How Are VCs Thinking About Music In 2025?
Five investors share their views on the music investment landscape, what trends excite them, and more.
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GM readers 👋,
Happy June!
Over the past three years, Leveling Up has served partly as a way for me to learn in public and get to the right answer, partly as a serendipity / marketing tool, and partly as a journal to capture the wins and losses of building a small business. As it relates to that last point, we saw some big milestones in June –
We welcomed three part-time writers to the Leveling Up team. I’m excited to see how much better this newsletter becomes as super-smart, curious folks with diverse backgrounds share their unique perspectives on the industry.
We spun up our first SPV via an investment in the pre-seed round of Qanooni alongside some great venture firms! This one was extra special, because many of the investors are Leveling Up readers. If you’re a lawyer who wants to get repetitive tasks done quicker, check them out!
One of Alderbrook’s first seed investments achieved unicorn status! An exciting milestone that wasn’t on my 2025 bingo card.
So a big thank you. None of these milestones or this month’s newsletter would be possible without you reading, commenting, sharing, and reaching out. I’m grateful that you are willing to take time out of your busy schedules to read what I write.
Ok, back to the regularly scheduled programming…
This month’s newsletter is Leveling Up’s “VC Edition”. We asked five experienced investors how they’re thinking about the current climate in music investing, what they’re most excited about, how they’re advising founders, and more. Thank you to each of them for taking the time to provide their perspectives. Their responses should be insightful for music tech founders, executives, and other investors in the space.
I owe an extra special thank you and shout out to long-time Leveling Up supporter Andres Lauer at Fairway Partners for helping us connect with many of the excellent contributors to this piece.
And with that, on to the disclaimers…
Note: I write this newsletter to learn in public. I’m not a licensed investment professional. This piece is for informational purposes only. None of this is tax, financial, investment, or legal advice. Do your own research!
Now, let’s get after it!
Jimmy
How Are VCs Thinking About Music In 2025?
“I’ve always been more of an analyst than an optimist.” - Bill Gurley, venture investor and General Partner at Benchmark
Investor Intros -
Andres Lauer / Partner / Fairway Partners
Andres Lauer is a partner at Fairway Partners and a specialist in corporate strategy for media and entertainment companies, with +10 years of experience.
Andrew Kahn / Managing Partner / Yamaha Music Innovation Fund
Andrew Kahn is the Managing Partner of Yamaha Music Innovation Fund. Previously, Andrew was the head of Crush Ventures, a leading early-stage fund focused on the intersection of music, technology, and cultural innovation.
Daniel Ibri / Managing Partner / Mindset Ventures
Daniel Ibri is the Managing Partner at Mindset Ventures. With over 10 years of experience as a venture capitalist, international management consultant, angel investor, M&A advisor and mentor for startups, Daniel closed over 100 deals across six different countries and founded three VC funds.
David Tauber / Investor / Creator Partners
David Tauber is an Investor at Creator Partners. David previously worked on the investment and strategy teams at Influence Media Partners and Kobalt Music.
Ishan Sachdev / General Partner / Deciens Capital
Ishan Sachdev is General Partner at Deciens Capital. Previously, Ishan was a growth equity investor and an early member of the portfolio operations team at PSG Equity.
Q1: For folks who aren’t in the weeds of venture investing every day. Can you provide a brief overview of where things currently stand in venture markets as a whole? How have venture markets shifted in 2025?
Andres / Fairway Partners: The venture capital market is highly cyclical and closely tied to interest rates. After the record-breaking activity of 2021, we’re now emerging from a period of high interest rates, which has made fundraising difficult — for both startups and funds.
On the startup side, investors are demanding stronger metrics, with a clear shift in preference toward profitability over growth at a loss.
On the fund side, structures have become leaner. Many funds launched during the hype cycle have scaled back, while top-tier firms are increasingly operating like asset managers. Newer, emerging funds tend to be smaller—often under $50 million—and usually focused on specific verticals.
Andrew / Yamaha: From a startup funding perspective, I don't think I'm stating the obvious here to say that AI is eating up almost all investor capital and mindshare. I wouldn't be surprised if close to 80% of invested capital was going into AI-focused startups. My sense is that the outliers like OpenAI are gobbling up most of those dollars and so the percentage of early-stage capital invested into AI might be less. That said, if Y Combinator's latest cohort is any indication (and it feels a bit like a lagging indicator), it's only accelerating across stages.
