For the hardcore fan, the idea of owning a piece of their favorite artist’s music might well be an enticing one and now, thanks to a company called Vetz.co, artists can raise cash by selling ownership of a song to fans. One such artist taking advantage of this opportunity is Drake, offering up a stake in his “Jodeci Freestyle”.
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Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0
If you ever wanted to own a piece of an artist’s music, or have your fans own a piece of yours, it’s now possible thanks to a company called Vetz.co. Vetz has set up a system called an ISO (Initial Song Offering) so that an artist can raise some cash by selling ownership in a particular song or songs. Perhaps the biggest artist to do this so far is Drake with his “Jodeci Freestyle” offering that’s that’s currently in the process now.
Artists and rights holders choose how much they’d like to raise from a fraction of their song, set the reversion term, and set a date for the ISO. Rights buyers (including fans, music professionals and brands) on Vezt buy song rights during the ISO, and the artists receive funds credited to their account. The song rights information is encoded on Vezt’s blockchain. Song royalties are then collected from Performing Rights Organizations (PROs) in 137 countries around the world, as well as STEM.is, which aggregates digital performance royalties from Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, Pandora, etc.
Sounds interesting on the surface, but in Drake’s case, he’s only offering 10% of the publishing of the song, not the actual master, which doesn’t return nearly as much. And they only take ether cryptocurrency to make the transaction (which isn’t very clear or easy, by the way). Plus, the offering is not tradable on any stock exchanges, and it’s not available in the United States (probably because it’s not legal yet).
So what this amounts to is a vanity investment just to say that you “own” some of Drake’s music. While there’s probably a market for a “micro-offering” like this in the future (and artists like David Bowie have proven a similar idea would work in the past), I’m not so sure that this idea is fleshed out enough yet to make artists and publishers take notice.