Stockholm's MasterExchange lets fans invest in song royalties

Helping consumers like you and I invest in future streaming royalties, Stockholm’s MasterExchange has raised $2.7 million in a funding round provided via San Francisco/Hong Kong-based Vectr Fintech, Pan Capital founder Claes-Henrik Julander, and Miniclip (now a Tencent property) founder Rob Small.

Essentially MasterExchange is a trading platform for future music royalties, enabling fans to invest fiat currencies in specific songs and receive quarterly revenue royalty payments just as the creator would. Likewise, users can trade their share of these music royalties.

The first song made available to invest in via the platform is Sofia by Alvaro, a title that’s recorded 313,227,072 streams on Spotify, and according to MasterExchange, over 1 billion when accounting for all available outlets.

To put this into perspective, Spotify pays artists anywhere between $0.003 - $0.005 per stream on average. This means that this title should have garnered approximately $1.5 million in revenues, which then will be cut up in a variety of ways.

Although there’s no specific mention of NFT or blockchain technology at work with MasterExchange, it is worth noting that the company is co-founded by UC Berkeley’s Launch2Learn AI & Blockchain director Alexander Fred-Ojala. Additional co-founders include Star Stable founder Johan Edfeldt and producer Jakke Erixson.

“This innovation allows music lovers to find unique and exciting new ways to connect with the music they love, whilst allowing the industry new, easy-to-use channels to create super-fans. For the creators, MasterExchange offers the opportunity to sell a part of future revenues, giving them more possibilities to fuel artistic creation,” says Fred-Ojala. “MasterExchange is well-positioned to drive this change with a team that has frontier tech expertise, deep roots in the music industry, and company-building experience. I am super proud to lead this effort and this amazing group of people.”