As usual, these valuable insights are made possible by DMN Pro’s Music Industry Funding Tracker, which compiles raises from in and around the sector. Unless otherwise noted, the below calculations reflect “core” funding, or that attributable to companies operating squarely in the industry proper.

And where applicable, they account for the USD exchange rate at the time of announcement. But for obvious reasons, they don’t factor for raises revealed without directly confirmed figures.

(Both are fairly common; during June alone, Reactional Music, Tringbox, and Cantilever pulled down funding in foreign currencies. Plus, we still don’t know precisely how much Madverse received from Ahdritz Capital and others.)

That’s up north of 152% from Q2 2025’s $1.32 billion, and in keeping with broader trends (i.e., AI and catalog businesses’ huge raises), a few gargantuan rounds fueled the jump.

Suno’s $400 million Series D certainly stands out here, as does Chord Music Partners’ $500 million ABS and especially Primary Wave’s $2.23 billion fourth fund. Furthermore, gigantic non-core raises – see the $1.7 billion Sphere Abu Dhabi investment and Shamrock Capital’s $813 million IP “content strategy fund” – materialized during the quarter to boot.

As reiterated in our prior rundowns, the humongous funding blasts are important generally and when it comes to painting a fuller picture of what’s on the horizon for the industry. Closer to the present, though they’re making for eye-catching year-over-year hikes, they’ll have to slow down at some point.

On one hand, there are, of course, only so many bodies of work to buy. On the other hand, after multiple years of song-rights selloffs, ultra-intense competition aside, investors are actively betting on the asset class.

But when this slowdown does become a reality, unless AI picks up the funding slack, it’s definitely possible that the triple-digit percentage hikes will make way for slips. Startups might actually benefit from the change, as relatively modest fundraises have been comparatively few and far between in recent years.

As initially mentioned, Q2 2026 delivered a bit of a shakeup in this department with at least six core seed and pre-seed raises. Time will tell whether the growth continues throughout the remainder of the year. And separately, DMN Pro’s set to explore different trends yet in its forthcoming second-quarter and half-year analysis.