Topic
B2B Music Tech and SaaS
Software businesses that sell to labels, publishers, venues and other music companies. 17 conversations with founders, investors and experts, newest first.
Episodes (17)
Yoel Kenan, founder of Africori, explains why African music consumption is high but revenue stays low, and where catalog and export investment should go next.
Matt Urmy, founder of Artist Growth, explains why he pivoted to enterprise software for labels and why raising money before a product was a mistake.
Aidan Schechter, CEO of Patchbay and partner at 1916 Enterprises, explains why independent music companies share the same workflows and need common software.
Christian Ringstad Schultz, CEO of Masterchannel, explains how proprietary AI mastering and a white-label API built a profitable, lean music tech company.
Björn Lindvall, CEO and co-founder of Music Infra, explains why outdated file formats and a disjointed supply chain leave rights holders underpaid.
Ben Mendoza, CEO of Beatchain, explains how AI quality control, local payment systems and white-label partners help independent artists get discovered and paid.
Edward Ginis, co-founder of OpenPlay, explains how the platform frees music companies from distributors that trap catalog data and slow commercial deals.
Amplitude Ventures' Jakob Wredstrøm and Taj argue music tech investing has no real supporting data, few active angels, and mostly weak exits below $50 million.
Clémentin Diard, founder of Control Reach, explains why raising money for a music marketing startup is so slow and why the company moved fully to B2B clients.
Ola Sars, founder of Soundtrack, explains why businesses pay fifty dollars for a music subscription and how the company started as a Spotify joint venture.
Maciej Dulski, co-founder of MusicTech Lab, explains why boring B2B fixes for metadata and licensing beat flashy consumer apps in music tech.
Tajdar Khan, partner at Amplitude Ventures, explains why music is a passion economy and where B2B solutions actually make money in it.
Daan Archer of Copyright Delta and Pål Bråtelund discuss why AI needs registered metadata and accountable infrastructure to pay music rights holders correctly.
Karl Richter, founder of Disco, explains how a personal file-sharing fix became a music supervision platform, and why founder stress never fully goes away.
Pål Bråtelund of Music DNA explains how music tech companies can share data and revenue through collaboration instead of chasing an acquisition.
Jørgen Iden, co-founder and CEO of Crescat, explains how collaborative software replaces outdated riders and running orders in live event production.
Christian Ringstad Schultz, co-founder and CEO of Masterchannel, on AI mastering software, aligning co-founders, and expanding a Norwegian startup globally.
Questions these episodes answer
Why does African music generate so little revenue despite huge consumption?
Kenan says consumption across Sub-Saharan Africa is high but monetization lags badly. He forecast a billion-dollar recording market by 2017; thirteen years later it sits at about $110 million, held back by low-paying advertising-based streaming, weak telecom-linked subscriptions and unresolved rights splits.
From: Exporting African Music: Rights, Revenue, and Global Growth
Why is buying an African music catalog risky?
Catalog buyers face missing contracts, falsified reports and people who surface years later claiming ownership of recordings made decades earlier. Kenan says he was once given a falsified report and has faced rights disputes on other deals, so he now avoids catalogs whose sellers cannot produce paperwork.
From: Exporting African Music: Rights, Revenue, and Global Growth
Why haven't telecom companies succeeded with their own music platforms?
Telcos control payment and data bundles and have tried repeatedly to launch their own streaming products, but Kenan says none has managed to build a lasting music platform of its own, since users keep gravitating to YouTube and Spotify instead of a carrier's app.
From: Exporting African Music: Rights, Revenue, and Global Growth
Where would an investor get the best long-term return in African music?
Kenan would split money across catalogs whose audiences have not yet moved to streaming, such as gospel music, artists and songs with genuine export potential, and better marketing and data tools for the wider ecosystem, expecting returns only on a ten-to-fifteen-year horizon.
From: Exporting African Music: Rights, Revenue, and Global Growth
Why do apps built for independent artists struggle to make money?
Independent artists spend nearly everything on pressing records, merch, studio time and travel, so organizing their business sits low on the list of things they will pay for. Urmy's free artist app drew fifteen thousand sign-ups but zero paid subscribers within six months, which forced him to pivot toward labels and management companies instead.
Should a music startup raise money before it has a product?
No. Urmy raised a million dollars on a slide deck and a spreadsheet before Artist Growth had a working prototype, and he now calls it a huge mistake. His advice is to build something, get one real paying customer, and only raise capital once the product already works in the market.
How can a founder tell if their product is a must-have or a nice-to-have?
Urmy ranks buyers on a scale of must-have, nice-to-have and do-I-really-need-it, and only must-haves support a real business. His artist app stayed stuck on the lower rungs until he pivoted to management companies with rosters of fifty or more artists, which moved Artist Growth into the must-have category.
What has AI changed about building enterprise software for music companies?
Urmy says AI has made front-end interfaces trivial to build, but the back end has not gotten easier. Music data needs field-level permissions across as many as a hundred different roles at labels, managers and agencies, and building that securely still takes real architectural and data modeling expertise that cannot be vibe coded.
What does Patchbay do for music managers and labels?
Patchbay is a shared workspace built for managers, labels, publishers, lawyers and business managers to track an artist's releases, deals, invoices and touring in one place. It checks contracts against MLC, PRO and SoundExchange data so people can see whether royalty splits and credits match what was agreed, instead of using spreadsheets, Airtable or Notion.
Why did Aidan Schechter decide the music industry needed shared software like Patchbay?
After roughly 10,000 hours of conversations with music executives, Schechter found that independent companies were all solving the same problems with no shared back office. Everyone invoiced producer fees to the same labels and filed publishing splits in the same format at the same collection societies, yet each business hacked together its own solution in spreadsheets or Airtable instead of using one shared system.
How is AI changing how Patchbay builds its product?
Schechter says AI research tools would have saved Patchbay about a year of early architecture work if they had existed when the company started three and a half years ago. Now the team uses AI, including Claude Code, to rebuild front-end work such as onboarding, which frees them to focus on harder problems like automated catalog enrichment.
What does Aidan Schechter see as Patchbay's long-term competitive advantage?
He argues the moat is trust rather than software alone. Patchbay verifies client workspaces for managers and teams, including collaborators behind about 35% of last year's Billboard Hot 100, so that when a client's song involves someone else's team, both sides can transact through a shared, guarded network instead of starting from scratch.