Exclusive: Music Industry Funding Grew 44% Year Over Year, Topping $4.6 Billion, During 2023’s First Three Quarters

Music industry funding increased dramatically during 2023’s first three quarters, according to DMN research. Photo Credit: Markus Winkler

Music industry funding spiked by nearly 44 percent year over year (YoY) during 2023’s opening three quarters, when businesses in and around the space scored north of $4.6 billion in investor capital.

Digital Music News identified the sizable increase when analyzing an in-house collection of music-funding data, which represents one component of our forthcoming DMN Pro offering. Industry companies included in our comprehensive database secured and announced $4,602,387,830 worth of raises during Q1, Q2, and Q3 of 2023.

That’s compared to the relatively modest $3,196,166,000 delivered by the opening three quarters of 2022 – though a substantial portion of the latter figure derived from a few especially high-value raises. (Omitted from the 2023 sum – and, in turn, the below calculations – are two rounds with values that weren’t publicly disclosed.)

Of course, excluding these large raises from the 2022 total would render the initially mentioned 44 percent industry-funding boost higher yet. To be sure, “IRL” event company Fever scored a $227 million Goldman-led raise towards last year’s beginning, before Yuga Labs in late March closed a $450 million seed round led by a16z Crypto.

Then, Epic Games in April obtained a cool $1 billion from Sony Group; another $1 billion Epic investment, put up by KIRKBI and announced simultaneously, was omitted from this piece’s calculations so as to avoid materially skewing findings.

(April further saw Pollen unveil a $150 million Series C – a seemingly positive development that was ultimately unable to stop the destination-event business from tumbling into insolvency later in 2022.)

Also in terms of major music industry raises disclosed across Q1, Q2, and Q3 of 2022, SeatGeek, having put its IPO ambitions on the backburner amid a broader SPAC-sphere slowdown, detailed a $238 million Series E in late August. The following month brought a $310 million equity funding announcement for TikTok competitor Triller.

All told, the 2022 raises of Yuga Labs, Epic Games, SeatGeek, and Triller alone totaled just under $2 billion, or over 62 percent of the entire sum for the first, second, and third quarters.

And while the same three-quarter stretch in 2023 had its own share of particularly massive raises – among them Kakao Entertainment’s $966 million in backing, the $800 million that reached the second catalog fund of Lyric Capital, and The Raine Group’s $760 million “Partners IV” fund – quantity rose significantly during the 2023 quarters as average value grew modestly.

DMN pinpointed 48 music industry funding rounds for the Q1-Q3 2022 window – 37.5 percent less than the 66 rounds associated with the identical period this year. Plus, the 2022 mean came in at $66.59 million, against $69.73 million for the 2023 quarters.

Specifically for the third quarters of 2022 and 2023, the latter’s cumulative music industry funding marked a $471.83 million and 62.9 percent YoY increase, to $1.22 billion, with rounds having numbered 20 in Q3 2023 and 13 in Q3 2022, Digital Music News found.

The stats are worth bearing in mind for the final months of 2023 as well as 2024 and beyond, when DMN Pro subscribers will be able to stay apprised of quick-moving industry trends with additional proprietary data, weekly intel reports, in-depth analyses, and much more.

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