Mogul ‘always on’ royalty tracking for musicians launches with $1.9M funding
Newly launched Mogul tracks dozens of input and income streams, including PROs, distributors, labels, and music publishers, to let artists and managers see their entire business in one place.
While not the only startup offering royalty tracking, Mogul is unique in its focus on serving individual mid-tier musicians, managers, and business managers, as well as its free tier and affordable pricing,
Founded by former SoundCloud for Artists lead Jeff Ponchick, the company launches with a $1.9M investment from Wonder Ventures, United Talent Agency, Amplify.LA, and former SoundCloud CEO Kerry Trainor’s Creator Partner.
$3.M In Unpaid Royalties Found
Artists and their teams need as many as fifty different logins to track down their income, missing an estimated 10% of their lifetime earnings, according to Mogul’s findings.
During the beta, Mogul (usemogul.com) says it tracked $30 million in revenue for artists including Besomorph, Attack Attack!, Drama B, and Color Theory and found more than $3.5MM in previously unidentified revenue.
“It was so hard to keep track of my royalties as they come from so many different sources,” says Besomorph, an artist with 3.7m monthly listeners on Spotify who was an early tester of Mogul. “Mogul helped me effortlessly identify all my unclaimed royalties.”
“We want to build a source of truth in the music industry, a utility where musicians can gain the confidence in whether or not their business is tight,” exclaims Mogul co-founder and CEO Jeff Ponchick. “We’re building out support for hundreds of different companies needed to connect all the statements and data across the industry, just like Mint does for personal finances or Plaid does in the finance world. Once we have the data centralized, we can cross reference it and let artists know how much money should be getting made. Then they can see if they’re collecting it.”
‘What we see as a gap in the industry. If you’re an artist who makes less than $500,000 a year, there’s little tech to help you understand your income streams or whether your music is registered correctly and to see what you are doing right or wrong,” says Mogul co-founder and co-CEO Joey Mason. “You have publishers over here, labels over there, PROs and CMOs, all these pieces of the puzzle, and no one who is putting it together for you in an easy-to-understand way.”
Bruce Houghton is the Founder and Editor of Hypebot, a Senior Advisor at Bandsintown, President of the Skyline Artists Agency, and a Berklee College Of Music professor.
