Music rights company Salt draws a major investment round from Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart, and Quincy Jones.
British music rights company Salt has announced closing a significant investment round with songwriters and producers, including Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart (pictured center), Canadian songwriter and producer Dan Kurtz, and legendary producer Quincy Jones.
The investment sees Ulvaeus joining Salt’s board alongside Robert Ashcroft, former chief executive of UK collection society, PRS for Music, and Roger Faxon, former chief executive of EMI. Dan Kurtz joins as Senior Vice President for the Americas, while Niclas Molinder (pictured right) is appointed as Head of Industry Relations.
Other investors in Salt’s latest funding round include the preeminent European investment firm Lansdowne Investment Company, and the family office of Nicolas James Group.
Salt streamlines music rights and royalties from attribution to distribution, with a global network that’s “flexible, accurate, high-speed, and transparent.” Its royalties platform processes usage, matches ownership, and calculates royalty distributions, providing societies with advanced royalty-processing software so they can pay rightsholders quickly and accurately.
“Making and distributing music is easier than ever. But the systems for crediting and rewarding creativity are stuck in the pre-digital era, unable to compete in a world where 140,000 tracks are added to Spotify every day,” says Salt CEO Doug Imrie (pictured left). “That’s why we created Salt. It plugs into existing back-office systems, processing usage, matching ownership and calculating distributions with cloud-powered speed and accuracy. With Salt, music creators will get played AND paid.”
Salt’s other software platform, Session, allows songwriters, producers, artists, and other performers to easily assign critical and correct metadata and songwriting credits to their work during the creation process, as well as share music releases with the downstream industry.
The platforms enable songwriters to access the so-called “Black Boxes” of unclaimed or mis-allocated royalties, which an Ivors Academy report found to be as high as $624 million a year. Already, Salt has signed a ten-year deal to process over $3.4 billion in music royalties with its first customer, Dutch music collection society BumaStemra.
Salt has also signed a deal with The Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) in the US to provide data matching services to improve music rights and royalties collection for music creators. The MLC administers blanket mechanical licenses for eligible streaming and download services, collecting royalties due under those licenses and paying music publishers and administrators, ex-US collective management organizations, and self-administered songwriters, composers, and lyricists.