From a fund perspective (in terms of capital available to invest in startups), that amount is shrinking and has been consolidating around established, name brand firms. It's a function of a few things, namely an overabundance of capital during the ZIRP era, a lack of liquidity options from M&A and IPOs, and a lack of differentiation amongst these younger firms. As it relates to the last point, in order to source high quality companies, you either (A) have those relationships already or (B) earn them by delivering for founders and their companies in outsized ways. Most funds don't and many are having a hard time raising their next funds.
Daniel / Mindset Ventures: The venture capital market has changed a lot in the past years, since the peak activity from 2021. With the world’s geopolitical instability growing, as well as rising interest rates, capital has become more scarce for alternative investments in general, including VC. We’ve seen a steep decline in the number of deals being done worldwide and in valuations (with exception to some AI companies), with investors taking more time to close deals and being more aggressive on negotiation of terms. It got harder for startups to raise, but also for managers to raise new funds. The number of first-time funds has declined significantly and the total amount raised for the asset class has as well. It’s definitely a more challenging environment than what we saw in 2022.
David / Creator Partners: From my vantage, venture is evolving. As an asset class, venture has historically outperformed the market. More recently, venture investors are returning capital to LPs at slower rates, some of which is intentional (e.g., longer and evergreen fund terms) and some due to market conditions (e.g., locked up public markets, antitrust scrutiny, etc.). LPs continue to allocate capital to venture, but more selectively: the number of actively investing firms has declined ~25% since 2021 according to Pitchbook.
All of these factors have made venture a bit touch-and-go in 2025. Apart from AI, the bar is just higher across the board. In the middle of the market, flat rounds are common. Metrics matter. Fewer players means deeper diligence. The froth is gone, and what’s left feels healthier in general.
Ishan / Deciens Capital: The venture market is currently very bifurcated. Companies in the expanding AI bubble are raising huge amounts of money at eye-popping valuations, regardless of underlying traction. This part of the market has accelerated way beyond the bubble of 2020-2022.
For companies outside that segment, the market is far more challenging. Funds are much more selective when they invest, prioritizing strong fundamentals, sound unit economics and metrics, and metrics that often exceed what would have been historically required to raise a comparable amount of capital.
2025 has added uncertainty to this calculus given the changing economic situation, but the recent IPOs – particularly Chime, Circle, and eToro – have provided a welcome unlock.
Q2: Is there anything about the state of venture investing in music that is different from the state of venture across technology generally right now?
Andres / Fairway Partners: We’ve observed what we call the “Series A Gap.” Music tech startups often raise early rounds – angel, pre-seed, and seed – quite successfully. Early traction and a strong founding team are usually enough to close those rounds.
But as these companies scale, growth tends to slow. The core music tech market is smaller than many assume. To compensate, companies often expand into new products and services to diversify revenue and stabilize operations. However, this comes at the cost of the kind of focused, rapid growth that traditional Series A investors look for: a clear strategy to scaling the core product within a large market, before pursuing a broader expansion - not the other way around.
The reality is that the music tech market is still evolving – especially with the rise of AI. While it hasn’t yet reached its full potential, we believe the industry is on the right path, and that millions of people will engage with music technology in the future.
Andrew / Yamaha: Yes and no. In terms of the differences, music-focused startups almost always need to align themselves with huge, incumbent stakeholder interests to get to scale (and that's not to mention lots of smaller, powerful gatekeepers along the way). And they generally need to do that much earlier in a company's lifecycle than you would in other industries. While the urgency to align interests seems to be accelerating amongst music tech startups in the AI era, the stakeholders seem to feel the opposite; they are comfortable waiting-and-seeing. I don't believe this dynamic exists as much in other industries, where it feels like builders, buyers and rightsholders (if there are any) are more often rowing in the same direction trying to improve speed, accuracy and win-rates.
In terms of similarities, none of the differences highlighted above has slowed down the number of agentic AI pitches we're seeing! No joke, I receive at least two per day right now. With all of this enthusiasm and so many smart people building in this space, there's no question that the music industry will be impacted in a big way by AI just like we're seeing in other parts of media, never mind law, developer tools, the military, etc.
Daniel / Mindset Ventures: Definitely. What we’ve seen are less investors interested in the music market, and honestly very few that really understand the challenges and opportunities in it. There’s definitely less capital available for music tech founders and it’s harder to raise from professional VC investors than from a more “traditional” startup, lets say in Fintech or Enterprise SaaS. The music market has very peculiar characteristics that are not applicable to other industries and make it less obvious for more generalist investors – the flow of money from royalties, for instance, the power and concentration on the major labels, the type of end-user, etc.
