The Future of Music 🎧
Music + Streaming + Social Media = ?
If you were an aspiring Artist a decade ago, your best bet was signing with a record label for support with Marketing, Distribution, Production, etc.
But in 2021, music is more democratized than ever:
✅ Production: If you have a laptop you can record music
✅ Distribution: Upload your music to Spotify for free (to 365M listeners)
✅ Marketing: Share your music on TikTok (bonus points if you go viral)
And these trends are accelerating:
“Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac was propelled back on the Hot 100 after 44 years due to a viral TikTok, so it’s no shocker that 67% of TikTok users go to streaming services to find “TikTok songs”.
72% of the world will use smartphones to access the internet by 2025, and they’ll all have 70M+ Songs in their pocket (via Spotify).
Fueled by streaming services, music revenue could double to $131B by 2030.
Artists = Founders 🚀
Music is powerful because you don’t need anyone’s permission to make it, and it has no marginal cost of replication. So a fair parallel is that music is no different than software, it requires a one time upfront investment to make and can generate income in perpetuity if consumers like it.
So, Kanye was right… “Artists are Founders.”
The challenge is that Artists are founders who lack fair funding options. The next frontier to truly democratize music is to establish Artists as an asset class:
Indify: The future of music 🔮
Indify is music startup that launched in 2015, and initially functioned as lead generation tool for Record Labels to find artists to sign.
But their second act is particularly exciting, in the words of founder Shav Garg… “We want to build a marketplace where if you need managing, funding, a lawyer, you come to indify, put together your team, and ensure that all the contracts are done in a fair and completely artist-friendly way”.
To democratize funding for Artists and create an open marketplace Indify has two broad problems to solve (1) remove risk for Investors, and (2) add value for Artists.
For Investors, its about balancing risk / reward:
To reduce risk, Indify predicts who the next big artists are using engagement signals from platforms (like YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, etc.) to gage if an artist has a growing and passionate fan base.
So far, they have a track record of success in proving that investing in music can be low risk and high reward, if you invest in the correct Artist. Imagine if you could’ve invested in Khalid before he got famous:
For Artists, its about transparency and utility:
Transparency: Music contracts are normally opaque, it took Paul McCartney 50 Years to regains rights to the Beatles. Indify ensures artists maintain ownership, creative control, and receive at least a 50/50 share of profit (if not more).
Team Building: One of the perks of signing with a label is you get access to their expertise. So Indify is creating a separate marketplace where Artist can build their own team of managers, lawyer, marketers, etc.
A Virtuous Loop 🔁
If you’re a fan of Science Fiction, you might be aware of the concept of a skyhook. It’s basically a cheap way to exchange momentum and help you transfer energy from one object to another in a sustainable way.
What’s exciting about Indify is it could power a new kind of momentum exchange, creators investing in creators:
Imagine if Charli D'Amelio (122M Followers on TikTok) only used music she was invested in, her social media posts could cause a direct spike in music streaming.
This in turn would lead to a bigger return on her music investment, and she could then use that capital to invest in more music and more content.
Music NFTs 🖼
Non-fungible tokens are unique digital asset stored on the blockchain.
Sports Collectibles are a use case of NFTs that Dapper Labs is pioneering, and their flagship brand (NBA Top Shot) has already driven $700m in sales in under a year.
Why not music? Indify recently launched Digital Artist Trading Cards, an interesting next step could be a marketplace to trade NFTs related to music / artists. It could even represent a way for artists to raise alternate financing from fans.
Founder Approved ✅
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