Here is a thing the music industry does not like to admit: the hard part was never finding talent. There has always been plenty of talent. The hard part - the genuinely expensive, opaque, favor-trading part - was funding it fairly. indify started life in 2015 as a data tool that got very good at the first problem, and then made the more interesting decision to go fix the second.
The company was built in the basement of a family home in Scarsdale, New York, by three childhood friends. Shav Garg and Connor Lawrence met in fourth grade on a championship Little League team. Matt Pavia, who became the chief technology officer, was Lawrence's pre-K classmate. This is the kind of origin detail that sounds like a press release but happens to be true, and it explains a certain stubbornness: people who have known each other since they were nine are harder to talk out of a weird idea.
The weird idea, at first, was analytics. indify ingested signals from YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify, TikTok, Instagram and the rest, and tried to predict which unknown artists were about to break. The system flagged Billie Eilish, Post Malone and Khalid while they were still unknown - which is the kind of track record that gets you meetings, but does not by itself change anything for the artists. Knowing who is about to win is useful. Doing something about it is the business.
So indify turned itself into a marketplace. The pitch is straightforward in a way the record business usually is not: an artist who needs money, a manager, a marketer, or a lawyer comes to indify and assembles a team. A partner supplies capital and marketing for a specific release - often a single song - and takes a slice of the streaming royalties in return. Then, crucially, the deal ends and the artist still owns everything that matters.
What makes this more than a nicer-sounding advance is the rulebook. Every deal on the platform is governed by three principles: the artist keeps their masters, the artist keeps creative control, and the artist keeps at least half the profit after the partner is repaid. In an industry where "artist-first" is usually a slogan printed over a contract that says otherwise, indify wrote the slogan into the terms and then made the terms short enough to read.
The economics appear to work in both directions, which is the part that should make incumbents nervous. indify has reported that more than half of the deals struck on the platform are already profitable, with partners netting roughly three times their money on average. Two early artists, Kirby and BMW Kenny, repaid their investors within six months on streaming income alone. BMW Kenny's "Wipe It Down" ended up soundtracking around 3.8 million TikTok videos, which is the modern equivalent of a song being unavoidable.
The most quietly radical feature is not the funding at all - it is the leaderboard. indify ranks partners by the actual streaming value they have brought artists, in public. Imagine an industry where your reputation was a number anyone could check, updated by results rather than lunch reservations. That is a very different incentive structure than the one the business grew up on, and it is the sort of thing that is easy to launch and hard to walk back.
"We want to build a marketplace where if you need managing, funding, a lawyer, you come to indify, put together your team."
Shav Garg, Co-Founder & CEO
The signal that the model is landing came in January 2025, when James Blake - an established, Grammy-winning artist who does not need a DIY platform to get a phone call returned - used indify to assemble the team for a new project. He pulled together partners for funding and strategy, marketing, creative and sync, and described the platform as one that puts artists in touch with services measured on a leaderboard by the real value they bring. When the tool built for emerging artists starts attracting the establishment, it is usually the establishment that is adapting.
None of this makes indify a sure thing. It sits in a crowded field of artist-financing and royalty-advance companies, and the broader competitor is the entire apparatus of the traditional label, which has money, catalog and inertia. But indify is playing a specific game: make the risk legible, make the terms fair, and let the data narrow the field. That is a smaller, faster, more honest version of what A&R departments have always claimed to do - and it is a lot harder to argue with when the spreadsheet is public.
