The below was originally published in our weekly editorial and database email digest, which connects the dots among the latest music/tech news as laid out across our suite of member-exclusive databases.

Music/Tech Investment Dashboard

Artists on cap tables: Snoop’s Web3-native ambitions with Death Row

Snoop Dogg kept busy in February between performing in the Super Bowl, dropping a notable NFT sale, and announcing his acquisition of Death Row Records (which he claims will be “an NFT label” and “the first major in the metaverse”).

• Last April, Snoop also invested in superfan engagement platform Pearpop. Combined with his splashy NFT drops, we continue to see him looking for new ways to connect musicians to fans outside of traditional industry structures.
• These moves are notable for a legacy artist who came of age in the golden era of major labels, and another signal that there will likely be long-term changes coming for the music industry when it comes for integrating Web3 tools into artists’ career strategies.

Startup funding rounds: Celebrity-backed metaverse investments continue to pick up steam

We added four new funding rounds to our database this week, including rounds for metaverse platform Everyrealm, sync licensing marketplace Dequency, the interactive mobile creator platform Encore Music Technologies and the digital karaoke streaming startup Singa.

Everyrealm announced it raised $60 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The re-branded Republic spin-off, formerly known as Republic Realm, has invested in 25 different metaverses and owns over 3,000 NFTs. It counts several musicians amongst its investors including Lil Baby, Gene Simmons and Nas.

• Nas is a prolific early-stage investor who backed NFT royalty distribution platform Royal, where he has also released his own NFTs. In just the last year, he’s invested in social gaming platform VersusGame, crypto-powered streaming platform Audius and influencer marketing company Breakr.
• His involvement with Everyrealm aligns with the music industry’s rapidly increasing attention on metaverse-related projects in recent months, which we began to cover in last week’s digest and hope to explore further in a future collaborative research $STREAM Season.

Encore Music Technologies, co-founded by Kid Cudi in 2020, announced a $9 million seed round led byBattery Venturesto provide more accessible and scalable, on-demand, direct-to-fan live mobile experiences. The company is allocating funds from the round to launch and grow its new live music AR app Encore Studio, which targets musicians looking to connect with fans virtually.

• The emergence of an AR livestreaming tool aligns several topics we’ve covered comprehensively including livestreaming platforms, superfan engagement platforms and music gaming strategy.

Sync licensing platform Dequency raised $4.5 million to build a decentralized music licensing platform on the Algorandblockchain.

• Based on our own internal research, we know of more than 40 online sync licensing marketplaces that allow creators to purchase micro-licenses of music for sync or production; this is the first such marketplace we have encountered that will be doing this licensing on-chain.

Exits: Spotify continues to beef up its podcast ad/monetization toolkit

We have added four new exits to our dashboard – two of which were acquired by Spotify, and another acquisition from Sony Music that was cleared this week.

Despite ongoing criticism of its payouts to its musical artists as contrasted with the significant money it spends on podcasts, Spotify furthered its commitment to podcasts this week with two acquisitions in the category: Chartable and Podsights.

• Chartable, founded in 2017, adds more data analytic tools for podcasters, while Podsights adds to its podcast advertising tools for marketers. The acquisition of both startups follows Spotify’s acquisitions of several other podcasting companies last year, including Podz and Whooshkaa.
• All of these acquisitions point to Spotify beefing up its podcast monetization and ad capabilities, particularly building on their existing advertising marketplace Spotify Audience Network and podcast publishing platform Megaphone. Interestingly, Spotify seems to be taking the approach of buying up existing tools from outside, rather than building new ones in-house; it remains to be seen how smoothly all of these tools will be integrated into a full-suite monetization stack for podcasters and brands.

Sony Music’s $430 million acquisition of music distribution company/independent label AWAL from Kobalt last May was finally cleared last week by UK regulators Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) after months of investigation. Sony also owns the major distribution company The Orchard.

• Additionally, this week Sony was also given the green light by Brazilian regulators to finalize the purchase of Brazil’s Som Livre record label, making Sony Music the dominant label in that market by far.
• These acquisitions significantly expand Sony’s already considerable influence in the highly-consolidated international music industry, and analysts suspect these rulings will clear the way for other major multinational acquisitions.

Music/Web3 Dashboard

Music NFT drops: Album and liner-note NFTs take center stage

We’ve added several dozen new NFT drops to our database this week, including some virtual collectibles from The Beatles, a new drop from Latashá and that massive sale mentioned above from (who else) Snoop Dogg, as well as many NFTs released on the platform Catalog over the last couple months that were previously missing from our database.

Snoop Dogg released 25,000 NFTs of his “Stash Boxes” that gave the purchaser an NFT of one of his 17 songs from his new album. It’s not clear how many NFTs sold in total, as the site was taken down after the sale ended. We suspect it did not sell out — only 8,934 sold of the 25,000 available at the last check. However, this is still the most significant single music NFT sale we have tracked to date, at $44.67 million in sales. The next highest was 3LAU’s Ultraviolet Collection in February 2021, which sold a total of $11.68 million.

• Snoop Dogg was an early adopter of music NFTs as their sales exploded in early 2021. Last year, we tracked $1.8 million in NFT sales from him, including a previous drop of 25,000 NFTs (which we calculated as selling only about 10% of supply, clearing about $547K in total).

An NFT version of the handwritten notes from the origin of the song “Hey Jude” was the top bid at $76,800 at Rock ‘N’ Roll memorabilia auction house Julien’s Auctions from a 6-NFT collection of various items from Julian Lennon’s private collection, which sold for a total of $149K.

• This is the first memorabilia NFT collection that we have captured in our Music NFT database and is a head-spinning philosophical use case for the analog vs. Web3 ownership value proposition: To purchase a piece of an artist’s history, through an NFT version of a real-world collection of physical memorabilia owned by someone, at a traditional auction house, is historic in and of itself.

Music/Web3 tools: Direct-to-fan messaging keeps up its momentum

We added the new startup WishWorld to our Web3 Tools database. Singapore-based Aqilliz partnered with One Mercuri to launch the company as an NFT and metaverse direct-to-fan-engagement platform for musicians and other entertainers. Its first NFT release will be from Indian film composer Maestro Ilaiyaraaja.

• Details are still scarce, but this is another example of the evolution we are seeing of direct-to-fan superfan engagement marketplaces bridging on-request Web2 engagement to Web3 spaces, as we covered in our $STREAM Season 1 report on Web3 Tools for Artists.