Two things are certain. Two are upside we can influence. One is the moat. We price on the certain ones and treat the rest as upside.
Royalties are paid by Spotify, YouTube, Meta and the other platforms into our distribution account, and SONOR's share is taken first. The risk is how much a song earns, never whether the money reaches us.
SONOR buys or licenses a share of future royalties, the structure Stripe uses for its merchant cash advance. No instalments, no debt for the artist, short cycles.
Better distribution management, growth services and creator monetization can lift a song's royalties after we buy them. More income on the same advance means faster recoupment.
Creators make songs famous and own nothing in them. The industry treats them as a cost or a threat. We treat them as distribution, and pay them in a way that also pays the artist and recoups our advance faster.
Every advance records what a song was expected to earn and what it did earn. That record is how we price the next song better, and the base for becoming the Bloomberg of independent music IP.
Artists pay upfront for promotion, often to bots. Creators who make a song famous earn a one-off fee or nothing, and on long-form YouTube a chart song often gets claimed and the creator loses the revenue. The industry treats creators as a cost or a threat. We treat them as distribution.
The song can join the creator-cleared library we are building with StreamAdvance.
Registered creators keep their monetization. YouTube Shorts already sends the music share to the rights holder automatically.
More streams land in the same recoupment window, so the advance recoups faster and capital turns more often.
Licences are split with the artist, and the artist's half recoups the advance first.
More advances bring more songs, which bring more creators. The loop starts again.
Why an investor should care: every extra stream lands in the same window as the receivable you funded. Faster recoupment means capital turns more often on the same receivable.
Price rises, emerging-market subscribers and AI licensing are separate levers behind the same income. The detail and sources are in the Music Royalty Investment Research. Growth is upside for us. We size every advance on income already earned.
Songs were the first asset because the data is best. The method is not about songs. It is about income that is real, dated and collected through an account we can see. Two more forms of music income fit it today.
Established catalogues have years of statements. We advance against trailing net income, from EUR 10,000, and the owner keeps the rights. Old income decays slower than a new release, so the advance recoups on a flatter curve.
A signed licence is a dated, contractual payment. We advance against licences already signed, collected through us, with the artist's share recouping first. Sync, brand and creator-cleared use all work the same way.
Catalogue and licence advances follow the same rules as songs: sized on trailing or signed income, never on a forecast, never on a peak.
A show that is sold out but not yet played, a creator's payout not yet earned, a game's daily revenue: these are contingent receivables. They are real, but banks and funds rarely treat them as collateral. Our thesis is that you can make them investable by controlling the account the money lands in, advancing only against the part already earned or contracted, and keeping cycles short.
Fans pay months before the doors open. Ticket cash held in an account we can see is a short, self-liquidating receivable, and it does not move with equity or credit markets.
Platforms pay creators weeks after the views. Trailing payouts routed through an account we can see make a stable, repeating receivable, spread across many small creators.
Players pay every day, and studios pay developers first. Revenue reported by the store on a live title is a measurable receivable, advanced in small tickets.
Live events, creators and gaming are not open. They carry cancellation, platform and regulatory risk, and stay on an interest list until our underwriting is ready.
Capital that treats a contingent receivable as an asset is rare. That is the gap we are built for.
The aim for an investor is one return stream with three features: it does not follow equity or credit markets, it pays back in short cycles, and it targets a stable total return. Targets are on the For Investors page. They are targets, not promises, and capital can be lost.
We don't ask you to bet on music. We ask you to fund short, collateralised receivables that happen to be paid by songs. Four things changed in the last 18 months.
Recorded music reached $31.7bn in 2025, up 6.4%, its eleventh year of growth. Goldman Sachs expects all music revenue to reach $198.1bn by 2035. Independent music holds 46.7% of the market by ownership.
The growth is in independent music, the part the big funds are too large to serve one song at a time. Italy is off their map. That is where we originate.
The Italian market reached €513.4M in 2025, up 10.7%, against 5.6% for Europe. Streaming is about €340M of it. 85% of the top 100 albums are Italian. 245 albums passed 30 million streams.
A deep, local pool of songs, much of it from the urban and trap wave of the last decade, owned by independent labels and artists. Off the map of US buyers.
KBRA has rated more than $12.9B of music-royalty bonds since 2020, bonds paid from royalty income. It expects 2026 issuance to fall about 25%, to just over $2.5B, mainly because issuers are consolidating, not because buyers are leaving.
