Kobalt Collects $75M In Artist Royalties

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.

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.

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.

While services like Spotify, Pandora and SoundCloud have been developing their own analytics services for artists to monitor how their music is being consumed on those individual platforms, another unique selling point for Kobalt is that it’s providing this kind of tracking in real time across a number of proprietary services, and it’s doing so not just for full tracks, but for samples and other fragments that get played.

Today, the company tracks music plays in twenty of the top digital streaming providing platforms globally, including services like Spotify, Apple Music and SoundCloud. The plan is to add another 20 sources in the next six months.

Kobalt does not disclose just how much an artist — be it a blockbuster name or a smaller player — can make using its platform, but it notes that it provides revenue uplifts of 25 percent compared to industry standards, simply from being able to track when a something is played.