ANote Music, a Luxembourg-based marketplace for buying, selling and earning music royalties, today announced the closing of a €2 million funding round.
The round was led by Seventure Partners alongside ScaleFund, with participation from existing investors and shareholders. The company plans to use this capital to expand its catalogue offerings, expand the number of people across Europe trading them, and continue work on the platform and its app.
Marzio F. Schena, CEO and co-founder of ANote Music, commented, “Music royalties have been one of the most resilient income streams in finance, and one of the hardest for ordinary investors to reach. We built ANote to close that gap: fair, transparent valuations for the rights holders who sell, and recurring royalty income for the people who buy. Seventure and ScaleFund let us do that for a far larger market.”
Founded in 2018 by Schena, Matteo Cernuschi and Grégoire Mathonet, and launched in 2020, ANote Music aims to bridge the gap between music and finance by transforming music royalties into an accessible asset class.
It’s a marketplace for buying, selling, and earning music royalties from top-performing catalogues, including songs performed by global icons such as The Kinks, Beyoncé, The Who, Backstreet Boys, Justin Bieber, Britney Spears, Drake, and Avicii.
The company states that, similar to a stock exchange, it allows music rights holders of songs to auction a portion of their future royalties in an open market. It enables them to sell or transfer their royalty interests and catalogues at fair market terms, rather than in opaque private transactions.
At the same time, investors and music enthusiasts can buy the right to receive a portion of their future royalty income. According to the startup, this opens up a previously exclusive asset class that offers recurring passive income and competitive returns.
Since launching in 2020, ANote Music highlighted that it has built a full market infrastructure for music royalties, which includes a primary auction market, a live secondary order book, and an automated royalties engine.
David Manjarres, General Partner and Head of the ICT department at Seventure Partners, added, “To unlock a global asset class, you need flawless infrastructure, not just a platform. ANote has engineered the definitive financial plumbing for music royalties. Bringing primary auctions, a live secondary order book, and an automated distribution engine under one roof is a rare technical feat, and it’s exactly why we stepped up to lead this round.”
This round will fund the company’s three priorities. The first bisexpanding the range of income-producing catalogues listed on the platform, working with labels, publishers, artists and songwriters to bring more music royalties to market.
It is also aiming to expand its marketing and user acquisition across Europe, targeting everyone from music fans and individual investors to professional clients. And lastly, it intends to continue investing in R&D for the platform and mobile apps to improve the experience for investors and rights holders as the marketplace scales.
ANote Music currently has more than 100k songs across 36 listed catalogues, 52k user accounts, and over €28 million in cumulative transaction value. In 2020, the company announced it had raised €505k from a consortium of music industry experts and European investors.