music-tech
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Peter Sinclair’s quiet revolution: give artists the check, then get out of the way
Peter Sinclair never pretended to have the golden ear. His sharper idea was that musicians deserved capital without a stranger rearranging their careers - a principle that became beatBread and outlived its founder.
Morgan Hayduk Found the Music Business Had a Fraud Problem Hiding in Plain Hearing
He set out to reconcile royalty statements. The trail led to bots, click farms and stolen accounts - and a company built to make every legitimate play count.
Yoav Zimmerman
Yoav Zimmerman is a San Francisco founder and machine learning engineer who is CEO and co-founder of Third Chair (YC X25), an AI-native IP enforcement agent that helps rightsholders find, stop, and monetize unauthorized use of their content. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he previously co-founded the social video analytics startup Trendpop (YC W21), grew it past $1M ARR with clients like Universal Music Group and MrBeast, and exited to Collab. Before startups he worked on machine learning at Google and at Determined AI.
Gaurav Sharma
Gaurav Sharma is the founder and CEO of Hook, a New York-based AI music platform that lets fans legally remix and mash up licensed songs and share them to social feeds while artists and rights holders keep control and get paid. A Johns Hopkins and Peabody Conservatory-trained musician turned operator, he previously helped scale India's JioSaavn to hundreds of millions of listeners and built and sold two consumer-tech startups. In 2026 Hook closed a $10 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $16 million.
Matt Jones
Matt Jones is the co-founder and CEO of Medallion, a New York-based platform that lets artists build branded, artist-owned digital environments where their most engaged fans can pay for early access, exclusive drops, and premium music formats. Before Medallion he ran Crowdsurge, the direct-to-fan ticketing company he started in 2008 that later merged with Songkick; he served as Songkick's CEO through its 2017 acquisition by Warner Music Group. Medallion closed a $13.7M Series A in December 2023 led by Dragonfly and Lightspeed Faction, with Metallica's Black Squirrel Partners, Coinbase Ventures, and members of Disclosure, Jungle, and Mt. Joy also on the cap table.
Shav Garg
Shav Garg is the co-founder and CEO of indify, a New York music-tech company that uses a predictive algorithm to spot emerging artists before they break and connect them with investors, managers and partners on artist-friendly terms. Founded in 2015 in the basement of his family home with two childhood friends from Scarsdale, indify flagged Khalid, Billie Eilish and Post Malone early and has reshaped how independent musicians fund careers while keeping their masters. Garg is also a working singer-songwriter who records as prettyboyshav.
Mark Spier
Mark Spier is the founder and CEO of Royalty Solutions Corp, a New York royalty-accounting and copyright-administration firm whose tagline is 'you make the Music, we do the Math.' A Cornell-trained computer scientist with a Columbia MBA, he spent early years at IBM and as a VP at Credit Suisse before taking over Memory Lane Music Group in 2003, the family publishing house his grandfather started in 1923. In 2009 he founded Royalty Solutions to bring transparency and software to the messy business of paying songwriters, building proprietary systems like the TuneLicensing mechanical-licensing engine and a client royalty portal.
Garrett Dodge
Garrett Dodge is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rockbot, the business media platform that powers music, TV, digital signage, and advertising for nearly 50,000 brick-and-mortar locations across North America. Founded in 2010, Rockbot has grown into a $9.2M revenue company serving major brands including Planet Fitness, Walmart, Shake Shack, and JetBlue, backed by Google Ventures, Universal Music Group, and others. Dodge holds a B.A. from Middlebury College and an MBA from MIT Sloan, and previously helped build Caesars Entertainment's Innovation Team before channeling that experience into reimagining how physical spaces use media to engage customers.
Tracy Chan
Tracy Chan is the CEO of Splash, the AI music platform that turned Roblox into the world's biggest music game with 480 million players. A veteran music-tech executive who built creator tools at YouTube, founded and sold CrowdAlbum to Spotify, scaled Spotify for Artists, led music at Twitch during the pandemic, and ran content at SoundCloud before joining Splash in March 2024 - Chan has spent his career at the exact intersection where technology meets the moment an artist connects with a fan. At Splash, he is building the infrastructure for a generation that doesn't just listen to music, it creates it.
Shamal Ranasinghe
Shamal Ranasinghe is the Chief Business Officer at Audius, the decentralized blockchain-based music streaming platform. A 25-year music-tech veteran, he co-founded Topspin Media in 2007 - one of the first direct-to-fan platforms for musicians - before spending eight years as VP of Product at Pandora/SiriusXM building creator tools. At Audius, he leads major label and publishing deals, including a landmark global licensing agreement with Kobalt Music in 2024, while championing a world where artists own their music, keep 90% of revenue, and connect directly with fans without gatekeepers.
Dalton Caldwell
Dalton Caldwell is a serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist best known for co-founding imeem (one of the first legal music social networks), launching App.net as a principled alternative to ad-supported social media, and spending over a decade as a Managing Partner at Y Combinator advising 1,000+ startups. He is now co-founding Standard Capital, a $425M AI-native Series A fund with Paul Buchheit and Bryan Berg.