Some investors claim the market is small and can’t produce big returns, which I definitely disagree with. We are talking about a $100B market growing at least 50% in the next 10 years, not accounting for the massive impact of disruption AI will have in democratizing the access to music and the way we compose, produce, monetize and distribute music all over the world. There are a lot of startups creating amazing tech that will definitely be of interest to strategic players in the market. I wouldn’t assume an IPO or unicorn in this market to justify huge funds, but I think you can have a great return if you invest with discipline and right size the fund.
David / Creator Partners: The macro patterns are similar: AI, barbell funding within seed and growth, and smaller rounds. On the flip side, the music industry's complexities and top-line growth introduce some dislocation.
First, whether you look at recorded music or live, incumbents control 50%+ of the market. Traditional GTM and pricing strategies can be less applicable; the highest potential, most disruptive ventures may not grow 100% YoY. Exiting with antitrust scrutiny makes success that much harder. Second, the trajectory for the music rights economy is mid to high single digit annual growth rates v. other venture sectors expected to grow at double digit rates. Still, many investors and LPs interested in music accept that some 'ventures' may have lower upper bounds that could be offset by downside protection. That means the 'who' can be different: risk-adjusted investment profiles appeal to different investor types - credit funds, family office direct investment arms - and there are many focused on music.
Ishan / Deciens Capital: In relation to the broader venture ecosystem, music is experiencing a similar bifurcation, albeit with an even wider gap. On one hand, many VCs struggle to navigate the music ecosystem’s complexities, which has limited the pool of music tech investors. On the other hand, AI is making its way into music in a big way, and the AI bubble is in full force at the intersection. This reflects the broader, still-unresolved question about what role generative AI will ultimately play in the industry.
Q3: Over the past 15 years, music has arguably been a difficult place to achieve venture-scale returns. Regardless, what corners of the music world are you most excited to invest in today?
Andres / Fairway Partners: It’s important to understand that music – and content more broadly – doesn’t scale like technology. There’s rarely a sudden inflection point or hockey-stick growth. Instead, it’s more often about steady, incremental progress. But with that also comes lower risk – it’s not always a “go big or go home” game.
That’s why music tech founders need to ask themselves: Does my business need to follow the venture capital path? Music isn’t always a natural fit for the venture model, which relies on outsized returns. The few companies that do break through the “Series A Gap” tend to be the ones delivering tangible, lasting value.
As an early-stage investor, I’m particularly excited about technologies on the creation side – tools that automate workflows and remove friction, helping artists and music creators stay focused on what they do best: being creative.
Andrew / Yamaha: I'm not sure that's entirely true if you made well-placed investments. Is it true as a function of companies trying to build in the space versus big outcomes? Maybe. I don't really know. But isn't that really the case in every industry — particularly consumer-facing ones — where winners take all?
Anyway, and it needs to be said upfront, we are not a music tech fund. We are more broadly focused on technology impacting the lives and businesses of creative people. It's an important caveat because I generally agree that investing in music tech presents a number of challenges. Moreover, I don't view music technology in isolation; the convergence of music and media — because neither lives in isolation at this point — creates a much broader aperture to consider investments AND much bigger outcomes (potentially).
One more caveat: I'm not much of a prognosticator. That said, thematically, the areas that feel most exciting in music are the rise of AI-driven creation tools that look vastly different from incumbent software, the continued professionalization of the creator economy, and UGC-led community platforms and marketplaces.
Daniel / Mindset Ventures: The first one is definitely the infrastructure / backbone of the industry and the most administrative stuff, which we are internally calling “revenue enhancement”. There are a lot of opportunities to use tech to enhance transparency, ownership, payments and the money flow in the industry. Big parts of the industry have been broken for decades. Everybody seems to know it, but few have actually faced the challenge of trying to fix it. And it’s now obvious, because it’s not a lack of technology, but sometimes about the ability to mobilize key stakeholders in the market to adopt a new standard. Artists are looking for ways to have more transparency over their gains, make more money on their creation, and engage with fans on a higher level.
We are also actively looking into the pure financial component of the industry and how Fintechs can provide credit, advances and others to artist being more friendly than some labels. We are also very aware of the interest of big funds in buying catalogs and all tools empowering that and making it more efficient are also interesting to us.
