Sam Cooper (L) and Matt Quinn of Mt. Joy perform in concert at Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park on October 10, 2023 in Austin, Texas.
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A new technology platform in the music industry wants to help artists get (fully) paid.
Notes.fm — a service launched in 2025 by Forbes 30 under 30 alumni Tim Luckow, who previously co-founded distribution company Stem — aims to spearhead an effort to reclaim an estimated $1 billion in song royalties that fall through the digital cracks each year. To help artists find unclaimed royalties, Notes.fm scans music metadata — such as songwriting credits and recording information —to identify incorrect or missing information; correcting mislabeled metadata on digitally distributed songs can lead to artists collecting previously unclaimed royalties.
Notes.fm has identified more than $10 million in unclaimed royalties, including works connected to Mt. Joy, Zach Bryan and James Blake.
“The challenge has been: Everybody knows there’s a lot of money missing,” Luckow told Forbes. “How do you make it simple enough where you can actually help millions of people get money? That is the challenge that really intrigues me.”
Notes.fm
How does it work? Notes.fm cross-checks an artist’s catalog against music-rights databases such as the Mechanical Licensing Collective and SoundExchange, as well as performance rights organizations, including ASCAP, SESAC and BMI. The platform searches for missing registrations, mismatched recordings and other potential issues.
Once identified, Notes.fm can create a list of issues for artists to take to royalty administrators or, in some cases, correct the problems and help collect missing money.
“There are 25 different types of issues that cause royalty problems,” Luckow said. “Generally, five or more songs have issues for most people.”
Issues include live recordings or new versions of songs that aren’t properly registered or linked to the underlying composition, information that doesn’t match across the aforementioned databases or incomplete song ownership credits.
“It’s real money,” Luckow said. “It’s not the pennies game that people like to make it out to be. Sometimes it is, but very rarely. It’s usually thousands of dollars.”
Credits.fm
And earlier this year, Notes.fm launched Credits.fm, a free platform that connects the dots between fragmented digital databases in the music business. The platform brings song credits and recording contributor information into a public, searchable database.
Credits.fm indexes more than 150 million song codes and credits, making it a tool for artists and stakeholders to verify the information used to determine who gets paid when music is consumed. The platform hopes to create a more complete map of music ownership and attribution.
At times, keeping track of song metadata can be daunting. When mapping rights and royalties across multiple databases, mistakes can happen, and “that’s how you’re going to miss money,” Luckow said.
He continued, “There are very big songwriters we work with that are missing songs in their catalog [management]. Signifcant income-type songs. No. 1-type songs. It’s been surprising how many funds and big musicians [where] that’s been true. If you can’t look at a page and make sense of it, you’re probably missing money. It’s hard to make sense of the layers of the onion.”
Find more information on the platforms at notes.fm and credits.fm.
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