Fast Company names 10 Most Innovative Music Companies 2025
Respected business journal Fast Company has released its annual list of the 10 most innovative music companies for 2025. Not one of the major streamers or record labels made the list.
“The global music industry reached an all-time high of nearly 5 trillion streams in 2024,” says Fast Company. “In the midst of this growth, the most innovative companies in music are making strides to position artists for the future.”
Fast Company’s 10 Most Innovative Music Companies 2025
1. pgLang
For spinning a diss track into a creative empire
From Fast Company: “In 2020, Kendrick Lamar and his longtime collaborator Dave Free founded the creative communications company pgLang. Since then, Lamar and Free have been shaping pgLang’s aesthetic and influence, defining it via videos, brand partnerships (they created the viral 2022 Cash App ad starring Ray Dalio and made a short film for Chanel this summer), but nothing has marked Lamar’s pgLang-era ascent as firmly as Not Like Us.”
2. Seeker Music
For displaying a chart-topping way to breathe new life into vintage hits with Shaboozey’s “Tipsy (A Bar Song)”
“Seeker Music, the music rights, publishing, and record company, is bringing a unique, songwriter-led perspective to catalog acquisition. Led by Evan Bogart, the scribe behind such hits as Beyoncé’s “Halo” and Rihanna’s “SOS,” Seeker is committed to finding the untapped potential in preexisting material and “flipping” them into new songs.”
3. SoundCloud
For using AI to shine a light on emerging artists
“On a platform that boasts more than 400 million tracks, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. SoundCloud made key strides in 2024 to prevent exactly that. The past year marked the official launch of First Fans, an AI-powered recommendation algorithm for subscribers aimed at highlighting emerging artists.”
4. Merlin
For creating a library of licensed music tailor-made for emerging tech companies
“For cash-strapped emerging platforms, AI-generated music is appealing because it can be made cheaply for any need—from sonic branding to background music for promo videos or user-generated content.”
5. Red Hot
For celebrating trans life across 46 tracks
“Since its founding 35 years ago, Red Hot has become known for its dozens of charity compilation albums, beginning with 1990’s Red Hot + Blue, which aimed to raise money to fight HIV/AIDS. Red Hot’s latest release, TRAИƧA, is the organization’s most ambitious and expansive release yet.”
6. TuneCore
For snuffing out fraud with an Avengers-style alliance
“The old adage “there’s safety in numbers” is more than just a survival strategy; it’s good business. When confronting fraud—a particularly insidious threat to the music industry—higher-ups at TuneCore and distributor CD Baby looked to industries like banking and credit cards that had formed coalitions in their own battles against fraud. If they could do it, they asked, why not us?”
7. Alibi
For bringing cultural authenticity to music for TV, film, and content creators
“At Alibi Music, founder Jonathan Parks is bringing background music to the foreground, working with a roster of more than 400 artists and composers to add royalty-free music to film, TV, trailers, commercials, podcasts, video games, and more. The company’s catalog comprises over 400,000 audio files, and Alibi creates roughly 200 albums a year for licensing purposes.”
8. Tone
For turning record labels’ payment data into artist-level insights
“Tone, introduced last year by Stem Disintermedia, was born out of the realization that most artists lack the resources to answer a simple question: What am I worth? For all of the modernization and technical know-how baked into the music industry, labels still lean on arcane, outdated methods of tracking how artists are performing monetarily.”
9. Mechanical Licensing Collective
For leveraging public data to line creatives’ pockets
“With the MLC’s Matching Tool, members can propose matches of sound recordings to their songs, ensuring that they’re collecting all the royalties owed to them. The Claiming Tool allows members to search for songs that are only partially claimed—songs where shares might be missing—and claim their shares to begin receiving royalties.”
10. Music AI
For helping amateur music producers find their (synthetic) voice
“As its name suggests, Music AI is harnessing the powers of artificial intelligence to empower creators of all stripes, thanks to its 50-plus AI audio models. This technology powers Music AI’s consumer app, Moises. Known for its algorithmic stem separation technology, Moises isolates individual vocals or instruments of a song—known as “stems”—from a mixed track, allowing users to create individualized backing tracks that are ideal for practicing.”
Find the full list of all of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies here.
