Kobalt Music is the only music technology company with a global music rights services platform built for artists, songwriters, publishers and labels as an alternative to the traditional music business model.
Kobalt’s mission from day one has been to take the music industry into the digital age and to deliver transparency to rights owners and creators.
Imagine this. One song, played in 87 countries, 124 TV ads, 3,000+ record stores, 850K radio spins, 1M local pub plays, 3M iTunes downloads, 536M Spotify streams, 1.8B Vevo plays, 2B YouTube views.
That’s about 4 billion transactions. Multiply that by three + rights holders and you’ve got 12B transactions.
That’s a lot of volume, at a low value tied to a super complex rights structure. Kobalt was designed for this volume and complexity.
Click the video below to find out more.
Our CEO Willard Ahdritz founded Kobalt in 2000.
He recognized the opportunity and the digital evolution ahead. Willard built Kobalt with the goal of making the music industry fair and transparent, bringing the industry to the digital age and making sure creators still got paid.
The music industry is going through exponential growth, thanks to digital streaming providers such as Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and others. Kobalt is at the heart of this.
We’ve grown our Publishing business faster than any of the majors at 3x’s the market and we’ve held the #2 spot in US market share by airplay for two consecutive quarters. We’re now disrupting the Recordings market with AWAL. We’re building a scalable, efficient platform to manage the growing middle-class ecosystem of recording artists like Lauv, Madison Beer, Lil Simz, and Freya Ridings.
We interface directly with over 20 streaming providers and represent an ever growing roster featuring some of the world's most recognized talent, breakthrough artists and songwriters, and up-and-coming stars (full roster here) enabling them to reach a rapidly growing audience through various channels.
To do this, we need to constantly innovate in a highly complex and unchartered environment. We are firm believers that Technology enables our business to experience tremendous growth, and by remaining at the forefront of the Technology evolution, we will continuously look to embrace new ways to keep looking to improve, and to remain a disruptor.
Hear from our CTO, Rian Liebenberg to why he decided to join Kobalt Music.
Rian Liebenberg: Why I joined Kobalt
Our platform is the foundation of Kobalt. We’re the only company that has built the technology infrastructure to track the trillions of micro transactions and fix all the royalty payment inefficiencies in the music industry. Our platform allows artists to manage all their rights in a transparent way.
We register their works globally with more Digital Service Providers than anyone else, with more accurate data than anyone else, we then track these trillions of transactions, collect the money, pay them and provide them with transparent data. This, in turn, enables us to fund and grow the next generation of artists and songwriters, using technology and data in novel ways to do this on a global, industrial scale. We're simplifying global distribution at scale, whilst bringing transparency and fairness back to the creators.
The music industry is not built on technology, but technology can and will change the future of music.
Tomorrow’s Tech Stack: Yours to influence.
Today’s Tech Stack: Java, PHP, Scala, AWS, Docker, JavaScript, React, Spark, Oracle, SQL.
We’re building a world-class product & engineering organisation to continue to revolutionise the music industry. We are pioneering change and we are only just getting started…
We’re hiring for multiple skills that bring a blend of experience and diversity to support this initiative. As a technologist you can play a key role in this disruption.
We deal with huge amounts of data on a daily basis and need to leverage scalable technologies, as well as efficient and innovative ways of processing and utilising to drive value for supply chain & serve artists better.
We represent approximately 20% of the total headcount, which is unrivalled amongst any other music business. We are in hyper growth mode and expected to double in size over the coming years.
Put creators first
Be transparent
Move fast & keep it simple
Champion diversity
Stay humble
Empower growth and development
Think like an entrepreneur