Music Industry Funding Already Tops $1.25 Billion In 2024 — But That’s Substantially Below Funding Levels at the Same Point In 2023

At the top level, music industry funding year-to-date in 2024 is far below same stretch in 2023 (Photo Credit: Adam Nir)

How’s music industry funding faring in 2024? Here’s a breakdown of relevant raises to this point in the year – and a look at how they stack up against their 2023 counterparts.Update, Friday, February 15th: We’ve updated our top-line 2024 funding tally to include a late-breaking funding announcement of $90 million for Duetti. The updated 2024 cumulative figure is now $1.25 billion.

The data behind this analysis comes from DMN Pro’s Music Industry Funding Tracker, a comprehensive collection of raises attributable to the music space and sub-sectors. Between 2024’s start and today, February 15th, 11 such raises have been announced, down slightly from 12 during the same window in 2023.

All told, music industry funding has approached $1.25 billion across 2024’s initial month and a half, per the all-encompassing resource. But the lion’s share of that massive sum entered the media spotlight today, when Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group revealed that it had obtained north of $1 billion from backers including HPS Investment Partners.

Behind this gargantuan investment, the reported $100 million that Gamma secured from Alpha Wave Global represents the second-largest music industry raise of 2024 thus far, followed by the “$20 million commitment of capital” that Tune.fm disclosed in early January.

Music Industry Funding Tracker

Running with the numbers, the average size of 2024’s industry raises to date is $105.27 million – or $6.44 million when excluding the combined $1.1 billion turned in by Iconic and Gamma. Additionally, more than half the rounds have brought in less than $10 million apiece.

Please note: those calculations exclude a late-breaking funding announcement of $90 million for Duetti, which emerged after our initial calculations on Thursday, February 15th.

Looking back to the identical stretch in 2023, companies operating in and around the music industry scored a comparatively substantial $2.33 billion worth of funding, data shows. While the sum is far larger than that delivered by 2024 – with a correspondingly bigger per-raise average of $211.37 million – a few points should be noted. First, Premier Music Group’s January of 2023 capital announcement didn’t bring with it a precise figure; the identified average excludes the round altogether.

Next, several especially large rounds arrived in early 2023, with Kakao Entertainment’s $966 million private equity raise, Shamrock Capital’s $600 million Content Fund III, and Anthropic’s $300 million raise leading the pack on this front.

Omitting these raises ($1.87 billion overall) from calculations, early 2023’s industry funding total is about $459.09 million, with a per-round average of $57.39 million.

Of course, the disclosed figures account only for a small portion of the music industry funding delivered by 2023 as well as the capital on the way for the rest of 2024 – and in turn, they tell just part of the story. However, the stats are insightful with regard to what the remainder of the year could have in store, particularly given multiple industry players’ apparent willingness to drop many millions of dollars on transactions that don’t constitute raises.