Fewer, bigger issuers need fresh, granular collateral. Seasoned pools of recouping songs are exactly that. Whoever produces them has pricing power, and an exit.
Apollo calls asset-based finance an estimated $20 trillion market, bought for self-amortising payments, collateral and short duration: most of what it owns runs three to five years, leaving less time for things to go wrong. KKR raised $6.5B for the strategy in 2025 and expects private ABF to exceed $9 trillion by 2029. The Swiss National Bank rate has been 0% since June 2025.
A royalty advance pays back in 6 to 14 months. Shorter, more granular and more self-liquidating than what the big managers sell, in a niche far too small for their tickets. Against 0% on Swiss cash, the case is simple.
Three industries show where the profit really sits: in the pipe that collects the money, not in the product.
Franchised restaurants bring about 90% of McDonald's restaurant margin: about 84% margin on franchise revenue, against about 15% on the restaurants it runs itself.
The collection account. Every royalty flows through our distribution first, advanced or not, and we earn on all of it.
Stripe describes its merchant cash advance as a purchase of a merchant's future receivables, not a loan. A share of each payout is withheld before the merchant is paid. YouLend, which provides Stripe's US cash advances, agreed in March 2026 to sell up to $225M of its receivables to Värde, a private credit fund.
Advances recouped at source through our distribution, with family offices funding the receivables.
About 39% of Lloyd's premium is written through delegated arrangements: specialist underwriters writing to a mandate, on capital others supply, paid through commission and often a profit share.
SONOR underwrites to a written mandate. Family offices supply the capital. SONOR Capital earns fees and owns the return engines.
Same pattern each time: own the pipe, advance against what flows through it, fund it with specialist capital. SONOR brings it to music royalties.
The same structure Stripe uses with merchants. Here is what the artist signs, and what you fund.
SONOR buys or licenses a share of the song's future royalties. It is not a loan or a credit transaction.
The platforms pay into our distribution account, which withholds the agreed share of each royalty payment, at the rate in the Advance Agreement Term Sheet, before the artist is paid.
No instalments and no debits. Payments rise and fall with the song's streams.
The advance is recouped only from the royalties of the songs distributed through us. If they earn less, recoupment takes longer. The artist owes nothing else.
The advance is paid in cash, in growth services such as marketing, or both.
Your return comes from receivables that collect themselves, not from a borrower's promise to pay.
Illustrative description. Final terms and their legal classification depend on the signed agreement and the governing law, and are subject to review by counsel.
Recorded music revenue in 2025, up 6.4%. The eleventh year of growth in a row. Streaming is 70% of it.
Growth in Latin America last year. Middle East, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa were close behind at 15.2%.
Where Goldman Sachs expects recorded music to be in 2035, from $31.7 billion in 2025. Its first upward revision since 2022.
Roughly the share of streaming revenue that flows through to rightsholders.
Goldman's forecast for yearly subscription streaming growth to 2035. We price on a bad year, not on this.
Independent music's share of the market by ownership. $14.3 billion in 2023.
Catalogue buyers want 40 years. Banks want size. The 12-month, song-sized advance sits between them.
Most advance providers wait for a distributor to pay them. The platforms pay our distribution account directly.
Too small for a credit fund. Too big and too unstructured for retail apps.
Scouts, producers and managers send us songs before the data is public.
Advancing to an artist usually means betting on a whole career. We price each song on its own data.
Goldman expects a rise every 12 to 24 months. Good for us. We pay nothing for it.
We reprice next year.
Our advances run on 12-month cycles. If rates fall, the growing songs we hold are worth more to buyers.
More songs, less per stream. We check every song is real, and we price the bad case.
We price every song by where it is played.
Royalties, ticket sales and creator payouts are real, dated receivables that banks and funds rarely treat as collateral. We make them investable by controlling the account the money lands in, advancing only against income already earned and keeping cycles short.
Songs keep earning for decades and platforms pay at source. Recoupment comes from the royalties themselves, not from a borrower's promise to pay.
In general, no. We buy receivables over past and future catalogues, and the artist keeps the song.
They are on our roadmap but not open. They carry cancellation, platform and regulatory risks and stay outside the offering until our underwriting is ready.
Tell us who you are. We will contact you when the full offering opens, by 10 January 2027. Family offices, private credit funds and qualified investors.
Prefer email? Write to apply@sonorcapital.com
The offering is for qualified and professional investors only, subject to eligibility checks. See our privacy policy.