This Musician-Founder Raised A $150 Million Private Credit Facility Using His Skills In Finance To Empower Music Creators To Monetize Their Creations Effectively

Most founders build companies from one world they know well. Thomas Tyler built his from two. On one side was music: a childhood steeped in instruments, performance, and songwriting, followed by a full-time career as a musician.

On the other hand was finance: a decade at HSBC in equity capital markets, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and then a role at the London Stock Exchange helping entrepreneurs prepare to raise capital before an IPO. Out of that unusual combination came Rezonate.

Rezonate acquires music royalties and provides liquidity solutions to creators whose catalogs are valuable but often overlooked. It is the kind of company that only emerges when someone can speak both languages fluently—the emotional language of artists and the analytical language of investors.

Thomas’s story is not just about building a company. It is about what happens when a founder stops choosing between different parts of himself and instead turns that tension into an advantage.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

A Childhood Shaped by Music

Thomas grew up in Birmingham, where music was not an extracurricular activity but part of daily life. He is a lifelong Aston Villa fan, and some of his earliest memories are musical. He had a violin in his hand at the age of three.

His parents exposed Thomas and his siblings to music from an early age, taking them to performances by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and creating a home where music was always present. He and his brothers even had a band.

Thomas attended both a traditional school and a performing arts academy. Music, by his own account, was the lifeblood of everything they did. That matters because for him, music was never a late-career discovery or a hobby rediscovered in adulthood. It was foundational.

Music shaped Thomas’s view of the world long before he entered finance, and it remained an important part of his identity even during the years when his professional life looked very different.

From Birmingham to Edinburgh to the World Bank

Before beginning his career, Thomas took a path that already hinted at range and adaptability. He studied history and politics in Edinburgh, spent time at university in California, and also worked at the World Bank in Washington, DC.

That combination of humanities, international exposure, and policy-oriented work gave Thomas a broad lens early on. He was not being trained narrowly for one function. He was learning how institutions work, how systems fit together, and how to move across environments.

But after all that movement, Thomas ultimately landed somewhere more traditional—the City of London.

A Decade at HSBC and the Storytelling Inside Capital Markets

Thomas joined HSBC and spent a decade in equity capital markets, sitting on a trading floor in London. On paper, it seems like a sharp break from music. In practice, he sees more continuity. His view is that equity markets are, in part, about telling stories.

As Thomas points out, a good equity broker is not just passing along information. He is constructing and communicating a compelling narrative about a business’s equity value. Yes, there is an empirical side. Yes, there is trading, execution, and market mechanics.

But at its center are interpretation and persuasion. Plenty of people separate creativity from finance as if one belongs to emotion and the other to numbers. Instead, Thomas understands that markets reward people who can frame value, position assets, and communicate potential.

In that sense, his years in finance were not a rejection of creativity but another expression of it. Thomas experienced the trading floor in an era when it was still loud, verbal, and high-energy. It was a vibrant environment for a young professional, intense and competitive, full of noise and motion.

That kind of setting teaches urgency, resilience, and how to operate under pressure—lessons that would prove useful later.

The Pull Back to Creativity

Even with a successful decade in finance, Thomas always wanted to be a musician. Eventually, that part of him became too strong to ignore. After ten years in the City, he made a move many people fantasize about, but few actually take: he left and decided to write an album.

Thomas became a full-time musician for two or three years. He wrote, recorded, released music, did TV and radio, and toured. It was not a casual side project; he committed to it seriously and professionally. This period was pivotal for another reason, too.

While making his album, Thomas met Cam Blackwood, the successful UK music producer who released his album and would later become his co-founder. That relationship eventually became the seed of Rezonate.

Looking back, Thomas recalls how he approached his first music company in an empirical, business-like manner—a completely logical way.

The Artist Who Showed Up With a SWOT Analysis

What makes Thomas especially interesting is that when he entered music, he did not mentally leave finance behind. He took the analytical habits of investment banking with him. He recalls turning up to meetings with a SWOT analysis on himself.

