Music Investment Marketplaces – Part 3: The Second Wave of MIM Start-ups, since 2021

The second wave of music investment marketplaces started in Europe, particularly in Sweden, from 2021 onwards (for the first start-up wave see part 2 of the series). With Tangy Market, Master Exchange and Anotherblock three new players entered the Swedish market between 2021 and 2023. The wave of new companies continued with Bolero (2021) in France, Sonomo (2023) in the Netherlands, OG Music (2023) in Italy and Parca (2023) in Istanbul, Turkey. In the US, three new music investment marketplaces were launched in the same period: Band Royalty in 2021 and sliceNote as well as JKBX in 2023. The developments in the music investment market since 2021 are now the focus of the third part of the blog series.

Music Investment Marketplaces – Part 3: The Second Wave of MIM Start-ups, since 2021*

MIMs from Sweden: Tangy Market, MasterExchange, Anotherblock

Tangy Market was originally founded in 2018 by former managing director of the Swedish music advocacy body Musiksverige, Linda Portnoff, in Stockholm, but was launched for the public in 2021. In the meantime, Tangy Market in partnership with the Swedish collecting society STIM to process royalty payments, developed the mobile app for the buying-and-selling-platform and acquired initial music assets. Tangy Market is a typical fractional royalty platform. Artists and other rightsholders can lease their royalty streams from their copyright for a limited period. Nevertheless, the rightsholders keep 100 per cent of the copyrights, because they only sell participation rights in their royalty revenues. Tangy Market targets small investors and music fans, who can download the mobile app, create a personal account and deposit money for investment. Investors can then buy and sell royalty shares of their favourite artists and participate in the royalty payouts. Besides local Swedish music catalogues, Tangy Market also offers songs covered by superstar artists such as “Different Kind of Love Song” by Cher, “She Don’t Like the Lights” by Justin Bieber and “Work B**ch!” by Britney Spears.

MasterExchange was founded by AI and blockchain expert Alexander Fred-Ojala with Star Stable founder Johan Edfeldt and music producer Jakke Erixson in Stockholm in 2022. MasterExchange is a music investment platform to buy and sell shares in music royalty revenue streams. In an Initial Music Offering (IMO) the original royalty owner sells a predetermined portion of the master royalties to investors. A royalty share is the unique tradable asset on the MasterExchange platform, representing a stake in a song’s future master royalties. Like other fractional royalty platform, the investors do not control the underlying copyright but own a participation right in the royalty revenue stream. Unlike ANote Music or Tangy Market, the MasterExchange’s royalty share is associated with an NFT on the Polygon blockchain. Nevertheless, MasterExchange conducts transactions in Euros rather than in cryptocurrency. In August 2023, MasterExchange raised US $2.7 million in funding from several investors including Vectr Fintech and launched the first initial music offering of the song “Sofia” by Alvaro Soler, released in July 2016, which has generated over 2 billion music streams across various platforms, especially in Italy and in Spain.

The Stockholm-based Web3 platform Anotherblock launched an NFT marketplace for music royalties in 2022 and secured a risk investment of US $8 million via three seed funding rounds. Music rightsholders can offer shares of their royalty revenue streams on Anotherblock’s platform. One example was the Swedish songwriter and producer Alex Karlsson, who wrote songs for K-Pop acts such as BTS, NCT, TXT and Twice, and offered the BTS hit “We Are Bulletproof: The Eternal” on Anotherblock’s website. Investors can buy a 0.004 per cent share of a royalty NFT for 0.023 Ether, which actually equates to US $63. The royalty NFTs are tradeable and can be sold on the secondary market on the Anotherblock platform.

Paris, Amsterdam, Milan and Istanbul: Bolero, Sonomo, OG Music, Parça

Bolero was founded by William Bailey and Arthur Amon in Paris in 2021 and is a fractional royalty platform. The business model is very similar to that of ANote Music. Investors can buy and sell so-called “Song Shares” in single songs or song catalogues. A Song Share is a digital asset that entitles to get a percentage of the right to receive proportional royalties from publishing and master rights of a specific song or song catalogue. Rights holders can transfer their income streams from the collecting societies to Bolero for a predefined period but retain the underlying rights. Therefore, the investors do not control the underlying copyright but acquire a participation right in the revenue stream generated by licensing of the song/song catalogue to music users such as music streaming services, radio and TV stations. Bolero also provides a secondary market platform, where the investors can trade their acquired Song Shares.

Sonomo is another fractional music investment platform operating in a similar way to the aforementioned companies. Founded by Faris Saher in the Netherlands in 2022, it offers investments in the right to claim future revenues derived from master royalties, but not the underlying royalties or master rights. Sonomo is focused on master rights and does not offer participation rights in revenue streams from exploiting publishing rights. The main target, therefore, are indie record labels and artists, who own their master rights. The rightsholders define the initial share price, starting at EUR 10, and Sonomo only facilitates the exchange of shares and handles all following payout disbursement. Currently investors from the EU can buy shares from 6 songs and 3 baskets of songs containing 42, 47 and 685 songs respectively.

