SourceAudio, A Platform For Selling Licensed Music, Raises $1.2M

SourceAudio, a startup aiming to connect buyers and sellers of licensed music, has raised $1.2 million in seed funding.

Co-founder and CEO Geoffrey Grotz (who previously co-founded GameTrailers.com) said the company isn’t building a consumer music store, but rather a platform that will allow musicians and music companies to build their own sites where the people who are looking to license music for their ad, TV show, or whatever can search for tracks. Normally, a publisher would have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a site to host music on their own, Grotz said.

SourceAudio, on the other hand, has built what he called a “unified platform” — customers can customize the look of their site, but the underlying technology is the same. The company says it already hosts 600 million catalogs with 5 million tracks from 3,400 music labels. It charges based on the number of tracks hosted, with pricing starting at $29 each month.

Grotz said one all the music in the system could also provide an opportunity for large media companies to tap into the full library. The long-term vision, he added, is to become “the iTunes or Amazon of the multi-billion dollar global music licensing business.”

The round was led by Emerson Investment Group (a firm that invests primarily in public companies).