Member Spotlight: Notes

Notes: Music Royalties, Simplified


For most independent labels and artists, releasing music and getting paid for it happen in many different places. You deliver through a distributor, then chase publishing, mechanicals, and neighboring rights across a patchwork of societies, portals, and spreadsheets. Money always falls through the cracks: more than $1 billion in music royalties goes unclaimed every year.

Notes was built to close that gap. Founded by Stem co-founder Tim Luckow, Notes is a music royalties company helping musicians and music companies identify, fix, and collect missing royalties, with a simple mission: make sure every royalty earned gets collected.

Release Once, Collect Everywhere

When you release music through Notes, your music is sent to 50+ platforms, and the royalties come back to the same place you manage your catalog. Notes collects complete credits and metadata, including songwriting splits, during the release flow, so every song is organized correctly from the start.

Collect All Kinds of Royalties
Most distributors collect only one type of royalty. Notes collects royalties directly from the source: streaming platforms for distribution royalties, The MLC for mechanicals, and SoundExchange for neighboring rights. Notes contracts calculate what each musician is owed based on the songs in each catalog, and treats royalty recovery as part of managing a catalog, not a separate project you have to solve alone. In the past year alone, Notes has helped identify more than $10 million in previously unclaimed royalties across catalogs connected to artists including James Blake, Zach Bryan, and Mt. Joy.

Credits are the foundation - so Notes made them open

Music credits shape how contributors are recognized and how royalties are routed. When credits, ownership data, or identifiers are complete, it’s easier to connect a piece of music to the people who should be paid for it.

That's why Notes also built Credits.fm, a free and open music credits database, now indexing more than 150 million song codes and identifiers (ISRC, ISWC, IPI, ISNI, and UPC) across rights databases, collecting societies, and registries. It's freely searchable at Credits.fm and through ISRC.fm, ISWC.fm, and IPI.fm, and it offers an open API and MCP integration so teams can pull verified credits straight into Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI tools. As licensed AI usage creates new revenue streams, correct attribution at the credits level matters more than ever.

"For musicians, a missing credit is more than an omission. It can interrupt the connection between the music they made and the royalties they are owed. We built Notes to make that connection easier to verify and act on." — Tim Luckow, CEO and cofounder, Notes

Notes Financial Accounts, powered by Stripe



This year Notes launched Financial Accounts powered by Stripe Connect and Stripe Treasury, building accounts and payouts directly into the platform where our customers already manage their catalogs, credits, and metadata. Royalties from a musician's releases and fixed royalty issues flow into their Notes Financial Account automatically every month. From there, a label or band can split earnings among members and collaborators, or withdraw to an external bank account, with detailed receipts for every transaction.

"We want to give musicians and music companies a clearer and easier way to manage the financial side of their work. Stripe gives us the tools to build money movement into Notes alongside the rights and royalty information our customers rely on."
— Tim Luckow, CEO and cofounder, Notes

Built for independent labels and teams

Notes supports flexible teams and catalogs, so labels, managers, songwriters, producers, and their teams can collaborate on the same catalog. Notes doesn't take a percentage of your royalties. It's a subscription, so musicians keep 100% of their earnings.

Release once, collect everywhere. Get started at notes.fm.

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