Pianity raises $6.5M for music NFT DAO with weekly 50% profit sharing
Music NFT marketplace Pianity has secured $6.5 million in seed-round venture financing. The platform empowers artists to sell tracks as limited edition NFTs and and rewards its most active users with 50% of the profits .
Since launching last year, Paris based Pianity has sold 11,000 NFTs and claims 20,000 users. Artists have earned over $1.9M in sales. Pianity was built using environmentally-conscious Arweave tech.
Indie Artist Success
“NFTs have been a game-changer in my career as a new source of income,” says jazz pianist Sarkis Ricci. “I sold 100 copies of a never-released composition on Pianity for over $150,000. That’s the kind of value that only a very few can reach on streaming platforms. With NFTs, we can connect directly to our audience and create value around music.”
“NFTs open up great opportunities for all artists because they are transforming the music industry business model,” said Kevin Primicerio, CEO and co-founder of Pianity.
DAO and platform-wide profit sharing
Late last year Pianity became a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) governed by its members. Users and holders of tokens have the power to vote for songs submitted by artists to be published and sold as NFTs.
Unique to Pianity is profit-sharing that redistributes 50% of profits in tokens to all active users each week.
For example, if $1,000 of NFTs were sold in a week, Pianity takes 20% per their fee ($200) and then the rest ($100) would be redistributed to active users. The amount users receive is based on the size of their NFT collection (the bigger their collection is, the higher their reward) and the volume of transactions.
Pianity developed this system to reward collectors for their support to musicians.
Investment details
This $6.5 million round was led by Digital Renaissance Foundation, Big Brain Holdings, and Longhash Ventures, with participation from IOSG; LD Capital; Sebastien Borget, co-founder and COO at TheSandBox; ViaBTC; ArkStream Capital; Arweave; and Ronny Shibley, CTO and co-founder at Gorillas.
The investment will be used to expand it headcounts with a team of country managers and artists relations managers and open offices in the U.S. and Latin America. It will also support the development of a mobile app and additional functionality for Pianity’s streaming services, such as creating an NFT playlist and building a library.
Bruce Houghton is Founder and Editor of Hypebot and MusicThinkTank and serves as a Senior Advisor to Bandsintown which acquired both publications in 2019. He is the Founder and President of the Skyline Artists Agency and a professor for the Berklee College Of Music.
