As music streaming continues to grow in ubiquity, a company that’s built a platform to collect royalties on music played across billions of streams is cashing in on the opportunity.
Kobalt, the European startup that has built technology and a platform to collect music royalties by tracking when even a sample of a song is played across multiple platforms, has raised another $75 million in funding.
We’ve confirmed with Kobalt’s CEO Willard Ahdritz that the investment was made at a post-money valuation of $775 million. It will be used to continue expanding Kobalt’s platform to cover more streaming sources, and to add more artists and labels to the list it represents, he said in an interview.
Today that list is already pretty extensive. It covers 25,000 songwriters, 600 publishers and 20,000 independent artists — working out to about 40 percent of the top 100 songs and albums in the U.S. and U.K. at any given time. Big names on the list include The Chainsmokers, Kelly Clarkson, Miles Davis, Dave Grohl, Dr Luke, Zayn Malik, Max Martin, Paul McCartney, Stevie Nicks, Pitbull, Elvis Presley, Skrillex and Sam Smith.
The funding round — a Series D — was led by Hearst Entertainment, with participation from previous investors Balderton and MSD, the investment firm for Michael Dell and his family. Prior to this, Kobalt had raised $60 million led by GV (formerly Google Ventures), and $140 million from a consortium of investors.
The $60 million was its last equity round; the $140 million was part of a total of $153 million that the company has raised to help finance the second strand of its business, label services where Kobalt either buys part or all of an artists’ rights to help collect royalties on their behalf. (That licensing business was expanded in 2015 with Kobalt’s acquisition of AMRA, which works with the likes of Apple Music in licensing deals.)
This latest chapter in Kobalt’s development comes at the same time that the digital music business is becoming increasingly important to the music industry.
Figures published last month by the recording industry association the IFPI noted that digital music in 2016 accounted for 50 percent of all music revenues globally, its highest proportion ever, working out to $7.8 billion of $15.7 billion in overall revenues (physical sales accounted for $5.4 billion). At the end of…