Year founded: 2016
Headquarters: New York, NY
What they do: Let the best be heard. 

A&R accounts for a large portion of any record label’s budget. According to the IFPI’s annual InMusicvesting in report, $4.5 billion was spent on A&R and marketing in 2015. Keshav Garg and his team are looking to reduce those costs, both for the benefit of these labels and to improve opportunities for artists worldwide. 

Using “a collection of extensive data points such as SoundCloud, YouTube, and Twitter,” indify is looking to predict the next big thing. They do so by tracking plays, likes, and audience growth for any artist in their constantly updated library, then sending the highest performers to their clients.

In the words of CEO Keshav Garg, “indify has a catalog of early-stage, emerging musicians that no other platform has. Our focus on identifying the best emerging talent early and connecting top talent with opportunities to be heard is what makes us unique.”

Following the recent success of SoundCloud phenoms like Post Malone, their algorithmic analysis will likely be part and parcel of artist discovery moving forward.

Visit indify here 

Year founded: 2015​
Headquarters: Los Angeles, CA
What they do: Eliminate the friction of getting paid for your creative work. 

Stem is a self-described distribution and payments platform​ for music collaborators. It shot to prominence in 2016 when Frank Ocean’s Blonde was mysteriously powered by this payment distribution service. Representatives of Frank Ocean and Apple Music declined to comment, but they nevertheless championed Stem as influential in its avant-garde approach to profit sharing.

Founders Jovin Cronin-Wilesmith, Milana Rabkin and Tim Luckow, who are based in Los Angeles, envision Stem as a game-changer in the royalties game for the independent artist. Their website describes the mission thusly: “Stem tracks and organizes revenue streams for artists and their teams, ensuring everyone involved has access to precise, actionable data and monthly payments.”

“We think that getting paid for your work should be simple,” Head of Brand Strategy Shanna Jade explains. “Stem has built a unified dashboard on web and iOS that allows users to distribute content view performance data, easily memorialize revenue splits, and ensure everyone involved is paid their fair share of earnings each month. We provide the tools artists and their teams need to enable everyone in the success of a release so that they spend less time making sense of spreadsheets, and more time focusing on making great art.”

Distributing payment to artists may seem like a pretty simple task, but with all the new platforms, creative deals, methods of consumption, and global collaboration that happens in modern music, it’s more complicated than ever. Stem is fixing that. Read more about them in this New York Times articlefrom earlier this year.

Visit Stem here

Year founded: 2013
Headquarters: Denver, CO 
What they do: Help people explore, experience, and enjoy music on a deeper level.

For around $25 a month, Vinyl Me, Please sends its subscribers a number of LPs, art prints, and cocktail recipes depending on the subscription level. The more you are willing to spend annually, the less the monthly cost and the more bonuses—which include vinyl-swapping, commemorative artist writes, and exclusives from the online store.

Up until 2017, their main offering was the Record of the Month—an original pressing of a record (which could come from any genre or any era), paired with an original art print and cocktail recipe. Moving forward this year, to improve flexibility, Vinyl Me, Please added the Swaps program, allowing subscribers to swap the current Record of the Month title with another record from a curated selection of archive titles.

With the resurgence of vinyl at an all-time high, Vinyl Me, Please is bringing the traditional business of record sales into the modern era. 

Visit Vinyl Me, Please here

Year founded: 2017
Headquarters: New York, NY
What they do: Empower artists to link up with the people they need to make awesome music and further their careers.

Starting out in music on your own is hard enough. Collaboration—the obvious next step to improving your sound—is bound to get easier with Treble FM. Treble is a community-powered platform that allows public postings, private messaging, and a tailored search engine to help discover everything from your next mixing engineer to a background singer or event photographer. 

Treble’s innovation lies in its founders’ mentality. “We’re not the first company to make a networking app for artists,” Founder Matt Bond told the Verge. “But most are built by tech people.” Treble is powered by artists and music-lovers, and Bond attributes their success to “beautiful design and successful community-building,” adding that the latter is “only as dope as the community of artists who inhabit it.”

Visit Treble FM here

Year founded: 2013
Headquarters: New York, NY
What they do: The cloud platform for music creation, collaboration and sharing.

With rent-to-own plugins, contests, and over one million samples and presets, a Splice account is an exciting way to immerse yourself in the production aspects of modern music.

Splice’s studio functionality offers free cloud-backup for your own digital audio workstation, whether you’re working on Ableton, Logic Pro, or FL Studio. More than that, its massive catalogue of sounds, DAW add-ons, and tutorials are making professional production feel as accessible as it is fun. 

