beatBread brings fractional investing to the independent artist funding scene

You can now invest in independent music artists with as little as $1,000.

Music funding platform beatBread has launched a new tool that will allow investors to buy a share of the profits made through funding by the platform from independent artists.

This decision will likely have a major impact on the amount of money artists can access through beatBread.

Launched in 2020, beatBread allows independent artists to get advances on their music revenue without having to cede control of their career to a label.

beat Bread uses an artificial intelligence algorithm called ChordCash analyze an artist’s streaming and social data to generate an offer. Its automated system means the advance can land in an artist’s bank account within days of the request.

The artist then repays the advance as a percentage of their earnings, over a period of time that the artists can choose themselves.

The platform currently offers advances ranging from $1,000 to over $3 million.

Until now, beatBread had used seed money to raise the capital needed to fund artist advances. He 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 split investing has the potential to dramatically increase the amount of money beatBread can bring to the table.

For those unfamiliar with the term, fractional investing is essentially the same as buying stock in a business, except it involves non-business investments.

For example, there are fractional investment platforms for art and real estate, which allow investors to buy a share of an artwork or property.

beatBread’s new platform – which it has dubbed sliceNote – will allow investors to choose the artists they want to fund, and allow them to buy a share of the revenue beatBread collects in exchange for the advance they give to the artist.

Accredited investors will be able to purchase as little as 1% of any given deal that beatBread enters into and can invest as little as $1,000 or up to $1 million in that deal.

“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,” said said Peter Sinclair, CEO of beatBread, in a statement on Tuesday (April). 11).

“We are giving extra financial muscle to these skilled professionals to help them compete with the majors. Unlike other music investment platforms that only focus on mature catalog buyouts, sliceNote allows investing in artists during the growth phases of their careers.

Investors using sliceNote will have access to prediction tools that allow them to make decisions based on detailed data about an artist’s streaming, social and revenue history. These tools, called “soundInvestment”, also provide projections for future releases, as well as likely financial outcomes for the investor.

“The data we provide [is] based on a market-tested model trained on hundreds of thousands of artists and tens of millions of songs,” John Haller, head of analytics and data science at sliceNote, said in a statement.

“Our patent-pending technology successfully predicted artist revenue on catalog and unreleased music within a few percentage points across hundreds of deals for artists and labels.”

beatBread has grown its business aggressively over the past year, announcing its biggest investment yet in June 2022, a “seven-figure” contract with singer-songwriter Elley Duhe and his independent label and management company, Not Fit For Society.

This too launched an “exclusive investor network” last Novemberwhich allows investors to bid to provide advances to artists.

Artists who have been approved for an advance can present their plans, such as tour dates, marketing partners and other initiatives, to network members – i.e. music professionals and businesses , distributors and “high net worth” individuals – who can bid to provide an advance to the musician.

The initiative is designed to give artists better economic terms on their advances than they could otherwise get. If they don’t like the offers they receive from these investors, they can always accept the initial offer made to them by beatBread.

The new sliceNote fractional investment platform seems like a natural extension of this effort to attract more and more investors to the artist funding scene.

“In the legacy music industry, artists have been forced to sacrifice control of their careers and their masters to access growth capital,” Sinclair said. said last year.

“Our mission is to enable artists to access capital on their own terms.”The music industry around the world