Pianity Raises $6.5m To Further NFT and Blockchain Music Industry Fusion
Pianity, the web3 music NFT marketplace powered by Arweave, has just announced that it has raised $6.5m in its latest venture financing seed round. This move will enable Pianity, which is one of the pioneering platforms combining the traditional music industry with blockchain technology, to further their efforts at partnering with major music industry giants, as well as onboarding more artists and further developing their protocol.
We’re proud to announce that we raised $6.5 million in seed to build the next generation of music platform leveraging #NFTs!🚀
⭐Thank you to all the artists, collectors, advisors, and investors for being part of this journey!
👉Read the announcement: https://t.co/IqCho8WNAc pic.twitter.com/hxyUWPKI4w
— Pianity (@pianitynft) March 2, 2022
The funds will also allow Pianity to expand its headcount and bring in a world-class team of country managers, along with artist relation managers. The capital will also be used to open offices in the US and Latin America, as well as to further the development of their mobile application, and add to their streaming services’ functionality (including an NFT playlist function, and building a music library).
The funding round is led by:
- Digital Renaissance Foundation – Venture capital focusing on building an open web.
- Big Brain Holdings – Investment fund that focuses on early startups on major L1 chains
- LongHash Ventures – Web3 investment fund
It is also supported by:
- Arweave – The Permaweb itself
- Ronny Shibley – CTO and co-founder at Gorillas.
- IOSG Ventures – Community driven venture capital
- LD Capital – Crypto fund
- Sebastien Borget – Co-founder and COO of The Sandbox
- ViaBTC Capital – Crypto investment group focusing on L2s, DeFi, NFTs and GameFi
- ArkStream Capital – Crypto fund focused on accelerating web 3 unicorns
What is Pianity?
Pianity, launched in 2021, is a music NFT marketplace and platform that was built for the ground up as a profit sharing community. Its high user rewards, amongst other things, is what makes it appealing to many artists and users alike, as it redistributes 50% of its profits back to the users. Percentages per user are calculated proportionately to their NFT portfolios.
They have set out to change the traditional music industry and streaming services by making the market fairer for all participants via the use of blockchain and web3 technology. Pianity is still in its early days, but to date it has accrued over 20k users, minted over 500 song, sold 11k NFTs and generated $1.9m of revenue in NFT sales for artists.
Pianity recently highlighted this NFT drop by DJ Moh Green featuring Jamaican award winning dancehall artist Sean Paul, as well as Nicky B and SynthKartell.
⚡️There's a very special Unique Edition auctioned today: "Tornado" by @DjMohgreen featuring @duttypaul @Nickybja & SynthKartell
🎵 🇯🇲 Recorded in Jamaica, this track available in #NFT is cut to make you dance under the palm trees.
💎Collect it: https://t.co/H3NNTREpti pic.twitter.com/FrG9ocAlfq
— Pianity (@pianitynft) March 2, 2022
As well as onboarding more artists from a wider range of music genres, they will also seek out to partner with major music festivals.
Music Industry & Blockchain Fusion
There are many platforms seeking to find new ways to incentivise artists and music creators being built on web3. It is highly likely that music NFTs will see a rise in popularity very soon, and adoption might be driven by the industry’s elite.
Cao Yin, the founder of Digital Renaissance Foundation, talking about Pianity and NFTs in the music industry said that
“Music is more likely to resonate with the community, and, therefore, the NFT music market should be larger than the visual NFTs market”.
He went on to say:
“I followed and invested in Pianity at an early stage, because I believe
that the iteration speed of the company’s platform will catch up with traditional internet
companies. It offers a more compelling value proposition for both artists and collectors.”
Meanwhile, IDM and EDM musician BT recently dropped his latest collection, Orbs – a collection of NFT that responds to music being generated in real time, that can also be utilised in the Gala Games universe. This is far from a simple integration of web3 into the music industry, but we wouldn’t expect less from BT. There is room for many use cases.
With the way the music industry has gone over the past decade it is almost a certain that many artists are feeling unfairly treated and sometimes even left out, being overshadowed by the giants of the industry that perpetually stay in the spotlight due to major industry promoters pertaining them there.
If you want to read one of our theses on how music NFTs and decentralised streaming can affect the music industry, have a read at this article of ours, as well as this article about another platform, Releap.
Catch the full Pianty announcement here.
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