Quick take:
- The fund will invest in platforms, protocols, artists and tokens uniquely enabled by Web3.
- The team will work directly with founders and artists to build products which create new revenue streams.
- The fund will also help artists raise capital to build an ecosystem for their fans.
Crypto influencer Cooper Turley has announced Coop Records Fund I, a $10M early-stage fund to invest in music and artists enabled by Web3.
Turley has worked in the music industry for 10 years and was a DJ and artist manager. He was a co-founder of Friends with Benefits DAO, which he was ousted from after racist tweets surfaced. He was also a former venture partner at Variant and is an active advisor at Web3 music project, Audius.
In a blog post, Turley explained that there have been very few opportunities to participate in the growth of artists that he’s a fan of, which is why he has decided to start a fund to invest in music.
With Coop Records Fund I, Turley wants to give people the opportunity to invest in the Web3 equivalent of music streaming services and record labels that could grow to be as big as Web2 ones like SoundCloud or Spotify.
In the Web2 era, music artists have relied on streaming as an additional revenue stream, but with Web3, consumers can do more to support artists than just adding a new release to their playlists. For instance, fans can purchase music NFTs, which results in artists “making multiples more income off of NFT sales than streaming.”
Selling 25 Music NFTs at 0.1 ETH pays more than a million streams on Spotify.
— Coopahtroopa 🔥_🔥 (@Cooopahtroopa) June 4, 2022
Let that sink in.
“We invest in platforms, protocols, artists and tokens uniquely enabled by web3. Think of Coop Records as a hybrid between a web3 venture fund, a record label, and an incubator. We work directly with founders and artists to build products which create new revenue streams,” Turley wrote in a blog post.
He added that Coop Records is funding opportunities for artists to raise capital by selling their songs to investors instead of record labels via what the fund calls “Artist Seed Rounds.” By raising capital using this method, artists can maintain majority ownership of their music while getting capital from long-term partners. Artists could also sell equity in their company instead of the rights to their catalogue, allowing them to build an ecosystem for their fans.
Coop Records is also bringing on a select batch of trusted artists as investors in the fund so that they could also own parts of the company at the earliest stages.
Over the past 18 months, Turley has been angel investing in several Web3 companies including Zora, Mirror, Koop, Variant Fund II, amongst others. With Coop Records, he is a solo general partner looking to invest in music companies and artists in Web3.
Stay up to date:
