Notes.fm raises $5M from artists to sell a $5-a-month royalty stack

Why it matters

Notes.fm's cap table gives Luckow trusted distribution into artist circles. The harder test is whether a $5 subscription can scale without taking a cut of royalties.

Tim Luckow (@timluckow), the Stem co-founder who has spent his career trying to untangle how independent musicians get paid, has raised $5 million for Notes.fm, according to a September 17th announcement.

The New York startup's backers include artists Benny Blanco, Zach Bryan, Tainy, Blake Slatkin and Mt. Joy frontman Matt Quinn, alongside Bryan's managers Stefan Max and Danny Kang. Ari Emanuel, Sam Hendel and former Atlantic Records chief Julie Greenwald also participated, as did music companies including Foundations, Mick Management, Twenty Ten Management, Triple 8, KMGMT, Good Boy, Mexican Summer and Breakaway.

Notes.fm did not name a lead investor or disclose a valuation. The unusually industry-heavy investor list is central to Luckow's strategy: musicians and their managers are being asked to move sensitive catalog, ownership and payment data into a young platform. Familiar names can help clear that trust barrier.

Luckow has made this bet before. While studying music business and management at Berklee College of Music, where he graduated in 2010, he started a record label and artist-management operation and encountered the distribution and payment problems that would shape his career, according to Berklee's profile. He later co-founded Stem, which built distribution, collaborator-split and royalty-payment software for independent artists.

Concord acquired Stem Distribution in March 2025. Luckow carried the same thesis into Notes.fm, expanding the scope from distributing releases and splitting their proceeds to finding money already lost across registries, collection societies and streaming platforms.

An investor list built for customer acquisition

The backers give Notes.fm a route into the professional networks where musicians choose distributors, publishing administrators and business managers. That matters because Luckow is selling administrative plumbing, a category where accuracy and reputation tend to outweigh novelty.

Luckow has been direct about using prominent artists to reach the wider market. In a 2025 interview with Chartmetric, he said Stem's work distributing Frank Ocean's "Blonde" produced a rush of inbound interest from other musicians. His plan for Notes.fm follows the same playbook: work publicly with artists whom other artists respect, then use those relationships to bring in catalogs at scale.

That makes this cap table part of Notes.fm's distribution plan. Zach Bryan is both an investor and one of the artists whose catalog Notes.fm says contained previously unclaimed royalties. The financing gives Notes.fm capital for product development and marketing, while the participants give Luckow a collection of potential advocates with direct access to artists and management teams.

Co-founder Derek Davies brings another side of that network. Davies, who also co-founded Neon Gold and Futures Music Group, said the round was funded almost entirely by artists, managers and strategic music-industry participants who had encountered fragmented royalty systems themselves.

One workflow for both sides of a song

Notes.fm's newly released Releases product combines distribution, publishing administration and royalty collection in one process. Musicians can submit a recording, attach songwriting and performance credits, set separate ownership splits for the master and composition, and deliver the release to more than 50 platforms.

The distinction matters because a single stream can generate several types of payments, each dependent on different identifiers, ownership records and collection systems. Notes.fm registers compositions with The Mechanical Licensing Collective and performing-rights organizations while also handling recording distribution and supported neighboring-rights royalties.

Luckow's pitch is prevention as much as recovery. Complete credits and registrations entered when music is released should reduce the number of unmatched payments that Notes.fm later needs to find. "Complexity is the enemy," he told Chartmetric, arguing that rights administration is better treated as a software task than recurring manual work for artists, lawyers and business managers.

Notes.fm has also embedded financial accounts and payouts through Stripe Connect and Stripe Treasury. Eligible users can hold earnings in accounts provided through Stripe, split payments among collaborators or transfer funds to an external bank account. Notes.fm is not a bank; eligible funds are held at Fifth Third Bank, according to Notes.fm's payments page.

The arrangement lets Luckow place money movement beside catalog and ownership data, rather than sending musicians to a separate payment service once royalties have been reconciled. It also pushes Notes.fm beyond royalty analytics into the daily financial operations of an artist's career.

The $5 subscription requires volume

Notes.fm does not take a percentage of distribution or publishing royalties. Its free tier covers 10 existing songs and one royalty review. The paid Musician plan costs $5 per month or $50 per year and includes unlimited catalog imports, releases, credit registration and monthly reviews. Plans for managers and other music companies start at $100 per month.

That pricing is an artist-friendly wedge and a demanding software model. Notes.fm must enroll a large number of musicians, move customers into higher-priced company plans or build additional revenue around its financial products to create substantial recurring revenue without participating in royalties.

Luckow understands the arithmetic. He told Chartmetric that the model depends on repeating a low-cost subscription across a very large customer base. The artist-heavy investor group can help Notes.fm reach that audience without relying entirely on paid marketing in a market crowded with distributors, publishing administrators and royalty-tracking tools.

Royalty intelligence is already attracting capital. Mogul, founded by former SoundCloud executive Jeff Ponchick and Joey Mason, raised its own $5 million round in February 2026 to expand software for tracking and identifying missing payments. Larger operators including TuneCore, DistroKid, Songtrust, Kobalt and CD Baby cover overlapping pieces of distribution or publishing administration.

Notes.fm is betting that musicians will prefer one account connecting the recording, composition, credits, royalty review and eventual payout. Notes.fm says it has identified more than $10 million in previously unclaimed royalties across catalogs including James Blake, Zach Bryan, Mt. Joy and Girl in Red. The figure is self-reported and does not show how much money Notes.fm has successfully collected or how much recurring revenue the platform generates.

When Notes.fm launched publicly in October 2025, it said it had reviewed more than 400 artists during a year-long beta. The $5 million round gives Luckow resources to turn those reviews into recurring subscriptions and new releases. His backers are also a practical test of the premise: if artists with established managers and business teams find value in consolidating their royalty work, their participation will carry further than another claim about fixing the music industry.