Last but definitely not least, we are looking a lot into AI and how it can contribute to the industry in several ways. There are huge opportunities to use AI as a tool to increase efficiency and support all stakeholders in the industry to produce more and with higher quality. We are not looking into AI-generated music though – we don’t believe it has a clear value proposition to users in the short term and are also completely against the usage of copyright materials for any purpose without proper licensing with its holders.
There are also other segments with interesting opportunities in music, like education, healthcare and even hardware, but we are not looking at those for our first fund. We also feel that although the big Web3 hype is now gone, there are still clever ways to use blockchain and tokenization to generate value in this industry.
David / Creator Partners:
Creation: creative expression - be it music, video, art of any kind - is an innately human activity. The TAM for creation is everyone. Frictionless creation supported by smartphones and AI let billions of people experiment with photography, storytelling, and increasingly songwriting. That spreads beyond software and our recent partnership with Reverb, the musical instruments marketplace that has fostered a thriving, growing community of gear enthusiasts passionate about musical expression, is one of those unique platforms that straddles creation, content and commerce.
Live entertainment: it is talked about, but the post-pandemic period as an inflection point for live may be understated. First, the market re-opening has shown sustained demand for concerts, festivals, and branded experiences. Second, massive investment has poured into event infrastructure and placemaking, especially around immersive - the Sphere, for me, stands out from the crowd. Third, digitally-native communities are forming, scaling, and developing parallel IRL communities at an unprecedented rate. I am encouraged by how COLORS, one of our portfolio companies, has deepened its audience ties while opening new formats to showcase artists with its global TONES of concert series.
Rights infrastructure: ventures across media with recurring revenue and mission-critical connectivity are somewhat analogous to B2B SaaS. Pex's recent sale to Vobile is an example of the value in the space being recognized. I am encouraged by the traction AI content protection and licensing platforms are seeing with legacy IP rightsholders too.
Ishan / Deciens Capital: In the music world, we are most excited about opportunities in B2B software and in digitizing services that have previously been manual. Historically, venture investment in music and music tech has been focused on the consumer side of the business. I believe that’s largely because B2B solutions historically required the adoption of the major labels, given their centrality to the industry – a very challenging proposition.
Now that streaming has reshaped the entire value chain of the industry, the dynamics have shifted – and the B2B opportunity is wide open. And since there has been limited tech innovation for so long, many parts of the music industry still operate in archaic, manual, and legacy ways, creating significant opportunities for new startups. We are particularly interested in businesses that:
Enable the macro shifts already underway to independent labels and artists, and to more artists breaking outside of the major labels.
Untangle the complexity of the underlying infrastructure of the industry, particularly where it intersects with financial services.
Digitize key monetization modalities that have historically been done fully manually – like sync licensing – leveraging modern technologies, with APIs enabling them to be plugged into broader platforms.
Take on the financial functions – like advances – that labels have historically captured internally, creating models for them to function outside of the labels and serve the broader industry.
Q4: Are you focused on a particular stage of a company’s life?
Andres / Fairway Partners: We focus on pre-seed and seed stages, with the occasional secondary investment in later-stage rounds if the opportunity is compelling. While we typically don’t lead rounds, we actively support founders we believe in – often helping them secure a lead investor through our network.
Andrew / Yamaha: We are primarily seed stage focused although we would consider an opportunistic Series A round. There are a few factors that are critical to any investment that we make: a demonstrable product, early customer traction, founder-market fit, and an unfair advantage to acquire customers cheaply.
Daniel / Mindset Ventures: We are mostly focused on Seed and Series A rounds, but have flexibility to do some pre-Seed deals as well. We like to see some traction and validation of the product with initial customers to be able to invest.
David / Creator Partners: I focus on established businesses and startups with clear product-market fit. Bringing operational experience to bear across product, GTM, and team building favors later-stage and growth opportunities. Still, the investment thesis is multi-stage across digital media, so I am always meeting with earlier stage companies with exceptional founder-market fit / thesis-alignment too.
Ishan / Deciens Capital: We focus on investing at the pre-seed and seed stages, starting as early as company inception. For our own portfolio companies, we aim to be enduring partners, continuing to invest over the long term.
Q5: How do you think about being a differentiator/value-add as a music VC to win competitive rounds?
Andres / Fairway Partners: At the end of the day, we’re all selling capital. While investors often claim to add “tremendous value,” the truth is that the biggest value comes from writing the check.