Visit Splice Here

Year founded: 2014
Headquarters: Berlin
What they do:  Leverage machine intelligence to analyze event and audience data to accurately predict ticket sales.

Live shows can be tricky. “78% of events don’t actually sell out,” according to Michael Rapino, CEO of Live Nation. Stagelink improves the chances of success by measuring the prospective demands of a particular locale and demographic, tailoring the experience to support a promoter’s needs. 

For Stagelink, metrics are king. By analyzing live show viability, monitoring pre-sale engagement and over a million data points, this Berlin-based company is another innovator looking to use numbers to their advantage.

Visit Stagelink here

Year founded: 2013
Headquarters: London, England
What they do: Use TalentAI tech to discover, track, and analyze emerging online influencers.

Instrumental aims to discover influencers, artists, producers, and creators who can help their clients’ businesses grow. Their TalentAI, another patented algorithm-based system, uses social media metrics to predict emerging online influencers and then matches them with the needs of clients’ brands all over the world. 

With an eye towards changing the way sponsorships work for all parties, Instrumental acts as a liaison between clients—music labels, music promoters, and consumer brands—and the artists their TalentAI selects are picked to maximize the effectiveness of advertising campaigns and endorsements. Some of their clients include PepsiCo, Coty, BBC, NBC, Live Nation, Style Haul and Bic.  

Visit Instrumental here

Year founded: 2016
Headquarters: Austin, TX
What they do: Connect people through virtual reality and music.

TheWaveVR is working to push the limits of musical interaction by enabling artists and creators to host live streams and shows. The platform offers a wide range of customization for their virtual reality streams, sidestepping many of the difficulties presented by live events.

For example, Ash Koosha—an Iranian musician based in London affected by the recent US travel ban—was still able to perform for an American audience, digitally speaking, thanks to TheWaveVR.

The background of this company is as appropriate given their objectives. CEO Adam Arrigo explains, “Everyone at our company is a musician, and most of us have backgrounds in video games. I worked on a number of music games back in the day, like Rock Band, which was also a simulation of a music show—and it also let people experience and interact with music in way they couldn’t before.” Here stands the nectar of theWaveVR’s innovation: connecting people in new, exciting, and unique ways. 

“We want to give artists a platform to create and distribute this content, and let people socialize around it. Can you imagine some day soon when artists can go on tour and sell virtual concert tickets without leaving the house? And actually make a living through music? That’s the ultimate goal.”

Visit TheWaveVR Here

Year founded: 2013
Headquarters: New York, NY 
What they do: Make it easy for artists of all sizes to get their music in front of the right audience.

Feature.FM offers exposure on their streaming service at affordable prices with improved results as compared to Facebook and Google advertising. Billed as “smarter music marketing,” this service uses smart URLs to proliferate artist presence on Spotify, Deezer, and beyond.

“Most music marketers need to utilize too many different platforms for advertising, smart links, pre-saves, data analysis, and other pieces of their promotion,” CEO and founder Lior Aharoni says. “We believe that with the right tools, any artist with great music should be successful. Feature.fm aims to provide tools for artists to manage and analyze their entire marketing campaigns from one place.”

The service allows artists to target the right audience, but it also features a grace period where there’s no charge for the ad service unless a listener spends more than 30 seconds with a song. Due to its smart features, artist-centric focus, and platform agnostic elements, Feature.FM strikes us as a potentially powerful tool for fan engagement and inexpensive exposure.

Visit Feature.FM Here

Year founded: 2015
Headquarters: Phoenix, AZ
What they do: Offer musicians and artists a new opportunity to earn a fair living from their creative work. 

Damon Evans, CEO, writes, “Artists simply can not sustain a career in music from the low streaming royalties Spotify, Pandora and iTunes Radio pay. If we don’t act now, there will be no more music.” Herein lies Arena’s struggle: trying to ensure sustainability for musicians and music in general.

Artists are craving new ways to get paid for their work, and Arena is here to help. Springing from the platform of a changing music industry, Arena seeks to offer competitive compensation to its musicians with royalty rates to help musicians “earn more money per transaction than all other platforms combined.”

Fans are offered free access to the musicians they support, and musicians enjoy a non-exclusive relationship that yields profits touted as the highest in the industry as well as real-time and monthly reports on song performance. Users can set up their artist page to earn $.01 per song stream, or log in to listen to their favorite artists and in turn generate revenue by unlocking downloads through their “listen-to-own” feature. 

Visit Arena here