Not only that, Thomas compared himself to other male singer-songwriters, assessed his own market position, applied a heuristic value to where he fit, and then used that framework in conversations with managers and label executives. It bewildered people in the business because it was so unusual.

But it also says everything about how Thomas thinks. He does not box himself into one identity. He did not believe being an artist meant abandoning structure, discipline, or positioning. He approached the music business with the same seriousness and strategic mindset that finance had taught him.

That blend is rare. And later, it would become commercially powerful.

Going Back to the Suit and Tie

Eventually, Thomas decided that making music work as a fully sustainable career was harder than he had wanted. He had released his greatest hit—Shooting Stars—but he is candid about that reality. The life of a true creative is difficult. It takes relentless effort and no small amount of luck.

So Thomas returned to the corporate world, joining the London Stock Exchange. He jokes that his soul died a little bit that day, but in retrospect, the move was not a retreat. It was another phase of preparation. He also considers himself lucky; not all artists have other opportunities to fall back on.

At the London Stock Exchange, Thomas was not just sitting inside a big institution. He was working closely with entrepreneurs. He ran a pre-IPO, pre-financing platform that helped founders understand what they needed to do to raise capital and prepare for the next stage of growth.

That role gave Thomas proximity to ambitious builders, allowing him to act more like an intrapreneur than a conventional employee. He took a working program and expanded it internationally into North America, South America, and North Africa.

This is an important part of the story because it shows Thomas sharpening two capabilities at once: understanding how companies raise money and learning how to scale initiatives across markets.

By the time he eventually left to start Rezonate, Thomas had already spent years helping entrepreneurs navigate financing while also building and expanding something inside a major institution. He had reached a point where his creative side was activated again.

Thomas decided to take the leap of faith and direct that creativity in a different direction, focusing more on blending the musical side with the finance side.

The Idea That Would Become Rezonate

While Thomas was at the London Stock Exchange, he and Cam Blackwood had been discussing an idea for years. They were watching the growth of music rights as an asset class. Over the last several years, music royalties have evolved to become increasingly institutionalized.

More capital was flowing into the space, and more platforms were emerging to acquire rights. But there was a gap in the market. Much of the attention was focused on headline artists and marquee catalogs. The market loved star power.

The biggest names attracted the most visibility, the most competition, and often the most capital. Yet beneath that top layer sat a huge segment of rights holders who were highly credible but comparatively overlooked—producers, songwriters, and others.

These actors had more fragmented, less glamorous portfolios on the surface. Even when those rights were tied to major global artists, they were deemed not necessarily high-profile or valuable. That was the opportunity.

Cam understood the creative side deeply, having lived it. Thomas understood both the creative world and the financial lens through which assets are valued. Together, they saw the chance to build a better solution for an underserved and undervalued part of the music industry.

That became Rezonate.

What Rezonate Actually Does – The Business Model

At its core, Rezonate acquires music royalties. The company works with royalty owners, particularly in the producer-royalty segment, and provides liquidity solutions. Essentially, it means helping rights holders sell or realize value from assets they own but may not have efficient ways to monetize.

Thomas points out that rights have expanded as an asset class over the last seven or eight years to be pretty institutional now. There are quite a few platforms out there acquiring rights. What sets Rezonate apart is its focus on a particular area of the rights pie.

Rezonate creates solutions that support and partner with creatives and royalty owners. These sellers are often not household names, but they may own rights and income streams tied to major artists such as Taylor Swift, U2, Snow Patrol, Lewis Capaldi, and Dua Lipa. That distinction is critical.

Rezonate is not chasing only the obvious headline names. It is building exposure for the people behind the music—those who write, produce, or otherwise contribute to successful work, whose assets are often less visible to the market.

This gives the company a diversified portfolio and a different entry point into the asset class. From an investor’s standpoint, that diversification is attractive. From a creator’s standpoint, it offers liquidity where there has historically been opacity and limited support.

