Los Angeles-based independent musician Jesse Barrera had just bought a house and had his first child when he sat down to write “No Reservations.” It was February 2023 when Barrera released the neo-soul song and video he filmed on his iPhone to YouTube. Within a matter of months, the song became Barrera’s best-performing track on YouTube, accumulating more than 4.3 million views as of February 2026.
The track’s success caught catalog investors’ attention, including Duetti, whom Barrera had dealt with before. A year earlier, the music rights company, which buys master and publishing rights to individual songs by independent artists, bought a stake in his cover of Shania Twain’s “Still the One.” Barrera said that deal, the terms of which were not disclosed, paid for several of his music videos. That led him to sell Duetti his masters for “No Reservations” and use the proceeds to fund his 2025 album, Gentle Noise.
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“The timing was perfect because it aligned with the recording of my full-length record,” Barrera says. “For what I’m trying to do, trying to accomplish and keep going as an artist, it makes sense to me.”
Founded in 2022, Duetti has acquired thousands of songs like these for sums ranging from a few thousand to a few million dollars, and it is growing at a pace of around 80 songs and catalogs a month. With $100 million in backing from equity investors The Raine Group, Flexpoint Ford, Nyca Partners, Viola Ventures and Roc Nation and $205 million from two asset-backed securities, plus additional credit, Duetti and its investors are betting big on the future value of music’s long tail.
Their strategy is three-pronged. Like any music catalog company, Duetti grows through acquisitions. But because it is acquiring what most investors still consider to be riskier music assets — songs by lesser-known artists released as recently as two years ago — Duetti has invested heavily in data engineering and forecasting so it can value songs and project future growth in-house, Duetti co-founder and CEO Lior Tibon says. That tech platform helps the firm acquire the most promising songs at scale cost-efficiently, he adds, and once acquired it is also used to improve management and royalty collections. Meanwhile, marketing staff work to increase streaming activity with slowed-down and sped-up versions of songs and remixes, which are placed on Duetti’s 3,000 actively managed playlists and pitched to influencers and digital service providers.
“We are a company that really specializes in understanding the value — financial and otherwise — of catalogs and knows how to take them to the next level,” Tibon says. “It’s not about just financially aggregating rights. It’s about really managing and taking care — through marketing, collections — of music rights and making sure that they survive in this world where there’s so much new music coming out every day.”
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Duetti has published a flurry of recent reports to burnish its credentials as a resource for reliable data on indie music catalog economics. In January, with support from Billboard, the company launched its Music Finance Index, a twice-annual poll about the state of music catalog valuations and investor sentiment from the perspective of independent artists, managers and lawyers in Duetti’s orbit. In February, Duetti published its 2025 Music Economics Report, with findings on how artists who earn between $100 and $350,000 a year from streaming music can build catalogs that generate durable revenue, which they consider to be a catalog that experiences less than a 10% decay in streaming activity in a year.
The report found that songs that go viral may earn more money in the first three months than songs that grow more slowly, but within six to nine months both assets end up generating close to the same amount. It also guided artists to release electronic and hip-hop songs in the spring, alternative tracks in the summer and Christian and country songs in the winter for the greatest success. Artists who release at least three tracks a year had 18% higher revenue on average per track in the first year post-release, the report found. The report emphasized that for artists just getting started, two consecutive months of growth on YouTube is more correlated to catalog durability than similar periods of growth experienced on other streaming platforms.
As a startup, Duetti has raised $635 million, mostly in the form of debt. More than $200 million of that debt has come from two asset-backed securities; these notes sold to institutional investors, such as insurance companies, give Duetti access to money at an interest rate much lower than it would receive from a bank on a more conventional line of credit. For example, the U.S. Small Business Administration, which offers among the lowest interest rate loans on the market, charged between 11.75% and 14.75% on its loans in February. In contrast, Concord, which has raised more than $3 billion from ABS issuances, pays an interest rate of less than 6%, CEO Bob Valentine has said.
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However, most music securitizations, such as Concord’s, were backed by hit songs from famous artists that are decades old and therefore have shown steady rates of return. Duetti was the first catalog company to issue an ABS backed by newer songs. The money raised from its ABS reflects the value of the songs backing it, but like any other type of this securitization, if the underlying songs lose value over the coming years, the company could face a capital call. That hasn’t happened to Duetti or any music company.
When he has spoken with debt investors, Tibon says he always points out how many individual listeners and streams a song must have to generate $10,000. Compared with other assets like auto loans that get securitized and sold on the debt markets regularly, that theoretical song provides millions more data points to evaluate.
“Maybe it’s easier to get comfortable with the value of a Bruce Springsteen catalog,” Tibon says. “But we’ve proven twice that we can do a securitization, that the catalog is worth what we think it’s worth, and that we are stable and continue to grow.”
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