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

Startup funding rounds: ElectroSpit’s crowdfunding campaign, plus another nine-figure NFT platform raise

Talkbox audio hardware company ElectroSpit, raised $300,000 from ICA fund. Highlighting their Black- and woman-led startup, ElectroSpit has had a crowdfunding campaign for several months on Republic, gauging interest from investors to design new products and manufacture more of their signature tubeless, mobile talkbox.

• This investment is notable as we don’t typically see much investment in music and audio hardware. In all of 2021, we tracked just under $158,000 in publicly announced investments across five startups in the audio hardware category, plus one company, Artiphon, that received funding for an undisclosed amount).

In our adjacent rounds we listed a significant investment in Autograph, the NFT platform that boasts an A-list board of advisors (including Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino and Spotify Chief Content Officer Dawn Ostroff), and counts recent retiree Tom Brady among its co-founders. The company’s $170M Series B, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, is one of the largest rounds we’ve seen for an NFT platform since Dapper Labs’ $250M round in September 2021 (led by Coatue) and OpenSea’s $300M round in early January 2022 (led by Coatue and Paradigm).

• Autograph’s collections to date have focused mostly on professional athletes and “iconic brands in sports and culture.” That said, Autograph’s co-founder Richard Rosenblatt has stated that the company intends to expand their music NFT vertical, starting with an auction for a small collection featuring The Weeknd and Billboard in December 2021.

Music/Audio Startup Exits: Even more creator tech consolidation

Another week, another acquisition forUtopia Music. This week, the company announced they’d purchased music publisher Sentric Music Group,after acquiring five other companies in recent months, including ROSTR, ForTunes, Lyric Financial and Musimap.

• Utopia, a Switzerland-based fintech company, is becoming quite a powerhouse for rights monetization. It now has a Royalty Management Services business unit to complement its Royalty Advance acquisition (by way of owning Lyric Financial), and recently launched a Creator Services Division (by way of ROSTR, ForTunes and Musimap) — all with the apparent goal of providing artists and creators with a load of data, insights and tools to find and capitalize on new revenue streams.
• The only potential competitor to Utopia in the music creator tools market is Songtradr, a B2B music licensing marketplace that went on a similar acquisition spree throughout 2020 and 2021, buying up creative agency MassiveMusic, sync licensing company Cuesongs, sound design outfit Song Zu and music livestreaming startup Pretzel. As the “creator economy” becomes a buzzier topic in Silicon Valley at large — and, in turn, an increasingly central north star for today’s independent artists — it’s interesting to see tech startups rather than traditional rights holders take the reins on defining what the creator tools landscape will look like for the music industry. In the case of Utopia and Songtradr, they are seemingly asserting their market position by pure M&A force, rather than building their own products in-house.

Artists on Cap Tables: John Legend’s first NFT gig

John Legend has joined NFT platform OurSong as its co-founder and Chief Impact Officer, to make NFTs (which they call “Vibes”) easier to mint and buy without a crypto wallet to help more musicians transition into Web3.

• OurSong was first founded in 2018 as a subsidiary of Taiwanese music streaming service KKBOX, which is one of the top music streaming services in Asia and, to our knowledge, the first streaming company to launch its own NFT platform in-house. That said, OurSong now seems to be housed under a new parent company, Our Happy Company, whose connection to KKBOX is not yet clear (although KKCompany’s co-founder and group CEO Chris Lin is also listed as Our Happy Company’s co-founder/CEO).
• This venture appears to be Legend’s first foray into crypto, as we have no record of him minting NFTs in the past, or of him investing in other blockchain-based ventures.

Music/Web3 Dashboard

Music NFT drops: Banking on the return of IRL VIP Experiences

It was another rough week for NFT public relations thanks to HitPiece. However, there are still plenty of new legitimate music NFT drops, including some from Heno, Kris Lawrence, Black Dave, and today’s drop of hyped Coachella Music Festival’s “Infinite Keys” NFT series. We’re still watching ongoing auctions and upcoming drops such as Steve Aoki’s token-gated A0K1VERSE (one of the few celebrity drops we’ve seen that adopts the ERC-1155 multi-token standard), as well as deals like Warner Music’s partnership with platform OneOf and Rolling Stone’s partnership with Coinbase.

• Coachella’s big-ticket NFT collection offers the enticing IRL benefits we have been expecting to see in the evolution of NFT use cases, including lifetime festival passes, private parties and dinners in the Rose Garden. Coachella is not the first festival to issue NFTs: Governors Ball, for example, released some 10th-anniversary collectibles last fall, and India’s Sunburn Festival had a successful NFT drop in summer 2021, but neither collectible NFT provided  further utility.
• Considering the historically high-margin secondary market for Coachella tickets, we would expect a lifetime pass ticket with the benefit of verification to command hefty prices on the secondary market  (and at least a bit of speculative bidding on the auction, which lasts for the next week). If successful, the drop would provide a fascinating case study for NFTs as useful, traceable passes to in-person events as the world emerges from the pandemic.