IP Drives Music Industry Funding Growth, But Q3 ’25 Volume Dips

Photo Credit: Markus Winkler

Is there any music industry funding left for the little guy? Leading catalog players drove Q3 2025’s cumulative raise total past a staggering $4 billion, but data points to year-over-year slips in both the volume and average size of non-ABS rounds.

These and other worthwhile insights are once again made possible by DMN Pro’s Music Industry Funding Tracker, which exclusively captures and compiles raises from in and around the sector.

Recently updated to reflect contributions from asset-backed securitizations – which are, after all, leveraging music to generate capital – the Tracker logged the mentioned $4 billion+ in core music industry funding for Q3, which boosted the year-to-date total beyond $7 billion, DMN Pro reported.

But as is so often the case in the industry, especially when one-stop databases allow for deep dives, there’s a lot to unpack here. To answer the initial question: Funding is still reaching startups, with Q3 2025 having delivered support for emerging companies like Arthos ($730,000) and Kahuna ($1 million).

Nevertheless, massive raises were in many ways the third-quarter story. The Warner Music-Bain Capital catalog JV, Concord’s latest ABS, Recognition’s own ABS, and SESAC Music Group’s whole-company securitization were announced during the third quarter and themselves clocked in at north of $4 billion. And beatBread kicked in another $124 million with its credit and equity capital disclosure.

Without securitizations or non-core music funding – the Tracker also logs raises that, while adjacent to the industry, are significant for the music world – Q3 2025 brought a modest seven rounds, the data shows.

All told, those rounds involved $161.7 million in capital, for an average size of $23.1 million. And unsurprisingly, there are multiple angles from which to consider the figures; omitting the advance-focused beatBread’s $124 million would leave just $38 million or so for core industry companies specializing in areas besides IP, to name one.

By contrast, Q3 2024 put up 16 core non-securitization rounds worth $425.3 million overall, representing an average of $26.6 million. Though it’d be convenient to paint a doom-and-gloom picture as a result, doing so wouldn’t really make sense in light of the huge ongoing bets on song rights.

That said, thanks to the Tracker, we can see that last quarter’s comparative funding selectiveness marked the latest example – not the start – of a trend. In a nutshell, evidence shows that capital was for several years reaching all sorts of companies in the music space.

As of late, however, there’s been a focus – one that’s most apparent when browsing entire years of funding in a few minutes – on businesses with well-defined objectives, clear-cut capabilities, and correspondingly strong odds of achieving widespread adoption.

But as things stand, it seems safe to say that the selectiveness hasn’t bled through to the song-rights side. At the intersection of continued catalog demand, runaway valuations, and a possible streaming slowdown, the point will certainly be worth keeping in mind moving forward.