and collection, this layer reveals an architecture that appears less concerned with simply placing several revenue sources side by side than with preserving the thread between the identity of a work, those who hold rights in it, its exploitation and, eventually, the money it generates, and this is precisely where the nature of the problem begins to change.

Music revenue fragmentation is often observed at its financial endpoint, when an artist or rights holder is confronted with multiple organizations, statements, payment schedules and accounts. Yet when a royalty remains without an identifiable owner, the rupture was not necessarily created at the moment of payment, it may have slipped into the journey much earlier, when a piece of data was entered, transferred, registered again or passed from one system into another.

Bringing several functions into the same infrastructure obviously does not make that fragmentation disappear. The MLC, SoundExchange, PROs, DSPs and other organizations continue to exist with their own functions, data and rules, while no single platform can abolish the institutional boundaries of the music industry. Yet if some of those boundaries remain unavoidable, perhaps not every rupture they produce is.

The pattern

The $5 million raised by Notes.fm is the event. The more than $10 million in royalties identified gives its system a substance considerably more interesting than a simple technology promise, yet the pattern only really begins to emerge when that historical recovery work is considered alongside the architecture now being built around new releases.

For years, much of music tech has responded to industry fragmentation by building specialized tools at different points along the chain, distributing a master, administering a composition, registering rights, finding royalties, making payments. Notes appears to be moving in the opposite direction, allowing enough information to circulate between several of those functions for data created at the beginning of the journey still to be recognizable when payment becomes due at the other end.

The distinction may appear almost administrative, yet it touches the Value Flow directly, because when a royalty becomes unclaimed due to a missing identifier, an incorrect registration or a split that can no longer connect exploitation to its owner, the music has not stopped creating value... the infrastructure has stopped knowing where to carry it.

Historical recovery will remain necessary for as long as these ruptures exist, and the millions already identified show just how much stranded value the past may still contain. Yet an infrastructure capable of finding that money becomes considerably more interesting when it uses what it learned while searching for it to intervene a few years, a few systems and a few errors earlier, which may ultimately be what Notes.fm tells us beyond its own funding round. The most effective recovery infrastructure may not be the one that keeps finding ever more lost money, but the one that gradually manages to lose less of it in the first place.

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