At Fairway, we take a “hands-off, hands-on” approach. We don’t insert ourselves unnecessarily or take up founders’ time. But when needed – especially around fundraising – we’re ready to dive in for a few focused days and deliver real support.
When early-stage rounds in music tech become highly competitive, it’s often because a top-tier venture fund from outside the music space has written a large check, attracting additional interest from generalist investors. We’ve seen similar patterns with music and AI – as we did with music and Web3 – and we try to avoid chasing these hype cycles. We’re not opportunistic in that sense.
Andrew / Yamaha: That is literally our proposition to founders: we are not just capital but a springboard to growth. Our fund is backed by Yamaha Corporation (Yamaha Music) with a dedicated business development and platform team to bring to bear Yamaha's powerful assets over time for any company in which we invest. Some of those assets include Yamaha's thousand+ official artists, ten million customer database, software integrations across Yamaha's digital workstations and creator tools, hundreds of thousands of kids who go through Yamaha's music schools globally each year, access to Asian markets, and of course the ability to open doors for founders because of Yamaha's brand and relationships.
Daniel / Mindset Ventures: We are trying to position ourselves as a value-add investor in the industry and not just a check and have been doing that by putting together an amazing and complementary team of people and advisors that not only support us doing diligence but also support our founders hands-on. We have people from the deep technical side, from the legal/regulations side, from the business side (former c-level executives from other music tech companies), and accomplished musicians / producers (including my partner Lucas Cantor). All of them dedicate time to support founders in lots of different ways. Besides that, all invested companies can benefit from the value creation team and efforts we have at Mindset Ventures, including a platform with more than 100 pre-vetted service providers offering perks and benefits directly to our portfolio companies.
David / Creator Partners: First, I wouldn't classify myself as a music VC. I am not a generalist either. Being wholly focused on digital media and creator businesses, we've invested in music companies and have experience scaling around the unique constraints of rights, platforms, and creators. Our differentiation is often as a third path for entrepreneurs and management teams where traditional venture or strategic investment may not be the best option. Our approach is neither wide-net investing nor strategic control.
Ishan / Deciens Capital: We think about being a value-added investor in music through: (i) the deep knowledge we’ve built over the past four years investing in the space; (ii) our relationships across the industry, in particular across the major players involved in music financing, royalties, and adjacent areas; (iii) our expertise in financial services, which touches many aspects of the music ecosystem such as royalty collections and advances; and (iv) our broader business-building capabilities. Our entire focus is on partnering with founders at the earliest stages of their journey, and often our greatest value lies in supporting domain experts who create remarkable products only they could build by helping them navigate everything else required to take their visions to scale.
Q6: What advice are you giving to music tech teams today in regards to fundraising and capital allocation?
Andres / Fairway Partners: First, make sure you’re solving a real problem. Issues like streaming monetization often seem like product problems, but they’re more about power-law dynamics in entertainment and shifts in user behavior. We’re drawn to simple, focused solutions – technology that addresses a clear pain point, even if it’s small.
Second, assess your market honestly. Founders need to realize they’re not just competing with other music tech startups, but with the entire venture market for capital. Ask yourself: is the market opportunity and value proposition big enough to support multiple funding rounds?
And finally, check your bias. Everyone loves music – but fundraising is business. Grit matters, but so does self-awareness. Know when to push and when it’s time to walk away.
Andrew / Yamaha: My advice is simple: solve for customers. Build a solution that your customers love and have a plan to get it into their hands without paying much (if anything) to acquire them. If you can do that, and turn your customers into your biggest advocates, you're off to a better start than 90% of the pitches we receive. As far as how to approach a fundraise at the seed stage, I want to fund at least 24 months of runway (i.e. the average time it now takes to graduate from Seed to Series A) with almost all of that capital being spent on product development. It makes sense to have a portion allocated to community and partnerships, as well, though I would mainly expect founders to lead partnerships and sales at the Seed stage.
Daniel / Mindset Ventures: Just like any founder, founders in music tech need to be mindful of their financial planning given the challenges of the industry and also the current state of the markets. Founders need to plan to have at least 18 months of runway (preferably 24) and have a clear path to strong unit economics, acquisition costs, and profitability/break even. It’s hard and time consuming to raise these days so founders need to plan accordingly. Also founders need to do good research to understand which investors they will approach and how. Many entrepreneurs focus on the wrong type of investor or spend too much time pitching investors that won’t fit their stage or business model. Fundraising is a process and as such needs to be driven with focus, discipline and a structured approach to work. Make sure you have high quality materials ready by the time you approach investors, including a full deck, financial model, cap table, and corporate docs.
