Sound, a Web3 music platform, has raised $20 million in funding to help artists earn a sustainable income throughout their careers. The Series A round, which closed in February, was led by venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and included participation from Snoop Dogg, Ryan Tedder, Ashton Kutcher-led Sound Ventures and more.
The platform’s goal is to disrupt the traditional revenue models of Web2 streaming services such as Spotify or Apple Music. Since its beta launch in 2022, Sound has helped music creators generate $5.5 million on their music sales. Now, it’s opening access to the public to help more artists earn a livable income off of their work.
David Greenstein, co-founder of Sound and former product manager at streaming service Pandora, said that music subscription services have expanded access to songs while simultaneously diminishing artists’ earnings. He wants to empower listeners to fairly compensate artists at their own discretion. “One of my principles is that talent is equally distributed, and opportunity is not,” said Greenstein. “It shouldn’t matter where you come from, what you look like, how much money you have – if you are talented and you make music, you should be able to make a career off of being an artist.”
Web3 helps facilitate direct payments for the songs, allowing artists to eliminate the middleman and keep 100% of their revenue. Utilizing Ethereum and layer 2 scaling solution Optimism, artists can upload their songs, mint them on-chain and sell them for ETH – without requiring fans to create a wallet by supporting fiat payments.
Sound aims to use the funding to expand its artist relations, engineering, and marketing teams as it opens its platform to the public. Ahead of its launch last year, Sound raised a $5 million seed round in December 2021, with backers including a16z and rapper 21 Savage.