kobalt

How to become a VC, Amazon’s voice play, Peloton stock, Facebook’s new VR environment and more

EC Editorial Announcements TechCrunch Disrupt SF is this week: join us on the Extra Crunch stage TechCrunch’s biggest event of the year is happening this coming week at the brand-new Moscone North c

Kobalt’s edge in changing the music industry

Kobalt Music Group is driving the music industry to provide more transparency and faster royalty payments to musicians and challenging the traditional record labels and publishers with its own alterna

How to sell a startup for a $1B, Automattic, WeWork craziness, Kobalt, Netflix, Blackstone, and ClimateTech

Editor’s Note Apologies for not getting this roundup newsletter out on Saturday — I was on vacation this weekend. So this newsletter covers the back half of last week and the first half of this we

SexTech, Kobalt, sales efficiency, philanthropy and ethics, Brexit, and startup growth tactics

Tech startups want to destigmatize sex Sex, despite being one of the most fundamental human experiences, is still one of those businesses that some advertisers reject, banks are hesitant to financiall

How Kobalt is simplifying the killer complexities of the music industry

Backed by over $200 million in VC funding, Kobalt is changing the way the music industry does business and putting more money into musicians’ pockets in the process. In Part I of this series, I walk

Kobalt, Apple and smartwatches, Hadoop, customer support, and social work and AI

The Kobalt EC-1: How a Swedish saxophonist built Kobalt, the world’s next music unicorn My favorite pieces we host on Extra Crunch are our EC-1 series of in-depth profiles and analyses of high-flyin

The Kobalt EC-1

Music is the lifeblood for many of our lives, but that mellifluous sound emanating from our radios and AirPods belies an immense and intricate web of collection societies, labels, copyright holders, a

How a Swedish saxophonist built Kobalt, the world’s next music unicorn

You may not have heard of Kobalt before, but you probably engage with the music it oversees every day, if not almost every hour. Combining a technology platform to better track ownership rights and ro

Startups Weekly: What’s up with YC? Plus, mobility layoffs and Airbnb’s grand plans

In this week's startups newsletter: Y Combinator president Sam Altman is stepping down, Marie Kondo is raising VC and Munchery has finally filed for bankruptcy.

Music services company Kobalt is raising a big round that could exceed $100 million

Kobalt, a 19-year-old, London-based music services company that operates as both a music publisher and a service-based music company — among other things, it helps artists collect the royalties

The war over music copyrights

VC firms haven’t been the only ones raising hundreds of millions of dollars to invest in a booming market. After 15+ years of being the last industry anyone wanted to invest in, the music industry i

Avid Larizadeh Duggan, GV’s sole female GP, leaves to join music tech startup Kobalt

GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) has lost its one female general partner. London-based Avid Larizadeh Duggan is joining Kobalt​, a New York-based music tech company that acts as a publisher

Kobalt raises $600M to buy up (and monetize) more music copyrights

Kobalt, the music tech startup that has built a platform for rights holders to track incremental and full plays of music across a wide sea of platforms (in order to collect royalties on those plays),

Music rights collection startup Kobalt adds another $14M at $789M valuation, Bill Maris joins board

When he was still at Google Ventures, Bill Maris led a round of funding into music royalty collecting startup Kobalt, to make one of the VC arms bigger bets in the world of digital music. Now that he&

Music royalty collector Kobalt nabs $75M led by Hearst Entertainment at $775M valuation

As music streaming continues to grow in ubiquity, a company that’s built a platform to collect royalties on music played across billions of streams is cashing in on the opportunity. Kobalt, the

Kobalt’s AMRA Inks Its First Licensing Deal: A Global Agreement With Apple Music

Two months ago, Kobalt -- a startup whose technology tracks and collects music royalties from streaming music providers -- acquired and revamped and royalty collection agency AMRA to ramp up its music

Kobalt Quietly Acquired AMRA To Launch Its Own Global Collection Group For Digital Music

Kobalt, the London-based startup that has built big-data technology to track and collect digital music royalties from across multiple streaming platforms, is turning up the volume on its business. Th

Kobalt Tunes Into $60M Led By Google Ventures For Its Music Rights Collection Platform

The rise of digital music services has had some musicians up in arms over the way (and how much) they are paid. Now a startup that has built a better way to track this is stepping up its role in the

In Europe, Spotify Royalties Overtake iTunes Earnings By 13%

Spotify may be smarting from the removal of Taylor Swift’s music catalogue from its platform, and Taylor Swift may not care, since she is riding a sales blockbuster in the form of her new albu

Kobalt Raises $140M To Scale Up Its Digital Royalty Collection Business

Apple’s $3 billion acquisition of Beats Electronics, a possible IPO from Spotify and a review of music licensing rules by the Justice Department are some of the big developments that have p