The music industry, once an opaque world of complex contracts and arcane accounting, is undergoing a profound technological transformation. At the heart of the shift is Kobalt Music, a company that has built its reputation by championing transparency and creator ownership.
But the disruption is not just business model innovation; it’s a data and engineering challenge of immense scale. Processing trillions of streams, tracking rights across hundreds of territories and ensuring songwriters get paid accurately and quickly is a monumental task.
Nuno Guerreiro, Kobalt Music’s Chief Technology Officer, shares insight into the evolving industry. With a background spanning data-heavy industries like banking and online advertising, Nuno oversees Engineering, Product and IT, steering Kobalt through its next phase of technological evolution.
The foundational architecture of transparency
Kobalt’s “noble mission,” as Nuno describes it, is to “bring transparency and fairness to an opaque industry”. From a technical perspective, this means a complete rethink of the legacy systems that defined music publishing, which was fragmented by design with regional contracts.
Nuno explains that Kobalt’s ability to disrupt the model was an intentional architectural decision from day one.
The first pillar was a “single database enabling rights to be managed globally, instead of having regional contracts which effectively forced songwriters to deal with not one company, but all its regional officers in the case of our competitors”. The global, centralised view of rights was revolutionary.
The second, complementary pillar was a system built for complexity and automation. Nuno points to a “flexible rights model, allowing us to capture complex and bespoke rights pictures, with high degrees of automation, which allowed us to work with a lower marginal cost and make it possible not to own copyrights and instead focus on a service model, earning a commission”.
The combination is the engine of Kobalt’s “admin model”. Nuno’s experience in sectors like banking and advertising, where he built large-scale data warehousing, trading and advertising platforms, was paramount in managing the immense volumes of data in music.
He adds: “The importance of investing in continuous improvement, from a skills and process point of view, the adoption of new technologies, the focus on DevOps, cloud-native practices, etc, all heavily influenced the strategy.”
Scaling the platform: From creator to industry backbone
Kobalt leverages its robust platform to serve two distinct, but related, segments of the market.
On one end is KOSIGN, a service targeting the up-and-coming market of songwriters and independent creators traditionally shut out of the publishing world.
“With KOSIGN, you don’t need to wait to be signed by a publisher in the traditional sense,” Nuno explains. “While being signed is a huge milestone for a songwriter, it’s hard to attain and many unfortunately may never get to that stage. As such, they often struggle to collect what is rightfully theirs, their publishing royalties.”
The solution is not a ‘lite’ version of Kobalt’s central platform; it is the leading platform.
“With KOSIGN,” Nuno continues, “up-and-coming writers have access to the same world-class platform and infrastructure that our marquee clients have. Think about Dave Grohl, Paul McCartney, Childish Gambino and many others.”
While KOSIGN scales the platform’s benefits down to the individual creator, Kobalt’s B2B ambitions aim to scale it across the entire industry, making it the “backbone for music publishing administration”.
Nuno says: “Essentially, we’re talking about bringing large catalogues from all types of players within the industry onto our platform. It means ingesting, cleaning and managing millions of songs from creator clients, publishers and music funds.”
The primary bottleneck isn’t the tech, but the data.
“Interoperability at the systems level is not a challenge,” he goes on, “but onboarding the catalogue is, particularly as the data quality in the music publishing industry can be subpar, especially for older catalogues.”
To handle the future scale, the architecture was designed accordingly.
Nuno adds: “From a scalability perspective, it’s something we’ve factored into our architecture, by focusing on horizontally scalable technology, event-driven architectures, cloud-native services scaling on demand and SOLID principles that allow us to replace parts of the infrastructure if necessary without having to wholesale rebuild systems.”
Confronting the AI conundrum
No technology conversation in 2025 is complete without addressing AI and, for a company built on copyright, the stakes are existential.
Nuno sees AI as a double-sided challenge: a potential threat to the value of creative work and a powerful tool for internal efficiency.
On the copyright front, Kobalt is playing both offence and defence, as Nuno details: “From a copyright perspective, our key focus is ensuring that our clients find opportunities to leverage AI both in the creative process as well as finding alternative monetisation options that would allow them to benefit financially from their catalogue of works being used for the production of derivative works using AI.”
Simultaneously, the business is working to protect the royalty pool from dilution.
Nuno expands: “From a risk perspective, we continue to work actively across various copyright organisations, including the ones where we have board representation, to ensure that the value of the work that our clients create is not going to be diminished by a flood of generated content that could dilute the royalty pool for the creators we represent.”
Internally, Kobalt is already a mature adopter of AI to manage its massive data flows: “From an internal perspective, as with most organisations at the moment, we’re rolling out AI to enable us to gain efficiency and free up time to focus on work that is meaningful and remove as much repetitive manual work as possible.”
And it’s not just theoretical.
Nuno continues: “One of the use cases where we have historically rolled out AI is on the matching of works and recordings, allowing us to match more than 99% of all works automatically. We are furthermore using AI throughout the development process and have seen significant gains from adopting coding assistants.”
Accelerating modernisation through partnership
Driving such technological change, after the 2022 acquisition by private equity firm Francisco Partners, was no small feat. Nuno describes the period as one of “substantial investment in technology modernisation and to support considerable business growth”.
The transformation meant a fresh approach to resourcing, resulting in a strategic partnership with global software engineering firm DataArt.
Nuno reflects: “Following the acquisition, we established a stronger long-term partnership to augment our product development teams – both in capacity and skills – helping us deliver a comprehensive transformation programme.”
The partnership goes far beyond a standard outsourcing arrangement; it is an embedded collaboration centred on Kobalt’s core systems. DataArt technologists are fully integrated into Kobalt’s existing teams.
“Their technical expertise, attitude and business acumen have helped accelerate the delivery of several projects, including the new generations of our Catalogue Management, Royalty Processing and Accounting systems,” says the CTO.
The hybrid model enables Kobalt to retain its core architectural vision while scaling development speed to meet its ambitious modernisation and growth goals.
The innovator’s edge: Mission, mindset and the next frontier
The journey Nuno describes is one of conscious architectural design meeting purposeful, mission-driven strategy.
The ambitious scaling is not without its complexities, particularly in the face of generative AI and the challenge of poor industry data. However, Kobalt’s approach – blending internal AI adoption, strategic partnerships like DataArt and a “hungry” culture – provides a clear roadmap.
As Nuno articulates, Kobalt’s most significant innovation may not be its technology alone, but the way its business model structurally binds its success to that of its clients. By necessity, it must “fight for every dollar,” a reality that ensures its technology, partnerships and people remain agile and focused on what comes next.
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Nuno Guerreiro
Chief Technology Officer
