Most Musicians Have No Idea How Much Money They're Losing

Jeff Ponchick talked to over 100 musicians before building Mogul. Not one of them felt confident they were getting paid everything they were owed.

That includes artists with business managers. Artists with dedicated royalty departments. Artists who should know.

The problem isn't that the data doesn't exist. Every distributor, every publisher, every PRO sends you statements. The problem is that nobody can make sense of it all.

The average artist manages 15 to 50 different logins across platforms that generate their income. No single dashboard. No way to compare. No confidence that the numbers are right.

From SoundCloud Exit to a New Problem

Ponchick isn't a first-time founder. He built Repost, a digital distribution company born from a weekend hack that helped independent artists monetize their SoundCloud. He grew it over eight years, sold it to SoundCloud in 2019, and spent three years running what became SoundCloud for Artists.

His first company before Repost was a failure -- a concert video crowdsourcing tool that collapsed because he didn't understand publishing rights. That failure taught him something crucial: the music industry demands domain knowledge. You can't just build cool tech and hope it works.

After leaving SoundCloud, he took a sabbatical. Got married. Traveled. Then he and his co-founder Joey started asking artists one question: what pisses you off about the industry?

Three patterns emerged:

1. Artists don't trust they're getting paid correctly.
2. They can't verify what middlemen are doing for them.
3. They're drowning in fragmented accounts with no way to see their full financial picture.

"The first time an artist told me he was able to quit his job at Starbucks to take music full time because of the company I created, it was like an arrow through the heart. I am on this planet to help creative people make a living doing what they love."

Show Them the Money (Carefully)

Mogul connects to everything -- Universal Music, DistroKid, SongTrust, performing rights organizations -- and pulls all earnings into one place. Then it flags where money is missing: unregistered rights, residual databases, revenue anomalies across platforms.

But the product journey had surprises. Showing artists their total career earnings? That upset people. Like checking your credit card balance when you know it's bad. The team had to learn which data points motivate action versus which ones trigger anxiety.

The Fundraising Reality

Even with a SoundCloud exit on his resume, raising money was brutal. Two hundred outreach attempts. One hundred responses. Eighty-five rejections. Four investors said yes.

His advice: figure out fast if an investor is even open to music, and if not, move on. And frame your pitch as fintech, not music tech. Investors understand income tracking tools. They glaze over when you explain neighboring rights.

"99% of companies fail because they never launched. Just find a way to get the most simple version of it live and get people using it."

The Fragmentation Problem Is Everywhere

Mogul's insight isn't just about artists. It's about fragmentation as the silent killer of creative businesses.

Think about it from the studio side. How does the average independent studio manage bookings? Some come through DMs. Some through email. Some through phone calls. Maybe a website form that feeds into... a spreadsheet? Revenue is scattered across Venmo, bank transfers, cash, and invoices. Utilization rates are a guess. You don't know which rooms are actually profitable because the data lives in six different places.

Sound familiar? It's the same problem artists have with their royalties. Too many logins, too many platforms, no single source of truth.

The fix is the same too: centralize. When your pricing, availability, equipment, and reviews live in one searchable profile, you stop losing bookings to friction. Musicians find you, compare you, and book -- without sending five messages and waiting three days for a reply.

What to Do Right Now

You can't fix the whole industry. But you can fix your own setup this week.

1. Audit your income sources. List every platform, distributor, PRO, and publisher that owes you money. How many logins is that? If it's more than 10, you're almost certainly missing revenue somewhere. Tools like Mogul exist to consolidate this -- use them.

1. Check your registrations. Are all your songs registered with your PRO? Is your publishing admin actually collecting in all territories? Unregistered rights are the most common source of lost income. It's not glamorous work, but it's where the money is.

1. Consolidate your studio business. If you're a studio owner, stop accepting bookings through four different channels. Pick one system. Make your pricing transparent. Let people book without a back-and-forth conversation. Every friction point is a lost booking.

Key Takeaways

• Talk to 100 people before you build. Ponchick's customer discovery -- not his tech background -- shaped Mogul. The artists told him what to build.
• Launch ugly, learn fast. Mogul's first version was a Looker dashboard. Repost's first version was a form where Ponchick manually mailed letters in the background. Ship the simplest thing that proves demand.
• Frame your value outside your niche. Music tech struggles to attract investors. Positioning as fintech or creator economy tools opens doors that "music industry startup" closes.