Money: Cashflow & Access to Finance
How do artists and their teams access funding and the cashflow needed to develop the artist’s career? Signing rights to labels and publishers? Maxing out credit, crowdfunding? With an increasing range of financing options available, competition, digital metrics, and the growth of cultural asset classes, is creating opportunity for artists.
New services offer artist’s funding without asking for rights ownership in return, and can also disconnect service provision (i.e. A&R, distribution, marketing, etc), from the financing ‘deal’, placing more responsibility on the artists team to run the business, but providing greater flexibility in deploying finance to build an audience and revenues. The better you run your business, the better you can take risks with your art. If you raise finance using new services, do you also need to raise your game as a business? What are your backers offering you, and what are you offering them?
Featured Speakers:
Alex Heiche, CEO & Founder of Sound Royalties
Alex founded Sound Royalties in 2014 with the vision of providing funding to music creatives without ever taking ownership of the underlying copyrights. This alternative to creative financing was the first of its kind available to the music industry, and Sound Royalties continues to be the leading royalty finance firm that has pioneered this funding model. Alex possesses decades of experience in providing funds and finance raising strategies to music creatives, large annuity recipients, and professional athletes. He has worked with leading music industry professionals, including GRAMMY-Award winners, platinum recording artists and notable music industry executives in every genre, always with the utmost discretion and privacy.
Kimberly Knoller, CMO at SongVest
Kimberly Knoller is a passionate music marketing, management and artist development executive who has been on the cutting edge of breaking and developing artists globally for more than a decade. Kimberly utilizes her relationships, experience, and creative savvy to connect dots and utilize the strengths of SongVest and the utility value of Web3 to serve the needs of creators. She’s held executive roles at Warner Records, Sony Music, Geffen Records, and direct to fan platform Musictoday, and worked to support the careers of artists such as Aerosmith, Alice in Chains, Michael Buble, Harry Connick, Echosmith, Josh Groban, Guns N Roses, My Chemical Romance, The Regrettes, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Green Day, Peter Gabriel, Joni Mitchell, Nirvana, Blake Shelton, and many more.
Peter Sinclair, CEO and Co-Founder at beatBread
Peter Sinclair is a seasoned entrepreneur, with deep expertise in launching and elevating digital-forward businesses in the financial, music and consumer product sectors. He has repeatedly taken companies and business units from pre-revenue to rapid scale, creating high-performing organizations that deliver operational and commercial success. He co-founded beatBread in 2020 as a means to empower more artists to make a living from their music without giving up ownership of their masters or the ability to make their own career decisions. Since launch, beatBread has helped over 300 artists with advances against streaming revenues from new and catalog tracks, giving them the financial freedom to build the team and partnerships that work best for them.
Mark Ryan, CEO & co-founder of Fanbace
Fanbace is a free to use Merchandise on Demand platform. We enable the music industry to sell merchandise direct to a global fanbase without risk, upfront investment in inventory or the day-to-day headaches of order management.
Using best in-class technology and our global partner network we’ve removed all barriers to entry and leveled the playing field. Make merch accessible to all artists.
In a few steps All artists, or their teams, can monetize their fanbase. Building scalable and sustainable revenue streams.
Panel Moderator
Sara Qazi, SVP investments/founder GSE Impact Group of Raymond James
Sara sits at the intersection of entertainment, tech and finance, providing asset management and investment banking to founders and families. She focuses primarily on placing capital in high impact investments aligning values and legacy. Formerly, she managed punk and alt rock bands and was a standing board member of the MMF for seven years.