Mogul Finds Millions in Unidentified Royalties for Artists
The newly launched company has built uniquely powerful tech for finding musicians’ money, thanks to a $1.9M investment round and significant artist support.
Artists of all kinds and at all levels are haunted by the same doubt. It’s the constant nagging worry that they aren’t getting paid everything they are owed. With so many competing companies, platforms, societies, and middlemen collecting on an artist’s behalf, it can be hard to know who is doing what and if it’s being done correctly.
Mogul (usemogul.com) is here to banish this doubt once and for all. Founded by two music industry veterans with a passion for creator payments, Mogul ties together dozens of inputs and income streams to let artists see their entire career and business in one place, much as Rocket Money does with subscriptions. With successful artists already using the service, including Besomorph, Attack Attack!, Drama B, and Color Theory, Mogul has found more than $3.5MM in previously unidentified revenue while tracking more than $30MM—before the service has even launched.
Because Mogul has already proven it can solve one of the music industry’s toughest problems, the company has attracted significant investment from major music and entertainment companies. It has raised a $1.9m round from Wonder Ventures, United Talent Agency, Amplify.LA, and former SoundCloud CEO Kerry Trainor’s Creator Partners.
“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.”
Every artist suspects they aren’t getting paid everything, and the complexity of payments and revenue streams sows doubt. Artists and their teams are wrangling as many as fifty different logins to track down all their income, missing an estimated 10% of their lifetime earnings according to Mogul’s findings. No one trusts what they’re seeing, either. “When we interviewed hundreds of artists and managers, we heard the same thing. No one thinks they have it all figured out and no one trusts the reports they see,” explains Ponchick, who has worked with self-managed artists for a decade, in part as Head of Creator at SoundCloud.
For mid-tier and ambitious emerging artists, this can’t be easily solved. While bigger artists may have a royalty department, lawyer, or savvy business manager on their side, others face a fragmented and tangled set of platforms, logins, payouts, and reports with little support.
“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.”
"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."
In their mission to put the puzzle together in an artist-friendly way, Mogul created the clearest terms possible. The service currently offers a free tier that allows any artist to connect their accounts and begin learning about their business, then charges a flat subscription for those needing help to claim lost royalties. All fees are presented transparently. Mogul will continue to expand its tools and offerings in the near future.
“I see such a lack of clarity and so much pain in the space,” Ponchick reflects. “But in many cases, artists are provided with a plethora of data; they just don't know what to do with it. The goal is to get as much money as possible into artists’ hands because if they thrive, so will we. With Mogul, we would love to achieve massive scale in helping artists to piece together their business and achieve their financial goals."
About Mogul
At Mogul, our mission is to help artists understand their business and achieve their financial goals. We recognize that artists and their teams navigate a complex landscape of content and royalties, often missing out on their rightful earnings — a challenge we're determined to address.
By leveraging technology, we're crafting the ultimate platform for income transparency in the music industry, designed to demystify the music business and champion a new era of self-reliance and confidence for artists. Join us as we pave the way for a future where every artist has the clarity and support to thrive financially and creatively.