Sound empowers every musician to break free from the broken economics of streaming platforms by releasing new songs to the world’s biggest community of music collectors, selling directly to fans, and unlocking new revenue streams. In the past year we've generated $5.5 million in revenue for a select group of creators, and today we're thrilled to announce that Sound's tools are now available to all artists.
In 2022, we launched Sound with a simple hypothesis: if music fans had access to a deeper connection with their favorite artists and were able to directly support them, we could unlock the true value of music. Its value is now trapped by the fixed pricing model of streaming, where only 0.1% of musicians are able to make a living wage from their art.
Sound flips the model on its head. We encourage artists, not platforms or labels, to set the price of their music and sell directly to their fans. They get paid instantly and are able to see their biggest supporters on every track. This is the biggest advancement in music since streaming.
By making music collectible, Sound artists have earned revenue equivalent to 1.6 billion streams — a figure that less than 100 songs have ever reached on Spotify, and has never been achieved on Apple Music. It’s an early validation that artists can make a living from 1,000 true fans, without chasing viral hits and millions of streams.
Our goal is to make Sound the home of music discovery on the internet, and opening this new model to all artists is an important next step.
To turn this vision into reality, we’ve raised $20 million in a Series A round led by a16z crypto, with participation from Palm Tree Crew, Scalar Capital, A Capital, Collab + Currency, Sound Ventures, Coop Records, Archetype, Crush Ventures, Coinbase, Snoop Dogg, Ryan Tedder, Tay Keith, Paul Rosenberg amongst others.