Zach Bryan and Benny Blanco back a $5m raise for the artist platform Notes.fm

Notes.fm has raised $5m, and the list of who put the money in is the unusual part. Zach Bryan and Benny Blanco are both backers of the royalty collection platform, and the company says the round was funded almost entirely by artists, managers, executives and strategic partners from inside the music business rather than by venture funds. No lead investor was named.

The rest of the list runs deep into the industry. Tainy, Blake Slatkin and Mt. Joy frontman Matt Quinn invested, as did Bryan's managers Stefan Max and Danny Kang. WME Group executive chairman Ari Emanuel took part, along with Chord Music Partners co-founder Sam Hendel and Julie Greenwald, the former Atlantic Music Group chairman and chief executive who launched the label 26.2 with Max Lousada in April. Foundations, Mick Management, Twenty Ten Management, Triple 8, KMGMT, Good Boy, Mexican Summer and Breakaway are the companies in the round.

What the platform does is chase money that was never collected. Notes connects to the collection bodies, identifies royalties that are missing, helps fix the registration errors underneath the gap, and claims whatever those corrections release.

The numbers it puts on that problem are large. The company says more than $1bn in royalties goes unclaimed by artists every year, and that it has identified over $10m in previously unclaimed royalties across catalogues including those of James Blake, Zach Bryan, Mt. Joy and girl in red. It first published that total when it came out of a year-long beta in October 2025, by which point it had reviewed more than 400 artists' catalogues covering songs with over 50 billion streams.

The pricing is a deliberate break with how this business usually works. Notes takes no percentage of the distribution and publishing royalties it collects, charging a subscription instead: $5 a month on its musician plan, with a free tier covering a limited catalogue and a single royalty review.

Tim Luckow, the chief executive and a co-founder, put the case in terms of plumbing rather than advocacy. He said music is evolving quickly while the finance systems around it are not, and that between everything required to release, credit and collect on a record there are a lot of places where money falls through the cracks.

Co-founder Derek Davies, who is also co-founder and co-chief executive of the New York label collective Futures Music Group, said the response from the music community had been meaningful and that the raise was funded almost exclusively by people who understand the problem first-hand. Futures counts Notes.fm among its strategic investments and said in October 2024 that the platform had already found seven figures' worth of royalties owed to its launch artists.

The company has been building outward from collection. It launched Releases, folding distribution, publishing administration and money management into one process, built its accounts and payouts on Stripe Connect and Stripe Treasury this year, and in July opened Credits.fm, a free database it says indexes more than 150 million song codes and credits.

The money will go on platform development and wider marketing as Notes takes the product to artists outside the United States. Our other coverage of the royalty plumbing includes Jamen Capital and Merlin buying Curve Royalty Systems and Jermaine Dupri dropping his royalty suit against Sony.