Medallion, a direct artist-to-fan platform that permits white-label fan experiences and digitally native commerce for artists, has closed $13.7 million of Sequence A funding. The spherical was co-led by Dragonfly and Lightspeed Faction, alongside expertise traders akin to Coinbase Ventures, Infinite Capital, J17, The Chernin Group, Third Prime and Zeal Capital, in addition to music trade traders together with Invoice Silva Leisure, Black Squirrel, Man Lawrence of Disclosure, Foundations Artist Administration, Jungle, Mt. Pleasure, Methodology, Tiga and TAG Music. Black Squirrel was based in 2020 by former Morgan Stanley government Paul Donahue, METALLICA and its in-house management crew (Tony DiCioccio, Marc Reiter and Vickie Strate),WG&S founder Eric Wasserman and artist administration agency Q Prime, which represents METALLICA.
Medallion intends to make use of this capital to speed up an bold technical roadmap to ship internet new income alternatives for artists and immersive experiences for group members round pivotal artist moments.
Since launching in 2022, Medallion‘s expertise has enabled artists to launch community-driven digital environments and goal their highest intent followers to ship unique entry to drops, merchandise and experiences. Medallion-powered communities shortly turned artists’ fastest-growing group channel, attracting 86% extra members than their Fb teams, 161% greater than Reddit and 206% greater than Discord.
Medallion‘s most up-to-date product launch is Digital Deluxe, a chart-eligible format within the U.Okay., Australia and Germany. The premium product seamlessly integrates unique audio and visible content material to inform the story behind the music. Jungle‘s most up-to-date album landed at #3 on the U.Okay. charts, propelled partially by launching an experiential Digital Deluxe model of the album inside their Medallion group. As customers proceed to embrace amassing bodily music codecs, Digital Deluxe provides followers a premium digital various with extra immersive content material straight from the artist.
“Artists proudly owning direct entry to their followers is crucial, however in addition they want extra methods to ship worth for it to drive affect,” stated Matt Jones, CEO of Medallion.
Whereas streaming has opened up entry to music and social media and created new channels for direct distribution, the complete potential of direct artist-to-fan connections has not been realized. Medallion‘s artist-centric method and emphasis on digitally native fan experiences helps usher in a brand new, transformative interval for artists.
“Artists are beginning to perceive they don’t seem to be simply content material creators, however manufacturers themselves, and consequently are constructing multimodal companies that transcend merely music and content material,” stated Rob Hadick, normal associate at Dragonfly. “Medallion is constructing the infrastructure to allow artists to instantly work together with their highest intent clients via new and unique merchandise and experiences, whereas concurrently proudly owning the shopper relationship themselves and driving internet new income alternatives round their IP. We imagine this paradigm shift will permeate throughout the whole lot of the creator economic system.”
“Artists solely have direct relationships with a fraction of their fanbase. Medallion solves this downside by unlocking direct artist-to-fan connection,” stated Will Leas at Lightspeed Faction. “The crew has a historical past of constructing pioneering expertise for the world’s greatest artists, and we’re thrilled to again them on this journey.”
Medallion is led by expertise, e-commerce and music trade veterans from Songkick, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, Grailed, Warner Music Group and Reside Nation. Previous to the Sequence A spherical, the corporate raised greater than $9 million of seed funding in 2022 from traders together with The Chernin Group, Polygon Ventures, Mike Shinoda, Betaworks, Purple Gentle Ventures and Noise DAO, together with present Medallion artists iLLENNIUM and Tycho.