Notes.fm, a new platform from Stem co-founder Tim Luckow, officially launches publicly today with a mission to solve one of the most prominent issues in the music industry: unclaimed ‘black box’ royalties.
Notes.fm uses an artist-friendly, automated process to simplify a notoriously complex and outdated system that has historically led to hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties going unclaimed by artists every year. Notes.fm brings clarity to the complexity, requiring only an artist name and musician name to start scanning streaming services, collection societies, and registries like the MLC to not only identify missing royalties but to fix issues and directly claim the royalties that result from those corrections while ensuring future income flows correctly.
Notes.fm’s beta includes over 400 artists of every size, from established stars like Mt. Joy, James Blake and Girl In Red to legacy estates like Howlin’ Wolf and emerging artists like Adam Melchor and Anna Wise. Over the course of Notes.fm’s year-long private beta the platform identified over $10 million in missing or unclaimed royalties from songs representing more than 50 billion streams. For artists utilizing the platform to fix issues, Notes.fm has directly claimed an average of $15,500 per artist to date, taking money out of the so-called black box and putting it in the artist’s and songwriter’s bank accounts where it belongs.
“When it comes to music royalties, complexity is the enemy,” said Tim Luckow, CEO and cofounder of Notes.fm. “For over a century, musicians have struggled to get paid because of disconnected systems that were not designed for the digital streaming era. Notes.fm fixes that, handling the complex work in the background so artists can focus on the music. Every musician deserves every dollar they’ve earned, and we’re here to make sure that happens.”
Using Notes.fm, Mt. Joy has collected six figures in royalties directly across fixed historical registrations and new registrations for songs like ‘Highway Queen’, which was the first song to secure 100% royalty registration from delivery by Notes.fm upon its release last year and has since gone on to amass over 30 million streams across DSPs.
In another prominent instance, James Blake used Notes.fm to discover that roughly a quarter of all of the songs in his catalog had missing or incomplete registrations, leading to unclaimed royalties across these works.
Luckow, who helped redefine independent music distribution through his founding of Stem – which sold to Concord earlier this year –says Notes.fm represents the next leap forward: from “easily release your music” to “easily claim 100% of your money.” Where Stem empowered independence in distribution, Notes.fm is building an entirely new lane through a unifying framework for music credits and royalties, connecting the fragmented worlds of recordings, publishing, and performance rights in a single easy-to-use workflow.
The launch of Notes.fm comes at a critical moment. The U.S. Copyright Office is preparing for the redistribution of more than $100 million in unmatched ‘black box’ royalties through the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) likely in the next 12 months. Without proper registration or claims, much of that money risks being redistributed to major stakeholders based on market share rather than the artists who earned them. Notes.fm aims to prevent that outcome by giving every artist, from emerging musicians to arena headliners, a simple path to claim their share.
“What sets Notes.fm apart is its ability to move artists and their teams from insight to action,” says Steve Bursky, Founder/Partner at Foundations and an early investor in Notes.fm. “Rather than merely flagging unclaimed royalties, Notes.fm empowers users to identify, correct, and directly recover what’s rightfully theirs, representing a fundamental leap forward in artist-first rights management.”
Notes.fm’s founding team is rounded out by co-founders Derek Davies (Neon Gold, Futures Music Group) and Montalis Anglade (Soulection). The platform is now officially open to the public, inviting all artists to try it and see what’s available for them to claim from their catalog. Notes.fm forgoes participation in artist’s royalties, opting for a subscription model accessible to artists at every stage of their career, beginning at $5/month.
