Resolut, a Nashville platform for resolving music copyright and royalty conflicts at scale, won the Jury Award at Music Tectonics’ Swimming with Narwhals startup competition this week, while Visuals.fm, which uses AI to design visuals and videos for music, took Audience Choice.
The pitches capped the conference’s eighth edition, held Oct.27–29 at the Santa Monica Pier Carousel and the Annenberg Beach House.
Finalists pitched to three investor judges: Andrew Kahn of the Yamaha Music Innovations Fund, Ishan Sachdev of Deciens Capital, and Joe Tou of Triptyq Capital. Attendees voted for the Audience Choice winner. The other finalists were EquitX, which offers a fairer way to price high-demand tickets, and Cadence IO, which funnels release delivery, tracking, and organization through a single data-entry point.
Resolut was founded in 2024 to replace the spreadsheets and email threads rights holders typically juggle when sorting out ownership claims, territory disputes, and withheld revenue. Its platform pulls claims, chain-of-title records, and metadata into one workspace with real-time conflict monitoring and audit logs. That problem is only getting bigger. On UMG’s earnings call this week, Lucian Grainge cited Deezer figures showing more than 90,000 fully AI-generated tracks hitting streaming services every day, all of it more metadata for someone to reconcile.
Visuals.fm is built for artists and labels that need a full release package, from cover art variations and Spotify Canvas loops to lyric videos and social assets, generated from a single upload. Its Audience Choice win says something about where the room’s appetite is: AI that lowers the cost of the visual side of a release, a corner of the scene Zinstrel has been covering more closely through its Fresh Friday Recap.
Music Tectonics founder Dmitri Vietze framed the finalists around the conference’s “Rising Tide” theme:
“All of our Narwhal finalists reflect how technology can address real pain points in our business and lead to greater revenue, efficiency, and capacity for creativity.”
This year the competition expanded to pre-seed and pre-launch founders. Past Narwhals include AI stem-separation company AudioShake in 2022, AI sample creator Aux in 2023, and Roxxem and Music League last year.