In 2014, Kobalt Music Group acquired a small American mechanical rights society founded in the 1960s, the American Music Rights Association (AMRA), and relaunched it the following year around a premise that no existing society had seriously attempted. License and collect digital rights directly from streaming platforms, without routing money through local societies in each territory.
Ten years later, AMRA processed over 5 trillion transactions in 2023, distributed nearly $500 million in digital royalties since its relaunch, and generated $117 million in revenue in the fiscal year ending June 2022. Francisco Partners, which acquired a 90% stake in Kobalt in 2022 at a valuation of roughly $750 million, just sold it for double that.
Something about that model looks very valuable to people with a lot of capital.
How traditional digital collection works, and what AMRA does differently
Digital royalty collection in the existing system is territorial by design. When someone streams a song on Spotify from Brazil, the platform pays the corresponding Brazilian society, which keeps its commission and passes the remainder to the composer's home-country society, which takes another cut before paying the rights holder. The process can involve two to four intermediaries and take anywhere from 12 to 24 months. Along the way comes what the industry calls leakage, money that disappears or stalls due to metadata errors, undercollection, and sublicensing friction.
AMRA built infrastructure specifically for the digital world. It negotiates a single global license with each platform (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and more than 200 DSPs across 212 territories), receives data and payment directly from the source, and distributes to rights holders. One intermediary, one data flow, one point of control.
Tomas Ericsson, AMRA's CEO and former Deputy CEO of the Swedish society STIM, estimates that in certain regions his clients recover up to 30% more in royalties than they would through the traditional circuit. That difference comes from removing layers of intermediary commissions, reducing attribution errors, and compressing distribution timelines to six or nine months.
Sustaining that operation at scale required investing more than $50 million in technology over the past three years. The funds went toward cloud infrastructure, data ingestion capacity, machine learning to improve matching between streams and songs, and the ability to process the transaction volumes that exceeded 5 trillion in 2023. That investment also produced tangible changes for clients. AMRA overhauled its portal and moved income reporting from quarterly to weekly updates, letting composers and publishers monitor their royalties in near real time rather than waiting months to see what they were owed. It also introduced periodic audits of account statements, something no other collection platform currently offers.
Where the model reaches and where it does not
AMRA's scope covers digital rights exclusively, streaming and downloads. Radio, live performance, synchronization, and any analog royalty fall outside its direct operation. For those rights, money still passes through traditional societies before reaching AMRA, which in practice means a double commission for the rights holder.
It also does not operate in the two largest music markets in the world. Legal restrictions in the United States and China prevent AMRA from collecting directly in either territory, a structural limitation that matters for any comparison with the scale of major national CMOs.
That said, the segment where it does operate is the one with the most sustained growth. According to the 2021 CISAC annual report, digital already represented 36% of all global music publishing revenues. AMRA projects that figure will reach 80% in the coming years, though that estimate comes from the company rather than an independent source.
Why investors see strategic value here
Francisco Partners acquired its 90% stake in 2022 and identified AMRA as the priority growth asset within the portfolio. Partner Matt Spetzler described it as "the only global digital licensing platform" and called AMRA an "unpolished gem." Under that ownership, Kobalt grew its revenues to $794 million in fiscal year 2024.
In July 2026, Primary Wave bought Kobalt for $1.5 billion. The capital behind that transaction comes from pension funds, endowments, and global family offices, which signals that the investment thesis has moved well beyond the world of music-focused venture capital.
In four years, Kobalt's valuation doubled. The digital collection infrastructure was a central part of that appreciation.
What this signals for CMOs
Robert Kyncl, CEO of Warner Music Group, put it plainly at the NMPA's annual meeting in June 2024: "One of the things that troubles me personally is that we're basically collecting digital revenue the way we've collected analog revenue for decades. The speed of it; everything is the same."
AMRA is not a replacement for traditional CMOs, at least not in the near term. It has no presence in the United States or China. It does not cover offline rights. It lacks the mutual structure, the collective legal representation capacity, and the political weight that major societies built over decades. A composer who wants to collect across all contexts still needs a CMO.
But the model does raise a question worth sitting with. As digital concentrates an ever-larger share of total revenue, what role will CMOs play in that specific segment? The territorial system that works well for analog licensing creates considerable friction in a world where a single song can be played in 212 countries on the same day.
AMRA exists because someone decided to build infrastructure specifically for that problem. The institutional capital that followed confirms it was not a small bet.
Sources: Billboard (May 2023), Music Business Worldwide (June 2024, July 2026), TechCrunch (June 2015), CISAC Annual Report 2021, NMPA Annual Meeting keynote (June 2024).