Paying the people who make the music: a conversation between Hoppa and SongsWallet

Disclosure: SongsWallet is a HOPPA client, and HOPPA supplies the financial infrastructure behind the product described here. We are publishing this because the problem SongsWallet is working on is one almost nobody in payments is looking at, not because it is a customer — and because Arturo was asked the awkward questions alongside the easy ones.

Streaming, sync licensing, publishing, live shows, direct-to-fan sales: the number of ways a working musician can earn has never been higher. The money still arrives late and in pieces. On the master side the chain runs streaming platform to distributor to label to artist, and Revelator's own account of it puts the master leg at two to three months. Publishing income takes longer again, because it travels a separate path through collection societies, matching systems and territorial registrations before anyone sees it.

That is a cash-flow problem, and it is well documented. The less discussed problem is what it does to the artist's standing with a bank. Royalties arrive late, at irregular intervals, from many senders at once. Underwriting systems are built to recognise salary, not that. An artist with real, recurring, durable income can still read as an unassessable customer — which is a data problem wearing a credit problem's clothes.

In this edition we talk to two founders working on it from different ends.

Arturo Soler is the founder and CEO of SongsWallet, a fintech built for the music industry. Founded in 2025 and based in Málaga, Spain, SongsWallet gives distributors, labels and other rights organisations a white-label product they can offer to every artist in their catalogue: an account and a card where royalties are paid, a verified financial history built from those payments, and early access to royalties that are already confirmed. Its model also gives royalty financiers a scored view of individual artists. Each artist opens their own account, in their own name, with a licensed partner; SongsWallet never holds the money. A former hobby musician — a professional children's church choir that toured and recorded albums, a teenage rock band, drums taught to himself — Arturo then spent a decade inside the music business before starting the company: music-business consulting at TruePeople, then monitorLATINO, then LATAM account executive at Revelator, after two decades in commercial strategy at global companies. He works with Nicolás André (technical lead, Intech, Luxembourg) and José Luis Zagazeta, co-founder of SonoSuite, as strategic investor and advisor.

Beno van Gansen is CEO and co-founder of HOPPA, a B2B embedded-finance infrastructure provider. HOPPA lets companies launch accounts, wallets, cards and payment flows under their own brand, connecting the licensed financial institutions that hold the money with the product the end user actually sees. Beno is Belgian, lives in Portugal, and has spent the past several years building payment infrastructure. HOPPA supplies SongsWallet's financial infrastructure.

What is SongsWallet?

Beno: Arturo, I have been impressed by what you have built, especially coming from the other side as a former hobby musician. You started from a real problem in creator payouts — specifically how musicians get paid — and you did not just build another app on top of it. We are glad to be the financial infrastructure underneath. So let's start at the beginning: what is SongsWallet?

Arturo: SongsWallet turns royalties into a financial identity. We sell to the companies that already pay artists, distributors and labels, and they offer the product to their artists under their own brand. Each artist opens an account and gets a card, in their own name, with a licensed partner, and their royalties are paid straight into it. We never touch the money. What we build is the data and reconciliation layer: we match what the label reports against what actually arrives, and we turn that record into a score.

The idea came from two sides of my own life. I sang in a professional children's choir that toured and recorded albums, and in a teenage rock band — we rehearsed every day to play parties with a maximum capacity of eight people, the kind of gig where there are more people on stage than in the audience — and I taught myself drums. So I know how musicians work. Then I spent a decade on the business side watching the same problem: artists with real income and no way to prove it. The bank that first agreed to sponsor the model asked us to prove it in Europe first, which is why I moved to Spain.

What is actually broken in artist payouts

Beno: What are the real pain points in the music industry today when it comes to artist payouts? What is broken?

Arturo: Start with the artist. Unless you happen to be Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar or, very much in the news right now, Ed Sheeran, income is irregular, it comes from many sources, and it arrives months after the listening happened. Most artists already have a bank account. What they do not have is a financial identity, because that account has no way to recognise royalties as an asset. A streaming payment looks like an unpredictable deposit from an unfamiliar sender, not like income with a pattern behind it. That makes a financial history hard to build, so banks and lenders see a musician with real, recurring royalties as high-risk, or cannot assess them at all. The proof exists, but it lives in statements and spreadsheets, not in a bank account. That is what I want to change.

Then the label or distributor. It is not short of capital, but it would rather put that capital into catalogue or into the next artist it believes in. Artists still ask for advances all the time, and labels give many of them, often reluctantly, because an artist who is refused tends to leave for a competitor who says yes. So the money exists on both sides, and the financial system cannot see it.