That is the essence of the model—to create something helpful to creatives while also generating strong returns for investors.

Raising $150M the Unconventional Way

One of the most striking parts of the story is how Rezonate was financed. Rather than following the familiar startup path of friends and family, seed, Series A, and onward, the company partnered with Bridgepoint’s private credit business.

Thomas secured a $150M facility—a dramatically different way to build a company. He explains that the relevant capital in this space is more naturally found in private credit, as music rights resemble real estate in some respects.

They are yielding assets, with the potential for added upside if returns improve. That framing changes everything. Instead of slowly building toward institutionalization, Rezonate began there. Thomas says the company effectively had to go from zero to a hundred miles an hour very quickly.

When you partner with a large institution from the outset, you don’t have the luxury of gradually maturing into its institutional processes. You have to be prepared immediately for rigorous diligence, reporting, discipline, and execution. The fundraising journey itself was long and demanding.

Storytelling is everything that Thomas was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley legend (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

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As is often the case, the momentum felt slow until suddenly it wasn’t. After extended due diligence and many conversations, multiple institutions became interested at once, especially in the US, where much of the investor appetite for this asset class is concentrated.

Ultimately, the partnership with Bridgepoint gave Rezonate the capital base it needed to begin deploying seriously. For Thomas, that moment was the line in the sand. It meant the business could stop being merely an idea with a thesis and become an operating platform capable of acquiring rights at scale.

Building the Team and the Infrastructure Early

With the capital facility in place, the next challenge was execution. Rezonate has built a team of around ten people, but Thomas emphasizes that each piece of the team was added deliberately.

One of the earliest and most important additions was Nick, a third co-founder figure in the business who runs valuation and underwriting as CIO. Nick brought around thirty years of buy-side experience in equity capital markets, plus nearly a decade focused specifically on valuing music royalties.

In a business where income streams are fragmented and opaque, that kind of valuation expertise is essential. But Rezonate did not stop there. The company also invested heavily in data architecture from day one.

Thomas is blunt about the condition of the music royalty market: it is plagued by opaque information and fragmented data. Rather than rely on off-the-shelf tools that did not quite fit the problem, Rezonate chose to build its own proprietary system internally.

Led by Luke, the company’s head of data, this system became a cornerstone of the business. It enables Rezonate to ingest, organize, and value rights at scale, which is indispensable in a fragmented market. Cam’s phenomenal access to the market was another critical asset here.

This is one of the more subtle but important lessons in the story. Many founders wait too long to build real infrastructure. Rezonate did the opposite. It recognized that in a messy, data-poor market, infrastructure is not back-office support. It is a strategy.

Why Thomas Is Most Proud of the Team

Despite all the complexity around rights, capital, and data, Thomas says one of the things he is most proud of is the team itself. That is a revealing answer. Founders often talk about milestones, product, funding, or growth.

Thomas goes back to people. He speaks with genuine gratitude about the individuals who have committed their time, energy, and belief to the company’s story and vision. That kind of appreciation matters because early-stage building is difficult even when the opportunity is compelling.

Deploying the Capital: The Investment Thesis in Practice

With the facility secured, Rezonate’s work becomes a question of disciplined deployment. As Thomas points out, with secure institution-level venture-backed funding, deployment takes on a different dynamic than when you’re working with seed- or Series A-stage financing.

The company’s thesis centers predominantly on producer royalties, which Thomas describes as a broad category of non-frontline artist royalties.

In other words, rather than buying Taylor Swift’s rights directly, Rezonate might buy rights from the people who wrote songs with her, produced tracks for her, or otherwise contributed to music connected to major acts.

This approach allows the company to access highly valuable but fragmented income streams without relying on the most visible catalogs. Rezonate acquired rights from people who are equally important in the music industry, despite not being known household names.

