Top Music Startups in 2026

We're your digital library and bookstore, all in one. for one low subscription fee every month, you can read unlimited amounts of books and magazines from your phone, tablet, or computer. we also provide document hosting services. we're bringing print entertainment to the digital stage.

Sofar Sounds was founded from a rooftop concert in 2009 hosted by Rafe Offer. He had eight people come over and listen to musician, Dave Alexander, play. This hobby and desire for more personal performances founded Sofar Sounds. Sofar Sounds is about allowing people the opportunity to go to thoughtfully picked out performances in small venues in order to give people a more personal live experience. We connect thousands of artists and hosts to people who sign up. We are set up in 444 cities. Signing up is free, then you get emails inviting you to performances and from there you can buy tickets for the ones you wish you attend.

Mode Mobile is the creator of EarnOS, a transformational software that turns ordinary smartphones into "EarnPhones." This innovation empowers users globally to monetize everyday mobile activities such as streaming, gaming, shopping, etc. We enable users to profit from their data and attention rather than letting only tech giants benefit. Our inclusive approach sets us apart - converting users into earners and facilitating over $150M in earnings and savings while going a step further and turning earners into owners by awarding stock ownership in Mobile Mobile based on their usage. We have attracted over 40 million users across 170 countries. ​​Mode Mobile is proud to stand as the #1 Fastest-Growing North American Software Company recognized in Deloitte's 2023 Technology Fast 500 and ranked #2 across all sectors (Deloitte Fast 500 Winners). For additional insights, check out the information about our reward-based super app, Mode Earn App, which also powers the reward engine behind our proprietary smartphone, Mode Earn Phone.

Since being founded in 1999, we have become the leader in premium broadcast technology and the largest sell-side processor of premium advertising in the world, covering the broadest assortment of media. Our comprehensive sell-side solutions offer the only single-vendor platform that manages ad operations across all business processes and media platforms while providing revenue optimization via direct sold or programmatic. To provide the best possible solutions and service to our clients, we invest more than $35 million per year in core product development and support, and we hire top talent who understand our business and think beyond the ordinary. Our innovative team represents more than 6,500 combined years of broadcast experience.

Flat, created by Tutteo Ltd, is an online music notation platform that empowers music enthusiasts to create, learn and share music scores, tabs, and lead sheets. We believe that the old fashion sheet music industry has come to a point where it needs to be renewed. Flat is the forefront of a new way to write, teach and consume written music. We proudly support 5M+ composers and music enthusiasts around the world.

Volley builds the best voice-controlled games and entertainment experiences for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, smartphones, and Fire TVs. Popular Volley voice games include Song Quiz, Jeopardy!, and The Price Is Right. Our voice apps are used by millions of people every month. We believe voice control will become the main way people access entertainment in their bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms, and cars, and our goal is to become the "Netflix of Voice" for this emerging category of devices. Volley was founded by Max Child and James Wilsterman in 2016. We're a 60+ person hybrid remote/in-person company, headquartered in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. While we work to make home entertainment more accessible and engaging, we like to have fun along the way, with team lunches, Friday happy hours, and very active #food and #pets slack channels. If any of this sounds fun to you (we promise it is), come join us! Read more about Volley's culture and mission here: volleythat.com/post/volley-mission-culture-and-what-we-create

We're creating a new way to make music. We’re building a creative ecosystem for music producers. With this ecosystem, we’re cultivating a global community of creators that fosters inspiration, connection, focus, and growth. At Splice, we seek to empower all musicians to realize their creative potential and share it with the world. We believe that an open ecosystem leads to more collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and discovery, which leads to more musicians and better musicians, which means more and better music.

In 2010 we started out by reinventing and modernizing the jukebox - for the first time ever enabling consumers to easily request their favorite songs right from their phone. After diving into the world of bars and entertainment, we saw that brick-and-mortar businesses across all industries struggled with outdated digital media products, fragmented systems, and tools that didn’t work together. Leveraging the foundations and technology already in place, we broadened our mission and started building a unified, multi-product platform – to help businesses large and small deliver better experiences and create stronger customer relationships. Today, Rockbot delivers Music, Audio-Messaging, Digital Signage, and Streaming TV to some of the world’s largest brands and thousands of small businesses across the US, allowing them to easily manage it all from one place. Across the platform, we’ve added Advertising and Retail Media solutions so businesses have more ways to generate revenue and monetize their environments. Rockbot continues to innovate and expand its services for our partners, from Walmart to Planet Fitness, Neiman Marcus to Shake Shack, and to many of your local “down-the-street favorites” - there’s no customer that is too large or small for us. We are here to help you succeed.

Bandsintown simplifies concert discovery by allowing music fans to Track their favorite artists, see which shows they have RSVP’d to & share these shows with their friends. The concerts are then synced with their calendar, so fans are sure not to miss the show. Bandsintown recommends concerts based on a fan's musical tastes: including artists liked on Facebook & song libraries stored in iTunes, Spotify, Pandora & Rdio (to name a few). This data informs our algorithm which artists to Track. We aggregate concert data from hundreds of sources (ticketing companies, booking agencies, promoters); then we invite artists to contribute & edit their tour dates directly through Bandsintown Manager to ensure data accuracy. Bandsintown Manager is our free Facebook, iOS & Android app for touring artists, allowing musicians to update their tour dates from the road & communicate directly with their fans. We have now built the largest & most reliable database of live music events.

SoundCloud is the world’s leading social sound platform where anyone can create sounds and share them everywhere. Recording and uploading sounds to SoundCloud lets people easily share them privately with their friends or publicly to blogs, sites and social networks. It takes just a click to share sounds to Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Foursquare. SoundCloud can be accessed anywhere using the official iPhone and Android apps, as well as hundreds of creation and sharing apps built on the SoundCloud platform. SoundCloud has nearly 300+ full-time staff currently, with over 30 different nationalities and 30 languages spoken at the company. Today, SoundCloud reaches more than 350 million people every month around the globe, across the web, mobile, our embeddable widget and our API. More than 175 million unique listeners monthly and our creators post 12 hours of new content on SoundCloud every minute.