The four things that sit on top of the payment

Beno: And the solution you came up with. How does SongsWallet address that?

Arturo: Royalties are paid straight into the artist's own account, so every payment builds a record. Four things sit on top of that.

The account and card. Each artist opens their own account with a licensed partner, in their own name. Bank accounts come first, through the web app; virtual wallets follow.

The SW Score. A long-tail musician has no credit file, so we did not invent a new idea of creditworthiness. We took the way institutional royalty lenders analyse a catalogue and adapted it to artists who are small, numerous and have no credit history. The Score rates the royalty, not the person. It reads like a lender's analysis: the level, stability and trend of the cash flow; the strength of the catalogue, meaning how old and how durable the income is; how diversified it is across platforms, territories and channels; and, with a small weight, the momentum of the artist's audience. A tenure factor rewards time and good behaviour on the platform. It is built mainly on money that actually arrived, rather than on streaming counts or follower numbers, which say more about visibility than income. Every data point is labelled as reported by the label or verified through our rails, and we check for jumps at the point where one becomes the other. On top of the Score, each proposed deal is tested with a coverage ratio of the kind lenders use for debt service. The model is explainable rather than a black box: it can be shown to an artist in plain language and to a lender's finance team in its own terms. The Score has already been validated against royalty reports from several different labels. What is happening now is different: we are onboarding our first label to run the full product in production — Score, accounts and Instant Payout together.

Instant Payout. Early access to royalties the distributor has already confirmed, without waiting for the next payment date. It is anchored to money that is already owed, which is different from an advance against future income.

Scoring for lenders. This is part of the working model. Royalty financiers today assess artists one by one, largely by hand. SongsWallet gives lenders individual artists already scored on verified deposits, and introduces them deal by deal. The financing and its terms belong to the lender.

For the label, that means fewer ad-hoc advance requests, a way to offer artists financial tools without using its own capital, and a reason for artists to stay: the financial history an artist builds on the label's rails does not travel with them.

What HOPPA supplies

Arturo: From your side, Beno, what does HOPPA provide in this partnership?

Beno: We handle three layers. The first is the infrastructure: accounts, cards and money movement, delivered through our licensed banking and payment partners, including Equals Money. The second is the white-label web and mobile application that artists and labels actually use. The third, which people tend to underestimate, is the orchestration layer between the financial institutions and the product itself. That layer makes sure onboarding, compliance, card issuing and payments work as one experience rather than five separate integrations.

The result is a white-label product for payment management that SongsWallet can put in front of musicians and record labels under its own name. Our job is to stay out of sight so SongsWallet can focus on what it understands better than we do, which is the music industry. The integration has been under way since July; the first accounts are opening through the web app, and a mobile app follows shortly.

Why sell through labels rather than to artists

Beno: Why white-label through distributors and labels, instead of going direct to artists?

Arturo: Because labels and distributors already have what we would otherwise spend years and a lot of money acquiring: the relationship with the artist, the royalty data and the payment cycle. One integration reaches a whole catalogue. To illustrate the shape of that — and this is an illustration rather than an announcement — a white-label distribution platform such as SonoSuite, which supplies the distribution technology to labels and distributors rather than selling to artists directly, shows how one relationship of that kind could open many catalogues at once, rather than signing labels one by one. It is also where the data is: we start from the label's statements, then verify them against real deposits as payments begin to flow through the accounts.

The product works for any artist. Larger rightsholders are interested too, but their buying cycles are longer, so we start with the distributors and labels that can move first.

Does early access help the artist, or trap them?

Beno: Early access to royalties sounds attractive, but royalties can drop quickly when a song stops trending. How do you make sure it helps an artist rather than trapping them?

Arturo: That is a common belief, and it does not match what we see in royalty statements. A song's income does not fall to zero once it stops trending; it settles onto a long, stable plateau. Recordings past their first eighteen months carry far more of the industry's streaming volume than the release-week narrative suggests, and the label statements we have scored show the same shape at the level of an individual artist. A song does not need to keep charting to keep earning: modest, steady plays from playlists, sync placements and a loyal fanbase can carry a track for fifteen or twenty years after its moment in the spotlight has passed.

That is the case we design around, with three principles. First, Instant Payout is built on royalties the distributor has already confirmed, not on a forecast, so the amount cannot run ahead of what the artist is owed. Second, the SW Score reads what actually landed in the account — the level, stability and trend of the cash flow — so a spike in streams does not fool it. Third, repayment comes out of the royalties themselves, within the label's normal payment cycle, so the artist does not have a separate repayment to manage.

There is a trade-off and we do not hide it: money today means less in the next payment.

