British music rights company Salt attracts investment from Dave Stewart, Björn Ulvaeus from Abba and Quincy Jones

MUSIC ICONS AND PREEMINENT EUROPEAN INVESTMENT COMPANY INVEST IN REVOLUTIONARY RIGHTS AND ROYALTIES PLATFORM TO ENSURE MUSIC CREATORS GET ‘PLAYED AND PAID’.
? Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart and Quincy Jones team up with leading European investment fund Lansdowne Partners to invest in Salt
? Salt aims to solve the global metadata and processing problem depriving songwriters and rights-holders of £500m a year in unclaimed or misallocated royalties
? Music society clients include Netherland’s BumaStemra and the US’ Mechanical Licensing Collective

Salt CEO Doug Imrie (left) with new investor Dave Stewart and co-founder of Salt’s Session, Swedish songwriter
and producer Niclas Molinder.

A groundbreaking British music rights fintech company which ensures musicians are fairly rewarded and accurately paid for their work when streamed or downloaded has announced that it has closed an investment round with some of the biggest selling songwriters and producers of all time, and a pre-eminent European investment company.

New Salt investor Dave Stewart added: “It’s 40 years since we released Sweet Dreams but now for many new songwriters and artists, getting paid for their work has become a bit of a nightmare. For the music industry to survive and flourish, creators must get swift and accurate payments for their work. Salt is the solution that songwriters have been waiting years for and that’s why I wanted to invest.”

Salt’s platform streamlines music rights & royalties from attribution to distribution, with a global network that’s flexible, accurate, high–speed and transparent. The new investors in Salt include legendary songwriters and producers ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus, Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart and Quincy Jones who, between them, have sold over 500 million albums worldwide, in addition to Canadian songwriter and producer Dan Kurtz.

The investment has seen Björn Ulvaeus join Salt’s board alongside Robert Ashcroft, former Chief Executive of UK collection society PRS for Music, and Roger Faxon, former Chief Executive of EMI. Dan Kurtz joins as Senior Vice President for the Americas and Niclas Molinder is appointed as Head of Industry Relations.

Other investors in Salt’s latest strategic funding round include pre-eminent European investment company Lansdowne Investment Company and the family office of Nicolas James Group. Salt Royalties’ platform processes usage, matches ownership and calculates royalty distributions. It provides societies with royalty–processing software as advanced as the services they track, so they
can pay rightsholders quickly and accurately. Salt’s other software platform Session allows songwriters, producers, artists and other performers to easily assign critical the correct metadata and songwriting credits to their work during the creation process, as well as share music releases with the downstream industry, all for free.

Salt’s platforms will help songwriters access the so-called ‘Black Boxes’ of unclaimed or misallocated royalties. An Ivors Academy report found this to be as high as £500m a year ($624m, €570m). This global problem is caused by essential metadata— names and identifiers of writers, co-writers, and other stakeholders – being incomplete or missing entirely, resulting in royalty payments having no verifiable recipient.

Salt has already signed a 10-year deal to process over €3bn (£2.6bn, $3.4bn) of music royalties with its first customer, BumaStemra, the Dutch music collection society representing the interests of music authors and publishers. The first payments to thousands of Dutch songwriters using Salt technology have already been issued.

Salt has also just signed a deal with The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) in the US to provide data matching services to improve music rights & royalties collection for music creators. The MLC administers blanket mechanical licenses for eligible streaming and download services, collecting royalties due under those licenses and paying music publishers and administrators; ex-U.S. collective management organizations (CMOs); and self-administered songwriters, composers, and lyricists.

Salt CEO Doug Imrie said: “Making and distributing music is easier than ever. But the systems for crediting and rewarding creativity are stuck in the pre–digital era, unable to compete in a world where 140,000 tracks are added to Spotify every day. “That’s why we created Salt. It plugs into existing back-office systems, processing usage, matching ownership and calculating distributions with cloud-powered speed and accuracy. With Salt, music creators will get played AND paid.

“We’re proud that people of the stature of Dave, Quincy, Dan and Björn, who have created some of the most played music of all time, have invested in our plans to help other musicians and songwriters. We also warmly welcome Lansdowne Partners as investors to help fuel Salt’s global expansion.”

Salt board member and investor Björn Ulvaeus, who is also President of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), added: “I am delighted to have joined the board of Salt and to work with this team of committed industry experts to bring transparency and accuracy to the music industry.

“Salt’s revolutionary technology will enable the smooth and secure flow of royalty payments to the very people who make the music and keep this industry thriving, ensuring they get fair pay for every play.”