You can now invest as little as $1,000 in individual music artists.
Music funding platform beatBread has launched a new tool that will allow investors to buy a share of profits from the platform’s funding of independent artists.
This move could have a major impact on the amount of money artists are able to access through Bitbread.
Launched in 2020, beatBread allows independent artists to take control of their careers without having to sign to a label to get a head start on their music income.
beatBread uses an AI algorithm dubbed ChordCash to analyze an artist’s streaming and social data to generate an offer. Its automated system means the advance can be credited to an artist’s bank account within days of application.
The artist is then paid upfront as a percentage of their revenue, over time the artists can choose for themselves.
The platform currently offers advances from $1,000 to over $3 million.
Until now, Bitbread has been using seed funding to raise the capital needed to fund artists upfront. It raised $34 million in a funding round in February 2022 and closed a $100-million institutional fund with asset manager Variant Investments last November.
But fractional investments have the potential to greatly increase the amount of money Bitbread can bring to the table.
For those unfamiliar with the term, fractional investing is basically the same thing as buying shares in a company, except it involves investing in something other than the company itself.
For example, there are fractional investment platforms for art and real estate, which allow investors to buy a piece of art or property.
beatBread’s new platform – dubbed sliceNote – will allow investors to pick and choose the artists they want to fund and buy a share of the revenue BeatBread collects in exchange for an advance they pay the artist.
Eligible investors will be able to buy less than 1% of any contract that beats the bread strike and invest $1,000 or as much as $1 million in that contract.
“SliceNote brings smart capital to the music market, empowering not only independent artists, but also highly skilled music executives, independent labels and music companies who know how to build an artist’s career,” Bitbread CEO Peter Sinclair said in a statement released Tuesday (April). 11).
“We give these skilled professionals additional financial muscle to help them compete with the majors. Unlike other music investment platforms that only focus on buying mature catalogs, SliceNote allows artists to invest in the growth stages of their careers.”
Investors using SliceNote will have access to predictive tools that will allow them to make decisions based on detailed data from an artist’s streaming, social and revenue history. Known as “sound investments,” these tools provide estimates for future releases, along with potential financial results for the investor.
“The data we provide [is] Based on a market-tested model that has been trained on millions of artists and millions of songs.”
“Our patent-pending technology has successfully predicted artist revenue across catalogs and unreleased music within a few percentage points on hundreds of deals for artists and labels.”
beatBread has been aggressively expanding its business over the past year, announcing its biggest investment in June 2022, a “seven-figure” deal with singer-songwriter Eli Douhey and his independent label and management company, Not Fit for Society.
It launched an “exclusive investor network” last November, which allows investors to bid for artists to receive advances.
Artists authorized for advances can highlight their plans, such as tour dates, marketing partners and other initiatives, to members of the network – meaning music professionals and companies, distributors and “high net worth” individuals – who can bid to provide the musician an advance.
This initiative is designed to give artists better economic terms than they would otherwise get on their advances. If they don’t like the offers they get from these investors, they can always accept the initial offer made to them by Bitbread.
The new SliceNote fractional investor platform appears to be a natural extension of that effort to bring a larger number of investors into the artist-funding scene.
“In the legacy music industry, artists were forced to give up their masters to gain control of their careers and access to growth capital,” Sinclair said last year.
“Our goal is to enable artists to access capital on their own terms.”The global music business