Instant Payout is offered through the label, under a contract with SongsWallet, and today it is funded with our own capital, which keeps our incentives aligned with the artist's. For larger amounts, that is one example of how it can scale: the verified record we hold can also support financing from specialist lenders, on their own terms.

Build the banking stack, or buy the rails?

Beno: What did you need from an infrastructure partner, and why build on HOPPA rather than assembling the banking stack yourself?

Arturo: We needed three things: a regulated route to accounts and cards in the artist's own name, a working product fast, and one partner that could make onboarding, compliance and card issuing feel like a single experience. We are a small team. Assembling the banking stack ourselves means licences, integrations and years, and none of that is where we can add something nobody else has. What we can add is the data and scoring layer, so that is where our time goes, and building on HOPPA let us start there. Equals Money approved SongsWallet's application, which opened the route to the first accounts. The data layer is ours and sits above the rails, which means we can add providers and markets as we grow.

Day one, and six months in

Beno: What does a label see on day one, and what changes for an artist after six months on SongsWallet?

Arturo: On day one, if the label gives us historical royalty statements, we can use that data to score its artists from the start, then verify that history against what actually lands, month by month, checking that the two line up. From there, nothing changes about how the label pays: it keeps paying each artist directly into their own account, the same way it does today into a regular bank account, just through SongsWallet's rails instead. Every one of those payments, and the metadata that comes with it, adds to the record that builds the artist's score.

After six months an artist has six payment cycles of verified history, a score that reflects it, and access to early payout on confirmed royalties. For the label the change is quieter: fewer one-off advance requests to handle, and artists who have built a financial record on its rails and have something to lose by leaving.

Where this goes next

Beno: Where does SongsWallet go next — more markets, more of the music value chain, or other kinds of creators?

Arturo: Markets first. Bank accounts open first through the web app. About four weeks later, virtual wallets follow, covering Europe, Canada and selected countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia, subject to eligibility and partner approval. We chose Europe to begin with on purpose: it is the hardest market, with more regulation and banks that already give basic services away for free. If the model works here, it is easier to replicate in the Americas, where I have a long-standing network across Latin America and the Spanish-language market.

After markets, deeper into the value chain: more of what a rightsholder needs beyond the payment, starting with the data. Other kinds of creators are a possibility, because verified recurring income from rights is not unique to music, but we will earn that conversation in music first.

What is still unresolved

Neither of us would claim this is a settled model, and five things are genuinely open.

The Score is validated, not proven. It has been run against royalty reports from several labels, and one label is now onboarding the full product in production. That is a pilot. Whether the same weightings hold across genres, territories and catalogue ages is something only volume will answer, and the honest position today is that we do not know.

Changing a label's payment rails is a commercial decision, not a technical one. The integration is the straightforward part. Persuading a finance team to route artist payments through a new set of rails is not, and it is the step most likely to set the pace of everything else.

Artists already have bank accounts. A second one has to be worth opening. Adoption inside an embedded finance programme is consistently underestimated, and a white-label product distributed through a label inherits the label's relationship with the artist, good or bad.

Early access looks different funded by someone else. Today Instant Payout is funded from SongsWallet's own balance sheet, which aligns incentives tightly. Third-party lenders underwriting against the same score, on their own terms, is a different risk profile, and the protections that hold at small scale have to be shown to hold at large scale.

The regulatory footprint depends on staying outside the flow of funds. Accounts and cards are issued in the artist's own name by a licensed institution; SongsWallet operates the data layer and does not receive, hold, control or route client funds. That is what keeps the perimeter narrow. Any future design that moves SongsWallet inside the flow changes the analysis, and it should be treated as a different product rather than a feature release.

Closing

Beno: For us, SongsWallet shows what embedded finance should be about: a specialist who understands their industry deeply, building on infrastructure that does its job quietly in the background. The royalty-based payout problem is real, and we are proud to support the team working on it. The first accounts are opening now, and the wallets that follow will show how the model works across borders.

If you are building something with a payment problem at the centre of it and you are weighing whether to assemble the stack yourself, we would rather you tested it than took our word for it. Tell us what you find. Thank you, Arturo.

Regulatory note. Regulated financial services are provided by licensed financial institutions, including Equals Money. HOPPA is a technology provider and does not hold client funds. SongsWallet does not receive, hold, control or route client funds. Early access to royalties and any financing are provided under separate terms. Service availability varies by region and is subject to eligibility and partner approval. Nothing in this article is a loan, an offer of credit, or financial advice.

To talk to SongsWallet: contact@songswallet.com. To build with HOPPA: sales@hoppa.global.