OG Music was founded by Edoardo Tamburi and Federico Fundarò in Milan/Italy in 2023. OG Music copies the concept of numerous pre-existing platforms such as Anotherblock and MasterExchange, in which profit participation rights are sold to future revenues from the exploitation of music rights. OG Music promises investors: “if you purchase 1% of the streaming rights of a song for 5 years, you will have the opportunity to periodically receive the royalties that the song collects through streaming.” The investors have to deposit an amount of money in Euros on the platform by credit card or bank transfer. This can be allocated to different projects; however, a minimum investment of EUR 10 is necessary. In return they receive periodic payments from the different uses of the songs.

Also in 2023, the fractional music investment platform Parça was founded by Parça Teknoloji in Istanbul/Turkey. The business concept is similar to that of many music investment marketplaces already described. Investors can acquire shares in royalty streams in the form of participation rights and resell them on a secondary market platform, although the latter is, however, only in development at Parça. For each successful transaction, Parça charges a 5 per cent commission fee, regardless of whether it is an initial sale or a sale on the secondary trading platform. Parça is where investors can put their money, mainly for Turkish repertoire. There are currently 69 songs for sale on the homepage, with many of them by the same artists.

Back in the USA: Band Royalty and sliceNote

In the USA, three further music investment marketplaces were launched in the second wave of start-ups. In 2021, the music industry veterans Barnaby Andersun and Noble Drakoln established Band Royalty, which has acquired music rights of 57 songs performed by platinum-selling artists such as Justin Timberlake, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Beyonce, Cher etc.Unlike other MIMs, the company does not directly offer stakes in songs and songs catalogues, but in royalty music pools. If an investor buys a so-called BAND Music NFT, she will become a member of the Music Mogul Club, which provides access to the three royalty music pools. But to access royalty revenue the investor must buy at least one of the acquired BAND NFT from these music royalty pools and activate the staking of the BAND NFTs. This provides access to the revenues from the royalty streams across the 3 staking pools. The more BAND Royalty NFTs an investor owns and stakes, the larger is her royalty share. The NFTs are based on the Ethereum blockchain and only a total of 12,000 NFTs are available.

Unlike Band Royalty, sliceNote is a music investment marketplace, that does not use blockchain technology and NFTs to trade music royalty shares. SliceNote was founded by the Utah-based BeatBread, which started as a platform to offer advances to artists for their existing song catalogues, but also for their unreleased music. In return, BeatBread receives a share in the artists’ royalty payments, over a period determined by the artist. BeatBread was founded in 2020 by Peter Sinclair and was able to raise US $34 million in a first funding round in February 2022 and closed another US $100 million fund with Variant Investments in November 2022. In April 2023, BeatBread launched the music investment platform sliceNote, which offers qualified investors (high net worth individuals, record labels, music publishers etc.) the possibility to invest in fractional shares as small as 1 per cent per deal. Thus, sliceNote is not a typical fractional royalty platform such as SongVest and Musicow, but a music rights sales platform more comparable to Royalty Exchange.

Figure 1: List of music investment marketplaces

The fourth part of the blog series will take a closer look at the US micro-royalty sales platform JKBX, which could act as a game changer by linking the billion-dollar music rights market with music investment marketplaces.

Endnotes

Tangy Market, “About Us”, n.d., accessed: 2025-03-19.

Tangy Market, “For Creators”, n.d., accessed: 2025-03-19.

Tangy Market, “Investment Calculator”, n.d., accessed: 2025-03-19.

MasterExchange, “How It Works”, n.d., accessed: 2025-03-19.

Music Business Worldwide, “After raising $2.7m, music royalties marketplace MasterExchange sells out its first ‘initial music offering'”, August 17, 2023, accessed: 2025-03-19.

Music Business Worldwide, “Web3 music startup anotherblock raises $4.3m in latest funding round”, May 17, 2023, accessed: 2025-03-19.

Anotherblock, “The trusted bridge to music rights investments”, n.d., accessed: 2025-03-19.

Anotherblock, “‘We Are Bulletproof: The Eternal’ by Alex Karlsson”, n.d., accessed: 2025-03-19.

Bolero, “Frequently Asked Questions”, n.d., accessed: 2025-03-19.

Fintech Finance News, “Sonomo Hits the Right Note With Weavr’s Support”, November 22, 2022, accessed: 2025-03-24.

Sonomo, “How It Works”, n.d., accessed: 2025-03-24.

OG Music, “FAQ”, n.d., accessed: 2025-03-24.

Parça, “How It Works”, n.d., accessed: 2025-03-24.

GlobeNewswire, “Band Royalty Makes History With the Release of the World’s First Multi-Track Music NFT”, May 11, 2022, accessed: 2025-03-24.

Band Royalty, “FAQs”, n.d., accessed: 2025-03-24.

Music Business Worldwide, “BeatBread brings fractional investing to the independent artist funding scene”, April 12, 2023, accessed: 2025-03-24.

* This blog post is based on the report IP Finance in the Music Industry, which was commissioned by the World Intellectual Property Rights Organization (WIPO).