David / Creator Partners: With respect to fundraising, in the early stages, plans that allow for at least 12 months of runway are baseline. The adoption curve for music tech offerings and services is often slower than in tech, so less is not always more. Once there's product-market-fit, if it isn't a highly competitive space, it is compelling to understand what level of capital it would take to reach profitability with some reasonable buffer. As for capital allocation, disciplined growth resonates when paired with other metrics that demonstrate stickiness and demand. If unit economics are iron-clad and profitable on the initial transaction, double-down on growth. If you are relying on future assumptions or growing to scale where the economics net out, you may be signing up for a perpetual raise cycle.
Finally, don't lose sight of building a business. There's often a cultural mission at the heart of music tech ventures. We think the single best thing to do to further the cultural mission is to build a great business because the mission will then be self-sustaining and can even grow. The fun is in building in a way that is consistent with what makes the product or platform valuable and relevant in the first place.
Ishan / Deciens Capital: Our advice to music tech teams today is: (i) build great products that solve real problems; (ii) automate away the inherent underlying complexity of the industry and build magical user experiences that just work (iii) create visibility into areas that were previously very opaque, (iv) don’t feel pressured to pursue the overhyped areas; (v) develop strong economic models; and (vi) earn the support of the ecosystem, which is critical in a word-of-mouth, trust-driven industry.
One constant is that while new technology can be hugely impactful in music, it must solve real problems for real artists in a scalable way. Big picture visions have to meet artists where they are. I think back to the wave of NFT companies a few years ago – extremely hyped and ostensibly going to completely transform music financing – most of which have now all but disappeared. In contrast, those that focused on delivering real value have succeeded.
When it comes to fundraising, companies should always know where safe harbor lies in terms of their runway. Build relationships with the subset of investors who understand the music ecosystem and are excited about the space – even if they will be more relevant for later stages. Find a way to simplify the complexity of both the industry and your business, and communicate it clearly to investors who may not share your depth of understanding. Understand what it will take to raise your next round, recognize the potential variability involved, and manage cash flow appropriately. Don’t put yourself in a box where your only option is to raise a new round quickly – certainty in this environment is hard to come by.
Thanks to Matt and Adam for the feedback, input, and editing!
Leveling Up’s work is provided for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should always do your own research and consult advisors on these subjects. In addition, our work may feature entities in which Alderbrook Companies, LLC or the author has invested and/or has provided consulting services.
📚 Music Business, Tech, and Investing Content Worth Consuming
Here is some of the best content that I consumed over the past month or so –
Coatue’s Laffont Brothers. AI, Public & VC Mkts, Macro & More (Bg2 Pod: link)
How TikTok’s Coin Economy Generates $6B+ Annually (Naavik: link)
Will Record Stores Resurge Like Book Stores? (Fred Goldring: link)
Why Artist Development Matters More Than Ever (Trapital: link)
Music Segment Fireside Chat (Sony: link)
Mikey Shulman answers your questions about Suno and making music with AI (Lightspeed Venture Partners: link)
Scopely: Play & the Learning Machine (Lightspeed Venture Partners: link)
Michael Ovitz: Turning Potential Into Prominence (Invest Like The Best: link)
Why Superstars Like Bad Bunny Trust The Orchard With Their Distribution (Billboard: link)
7 Takeaways From Goldman Sachs’ New ‘Music In The Air’ Report (MBW: link)
‘If You’re Serious About Building Fandom, You Can’t Just Double Down On Diehards, You Need To Start On The Edges’ (MBW: link)
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Good stuff.
I like Daniel @ Mindset Ventures take on growth opportunities like: “infrastructure / backbone of the industry and the most administrative stuff, which we are internally calling “revenue enhancement”. There are a lot of opportunities to use tech to enhance transparency, ownership, payments and the money flow in the industry. Big parts of the industry have been broken for decades. Everybody seems to know it, but few have actually faced the challenge of trying to fix it. And it’s now obvious, because it’s not a lack of technology, but sometimes about the ability to mobilize key stakeholders in the market to adopt a new standard. Artists are looking for ways to have more transparency over their gains, make more money on their creation, and engage with fans on a higher level.”
Great work—this write-up offers valuable insight into VC interest in music tech and serves as a useful temperature check for potential founders looking to get started.
Highly recommend the read!