Back to basics: Where music tech money really flows

In 2024, music tech investment took an unexpected turn: The biggest checks went to the industry's least glamorous problems.

Gone were the splashy bets on metaverse concerts, blockchain-powered royalties, and avatar superstars. Instead, these kinds of deals captured the year's narrative:

The shift from hype to infrastructure reveals an industry finally confronting its operational reality: For all of music's “digital transformation,” its core systems remain surprisingly antiquated.

Today's artists can command stadium-sized LED displays but still track their ticket sales manually in spreadsheets. Streaming services process billions of plays while artists and rights holders navigate byzantine payment systems, often waiting months for accurate earnings data.

Music's technology story has always run on parallel tracks. Consumer experiences — streaming, social audio, virtual reality — grab headlines. Meanwhile, the essential scaffolding of rights management, ticketing, and distribution quietly powers the industry's core functions.

In 2024, that backend infrastructure finally became the main character. Many forces drove this pivot:

This report analyzes 140+ investments and exits across 38 countries from 2024, mapping capital flows that reveal music tech's new priorities. We explore:

The story that emerges is less about reinventing the music business per se, and more about making its existing machinery actually work.



Methodology

Our analysis draws from a proprietary database of 2024 music tech investments and exits, compiled in the first week of January 2025.

We define “music tech” generously, as the tools, platforms, and services that power how music is created, distributed, monetized, and experienced. This expands the scope beyond creation and production tools, into areas like ticketing, sync licensing, marketing analytics, artist financing, and much more.

We verified each deal through multiple sources:

While we strive for comprehensive coverage, this report inevitably represents a partial view of the music tech investment landscape. Private market data is inherently incomplete; many deals go unannounced, and crucial details like valuations often remain confidential.

Our coverage also skews heavily towards North American and European markets, which together account for 76% of deals and 78% of investors in our dataset. This reflects both our network's current reach and the broader challenges in tracking deals across emerging markets. Our deal coverage is particularly limited in regions like Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America.


2024 by the numbers

All in all, we tracked:

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