Why This Market Is More Complicated Than It Looks

Rezonate’s work is not just about finding sellers. It involves understanding each asset deeply, ingesting the data behind it, underwriting the opportunity, and deciding whether the price and expected return align. Connecting with sellers in fragmented locations worldwide is also a hurdle.

There is no single pool of sellers. The rights holders are dispersed not only across different places but also across different stages, with different types of assets and varying levels of documentation. That is hard, partly because the assets are mostly illiquid.

There is no live public market constantly printing price signals the way there is in listed securities. In the past, there was more visibility from listed companies like Hipgnosis Sounds Fund and Round Hill Music, which had to disclose what they paid for deals.

But today, with much of the market private, that information is less readily available. As a result, one of the most important capabilities in this business is simply being close to the market.

It is crucial to understand where price is, where expectations are, and how to bridge the gap between what sellers hope their assets are worth and what financial returns justify. That is not just a mathematical exercise. It is a negotiation between creative perception and financial discipline.

The company has to remain disciplined while still being commercially creative enough to close transactions. That balance is central to execution. And that is exactly where Thomas and Cam’s combination becomes powerful.

The Long-Term Vision: A Billion Dollars and a Broader Mission

Thomas’s ambition for Rezonate is large. The company has a stated goal of deploying $1B in music rights over the next five years, which he believes is highly achievable given the size of the opportunity and the growing awareness among creators of the value of their assets.

But the vision is not purely financial. Thomas wants Rezonate to become a force for good within the music industry. As the company grows, he sees opportunities to move earlier in the creative lifecycle and help earlier-stage artists and creators better understand the value of their rights.

That is a meaningful expansion of the mission. It suggests that Rezonate is not just trying to buy existing assets; it wants to become a major player and a more constructive participant in the broader music ecosystem.

This is an opportune time, as many artists and creators face structural challenges in navigating major labels, monetization, and ownership. In that sense, the vision is both commercial and cultural. Scale matters, but so does impact.

What Thomas Would Tell His Younger Self

When asked what advice he would give himself before launching the business, Thomas’s answer is simple and honest—it is relentless. That is the part people underestimate. Building something from scratch does not stop. It keeps coming.

The work, the pressure, the uncertainty, the need to keep moving even when progress feels invisible. Thomas’s advice is to keep going. Put one foot in front of the other every day. Do something that moves the business forward.

Then look back after a few months and realize that, even when it felt slow, real progress happened. Thomas also emphasizes belief. Nobody is that clever, he says. Nothing is that impossible. That may sound simple, but it is a deeply foundational truth.

The people who make unusual things happen are often not the ones with perfect certainty or genius-level clarity. They are the ones who keep going long enough for compounding to take effect.

The Bigger Lesson in Thomas Tyler’s Story

Thomas Tyler’s path is compelling because it challenges a common assumption about careers and entrepreneurship—that you have to pick one identity and stay inside it. He moved from music to finance, back to music, back to markets, and then into entrepreneurship by combining all of it.

What could have looked like a fragmented path turned out to be highly coherent in retrospect. That is what makes Rezonate interesting. It is not just a financial vehicle operating in the music industry. It is the product of a founder who understands that real opportunities often live between categories.

Thomas Tyler is doing exactly that.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Thomas Tyler built Rezonate by combining two worlds most founders keep separate: music and finance.
• His biggest advantage came from treating creativity like a business and finance like a form of storytelling.
• Rezonate found an opportunity where others missed it by focusing on overlooked royalty holders behind major artists.
• Raising a $150M facility through private credit forced the company to operate at an institutional level from day one.
• In a fragmented and opaque market, proprietary data infrastructure became a strategic edge rather than a support function.
• The company’s model works because it creates value for both sides: liquidity for creatives and returns for investors.
• Thomas’s story shows that unusual careers can become a founder’s greatest asset when all the pieces finally come together.

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Keep in mind that storytelling is everything in fundraising. In this regard, for a winning pitch deck to help you, take a look at the template created by Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley legend (see it here), which I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash. 

Remember to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

 

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