There’s a musician in Kentucky named Tim Goodin. I’ve never met him; I’d never even heard of him until last Thursday.
It was late — I wanna say 10:46 pm — and I was rummaging through TikTok. I don’t care that the Chinese Communist Party created that app to spy and collect data in their quest to control the world. It’s a sober way to spend a sleepless night.
I wish I had a hardened political ideology. Do you ever feel like that? I’m not a communist, but I do like free stuff. At my lowest, I even like the idea of handing over difficult life decisions to an immutable governing body. Let them deal with it.
Anyway — Tim Goodin.
He recently put out a song called Hard Times. Man, it’s good. Give it a listen and gain a deeper appreciation for guys who grew up poor and white trash like Tim and me. It makes me want to write a book about my blue-collar background and try to become Ohio’s next U.S. senator.
As I watched his TikTok for the 20th time, I started thinking of ways I could invest in Tim and his music. The guy’s going to be huge, and I understand the importance of getting in on the ground floor. As a savvy investor, I was one of the first to promote and invest in TerraUSD.
Despite being one of tech’s most prominent thought leaders, I found myself at a loss for how to invest in musicians and promote their work to the masses. Sure, I could tweet out the song to my Twitter following (mostly porn bots, tbh), but I’d probably end up banned and penniless now that Elon’s taking over.
There had to be a better way.
So I goog’d (not a typo, I’m just cool) “how to invest in musicians'' and the top hit was a 2015 Forbes article about a startup called TapTape that has since gone out of business. That made me want to go out of business. If TapTape failed, who could succeed?
A RollingStone article pointed me to Corite — an equity crowdfunding platform for musicians and fans. One advantage Corite has over TapTape is the company is still in business. It’s a sleek-looking platform that I know nothing about, but I created an account within seconds of visiting the site.
How much of your day is spent logging into things? I swear that’s all I do. I’m already dreading going back to Corite and trying to remember my username and password. Then again, as Kanye (probably) says, if becoming a music mogul was easy, everyone would do it.
The most interesting platform I found for investing in musicians is Royal. According to TechCrunch, the company “partners with musicians and allows users to buy NFTs which represent collective ownership in works from those artists.” Built on Polygon, Royal is backed by a16z, Founders Fund, and Paradigm. They raised a $55 million Series A at the end of last year. Nas, Diplo, and Big Boi are just some of the names who’ve dropped NFTs on the platform.
I’m betting Royal and platforms like it will blow up like a Ja Morant dunk. I know Web3 is going through a rough patch, but music is a great use case for NFTs and smart contracts. However, these platforms need to get better at helping fans discover and invest in up-and-coming musicians rather than just trying to land the biggest names in the industry.
So, Tim, if you’re reading this — hey, I just met you. And this is crazy. But here’s my question, see you on Royal maybe?