3 Music Tech Startups to Watch in 2023

As we wrap the year up, it’s time to look forward in the future of music and technology. There’s been loads of new technology in music with the rise of Web3, AI, royalty collection avenues and changes in marketing channels. There’s a lot to be excited about. Here are 3 music tech startups that I believe could make some waves in 2023!

SongClip

SongClip is an all-in-one music licensing and integration app solution for consumer applications that want to increase retention rates. Normal readers might have no idea what this means (I didn’t either don’t worry) but app developers are jumping up and down. One of the biggest problems with app development is that licensing music is notoriously difficult and expensive, SongClip streamlines this process across multiple levels of licensing. Do you want to add music to your social media app? Dance app? Dating app? Mobile game? After selecting a level of music licensing and a tech integration package to ensure accurate reporting, app developers can streamline this process. This is especially prevalent with the rise of short form content, where SongClip can license clips of songs to platforms like TikTok. This platform will make the digital licensing process exponentially easier and enable rights holders to be more efficient at collecting royalties from short form content.

Musiio

Personalization has always been a huge push by streaming giants. Spotify has about 20 playlist that uses your data to create a playlist of new music for you to listen to. One of the biggest sells of streaming is that users had instant access to millions of songs with personalized playlists, if that process begins to slow down the appeal of streaming lessens. Musiio uses AI to help the music industry curate, track, and tag audio more efficiently. For example, Beatstars uses Musiio’s tag API system to tag uploads with attributes such as genre, mood, vocal gender, key, bpm, energy, and more. According to Mussio, they tag about 20,000 tracks a day with a total of 6 million on this catalog. This makes it faster to gather information about a track, and then easier to place in specific personalized user playlists.

STEM

Music royalty distribution has never been a walk in the park. STEM streamlines the process of collecting master royalties and mechanical royalties. They also have distribution, financial, and artist centric scaling tools. STEM creates a dashboard that shows important figures such as monthly earnings, recoupment progress, and advances. These tools can be used by a variety of people in the music industry from labels/distributors to track macro royalty payouts, management teams to ensure accurate figures of royalty collection, and media/brands to ensure a streamlined royalty pay out process. STEM’s financial tools make it easy to split royalties among collaborators, get paid monthly, visualize data, and track recoupment. There are also data insight tools used to provide insight on royalty collection in both domestic and international territories, which has been previously difficult for independent artists. STEM’s scaling tools also provide an interesting avenue for independent artists to get more funding. Calculated from your monthly digital sound recording income and contribution, STEM provides an advance without giving up equity in your intellectual property.