We are excited to announce our investment in MusicInfra, a global clearinghouse for music usage.
Today, the simple action of pressing play on a song triggers a chain of events involving multiple intermediaries across multiple territories – sub-publishers, Collective Management Organisations (CMOs), back offices, and Digital Service Providers (DSPs). With such complexity there is ample opportunity for parties across the industry to work together, with MusicInfra, to find ways to make the overall supply chain even more efficient – to the benefit of anyone owning, controlling or creating music. This should lead to improved information of rights utilization and even more efficient and accurate processing throughout.
Founded in 2022, MusicInfra provides an AI-driven recognition and matching engine to help rights holders (publishers, composers etc.), collecting societies and music users (DSPs, streaming and user-generated-content platforms) connect and clear payments at scale. Looking ahead, this data layer provides the foundations to unlock future fintech opportunities including payment processing, facilitating payouts and financing.
MusicInfra is led by, as its CEO, industry veteran Björn Lindvall who scaled Hipgnosis Songs to $150m revenue and $2.7bn of music IP rights before being acquired by Blackstone. Björn is supported by a superstar team including Greg Quillard who led global partnership engineering for music at YouTube, Aileen Atkins, former General Council for music at Meta and Jules Parker, ex Global Head of Songwriter & Publisher partnerships at Spotify.
The Board consists of co-founder Bjorn Lindvall, Aditya Harnal, Raine Ventures, Kanisk Walia, MGV and co-founder Stefan Blom, former Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Content Officer at Spotify, now serial entrepreneur and investor. In addition to the board directors the following investors serve as Observers: Fred Davis, Raine Ventures, Max Samuel, Sno Ventures, John Yang, UTA Ventures.
Partner Kanishk Walia shared his thoughts on the investment:
“MusicInfra was born out of the team’s firsthand frustration with the fragmented and analogue state of music rights management where it can take years for royalties to be paid out and an estimated 20% of revenues are lost due to data attribution errors. We’re excited to partner with Björn and the team to build a platform which provides a better experience for all market participants and that is analogous to financial markets infrastructure.”
You can read more about MusicInfra’s funding round here.
