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Data is everything in the music business. It can tell you all you need to know, but it too often stays silent. Fragmented across file formats and platforms, music pros don't know precisely what they have, what it's worth, what they're owed, and how it connects to everything else. 

Spindl (spindl.co), an LA-based music data startup, has perfected the art of getting data to talk at scale, revealing new potential revenue, faulty or incomplete information, and the real value of huge catalogs. Its data wrangling methods let Spindl offer equally powerful tools for publishing as well as recording data, setting it apart from other platforms.

Music, with its two sides of copyrights and widely scattered stakeholders, has long suffered from an acute inability to manage and analyze the terabytes of data flowing from usage across the internet and around the world. This interferes with the swift and accurate payment of songwriters, producers, and artists. Though everyone agrees the system needs to improve, every company has its own approach and format for dealing with the data flood. 

Just emerging from stealth mode, Spindl promises to channel the flood, offering simple but potent ways to unveil data's hidden secrets. It works in minutes, not weeks, and catches patterns humans struggle to find, empowering music professionals in a wide range of roles to do more with data. The service has won over major investors and executives in music and media, and run pilots that valuated catalogs, found inaccurate metadata, and uncovered unclaimed revenue for large rights holders. Now it's ready to offer its groundbreaking technology to more music industry customers.

Spindl sprang from the experiences of Jon Wienner, who got his start as a young DJ jetting to gigs around the US, while attending NYU. Wienner's music career took him to LA, where he dived into songwriting and production, signing with publisher Warner Chappell and working with artists such as Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, J. Balvin, Demi Lovato, Zara Larsson, and Dominic Fike. 

Things were blowing up for Wienner. Then came Spring 2020. The music industry ground to a halt for several months, and Wienner, with more time on his hands than he wanted, began to take a closer look at his royalty statements. "I really dug into them, but they didn't make any sense," he recalls. "I wanted to know why the whole royalty process sucked, but no one could answer that question."

Wienner set out to answer it, eventually deciding to try and tackle some of the most painful points in data and payments. He crossed paths with Andrew Krueger and Matt Moody, two software engineers and entrepreneurs who had previously sold a fintech startup. Together, they decided to apply data fusion and inference models to music data. The results were exciting. "Every single organization handles data differently and may have a slightly different format," explains Wienner. "We built a way to make it so that none of that mattered."

Wienner jokingly compares Spindl's process to that of a wood chipper, but one that keeps the entire forest in mind. Spindl's technology can ingest nearly any data source, whether file or database, and extract relevant data points. Preserving the context, it connects the dots with minimal input or reformatting thanks to AI, regardless of format or language. Spindl then lets users interact with this data via a semantic interface, allowing even a non-technical user to easily extract what they're looking for.

Spindl can also identify a composition based on audio similarities and lyrics, even when lyrics are in a language different from the original composition, making it possible to discover new versions. "While it's been possible to find a recording and attribute it for some time, publishing hasn't benefited from that technology as much. Our technology fixes that," notes Wienner. "Lyrics are key, because it doesn't matter if you change a chord or the key of the song, or if there's background noise, the lyrics usually match. That's allowed us to find compositions everywhere they might pop up, including in UGC or social posts."

This means a team can finally hear what their data has to say. They can properly attribute a work or match a recording with a composition. They can discover previously unknown derivative works. They can claim their royalties efficiently and get all the data holes plugged. This can save hundreds of work hours and millions of dollars. 

"Spindl is here to make sure people don't have to dedicate their entire workdays to manual processes and painstaking, tedious tasks, when they could be thinking strategically or getting more creative," reflects Wienner. "We want to put more power into everyone's hands, so they see insights in the data they already have. These insights and the decisions they inspire promise to grow the entire industry." 

04 Jul 2025 | Press release

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04 Jul 2025 | Press release

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04 Jul 2025 | Press release

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04 Jul 2025 | Press release

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04 Jul 2025 | Press release

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04 Jul 2025 | Press release

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04 Jul 2025 | Press release

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03 Jul 2025 | Press release

WMA announces expansion of UK & European Publicity, Social and Marketing Divisions

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03 Jul 2025 | Press release

Tems Launches The Leading Vibe Initiative, Empowering the Next Generation of Women in Music

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03 Jul 2025 | Press release

WeAre8 Announces 8fest: The World's First Social Media Music Festival, curated by industry insiders

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03 Jul 2025 | Press release

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03 Jul 2025 | Press release

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03 Jul 2025 | Press release

Warner Music buys Skorpioni Music's catalogue

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03 Jul 2025 | Press release

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03 Jul 2025 | Press release

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02 Jul 2025 | Press release

The Beatles' Apple Corps Ltd. Announces Tom Greene as New CEO

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02 Jul 2025 | Press release

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02 Jul 2025 | Press release

BandLab Expands Licensing Platform to Connect Artists and Rights Holders to AI Companies, Opening the Door to Legal AI Music Models

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02 Jul 2025 | Press release

Warner Music Group and Bain Capital announce launch of joint venture to invest up to $1.2 billion in iconic music catalogs

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02 Jul 2025 | Press release

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02 Jul 2025 | Press release

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02 Jul 2025 | Press release

RSA announces David Joseph CBE as new Chief Executive Officer

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02 Jul 2025 | Press release

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02 Jul 2025 | Press release

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02 Jul 2025 | Press release

The UK's Official biggest songs and albums of 2025 so far revealed

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01 Jul 2025 | Press release

Open letter from WIN CEO to European Commission Vice-President Teresa Ribera

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01 Jul 2025 | Press release

Taylor Swift and Charli XCX Help Attract Record 23.5 Million Music Tourists Spending £10 Billion at UK Music Events - New Report Reveals

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01 Jul 2025 | Press release

BMG Brings Seeed catalog under one roof

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01 Jul 2025 | Press release

Amazon Launches the Ultimate Oasis Fan Destination

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01 Jul 2025 | Press release

Apple Music celebrates 10 years with the launch of a new global hub for artists designed to foster creativity and connection

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04 Jul 2025

  • V&A East Storehouse to open the David Bowie Centre (see News)

  • ESCA calls on the EU to block Universal Music’s deal to buy Downtown (see News)

  • Virgin Music CEOs push back against critics of Downtown Music deal (see News)

03 Jul 2025

  • Record labels are running on empty (see Opinion)

  • AI music is going viral, but it’s not what fans want (see Comment)

02 Jul 2025

  • The Velvet Sundown may be the first breakout AI band from Suno (see Digital)

  • Amid cuts, WMG to "continue to supercharge our capabilities in long-term artist, songwriter, and catalog development" (see Business)

01 Jul 2025

  • WIN CEO writes to European Commission Vice-President over Universal's acquisition of Downtown (see Comment)

  • If Spotify truly champions discovery, it should champion fair compensation from the first stream (see Comment)

30 Jun 2025

  • Selected Glastonbury coverage (see News, Features, Showbiz, Reviews)

27 Jun 2025

  • Streaming is both retail and radio – it shouldn’t be (see Comment)

  • Impala’s Helen Smith on UMG's planned Downtown acquisition (see Comment)

26 Jun 2025

  • Retiring Arista CEO David Massey shares his top 10 career highlights (see Features)

  • Budweiser’s royalty loophole ad: How AI and social have changed the value of creators (see Comment)

25 Jun 2025

  • When did making music get so lonely? (see Comment)

24 Jun 2025

  • How will Taylor Swift’s masters ownership saga be remembered? (see Audio&Visual)

23 Jun 2025

  • The copyright war between the AI industry and creatives (see Comment)

  • Interview: Lyor Cohen, the head of YouTube Music (see Features)