Donda Academy, Future of Music & the Billion Dollar Race for Copyrights 📈

Kanye West's opens a school in LA, what the future of Music looks like and Private Equity $$ are flowing into Music Copyrights

Happy Friday everyone!

This week started off in the most nightmarish manner possible for folks at Facebook when all three of its core products- Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram crashed, suddenly leaving a billion people around the globe in an existential crisis 😅

Most of the Internet jumped ships onto Twitter and boy did the memes not disappoint 👇🏻

Trung Phan 🇨🇦 @TrungTPhan

Live footage of Zuck heading to the data centres to restart Facebook and IG

Sure I was laughing my head off on Monday, but found myself at the wrong end of server issues when our very own product went down yesterday 🤦🏻‍♂️

Facebook obviously has its own physical data centres in California, but since it’ll probably take us a tad bit longer to get there, we use Google Cloud’s infrastructure and were pretty much helpless.

Thankfully, it went back on in a couple of hours, so you know where to find the best playlists to soundtrack your weekend 👇🏻 🎧

With the engineering team ‘hardly working’ to build out the next iteration of our product (DM us for a sneak peek 😉) , it seems like everyone has homework over the weekend to get to the bottom of this 🕵🏻‍♂️

As always there has been a lot to uncover this week, so let's get into it ⬇️

1) Kanye West’s Donda Academy 🏀

Right off the bat, it’s that man Kanye West yet again.

Chi-Town legend and Hip-Hop’s favourite punching bag is back in the ink, this time with his ballin’ shoes on ⛹🏻‍♂️

Earlier this week, West announced the long-awaited launch of his foray into the education space with the launch of ‘Donda Academy’ ⚫️

What is it?

Donda Academy will be a private school open to just 60 students, and lists the following as part of its mission statement 👇🏻

The best part? None of the 60 students will pay tuition.

West’s plan is to build Donda Academy into a premier institution for high-school basketball players and is going as far as DM’ing star players himself on Instagram in order to convince them to join his Los Angeles based school 🇺🇸

Love him or hate him, Yeezy’s commitment to bringing change for good is inspiring in times where Hip-Hop has been reduced to merely Hype-Beast Culture 😤

2) Building the Future of Music 👨🏻‍💻

It might feel like the Wild-West right now, Dave Edwards- Head of Revenue at AudioMack wrote a piece for VC firm a16z, about how the future of the Music Industry looks like 🌐

I think after a very long time, I came across an article which actually manages to separate signal from noise, and lay out a clear path to how exactly the Music Industry can take inspiration from gaming and solve its century-long copyrights problem 📝

Dave is a 20-year veteran in the Music Business

Dave talks in detail about how Gaming has evolved into a massive $180 Billion industry, embracing innovation when it comes to modified copyrights and user-generated content, whereas Music has adopted the archaic approach of suing for copyright infringement rather than letting users innovate with remixed songs and modified content.

So what’s the solution according to him?

He lays out a three pronged approach which can help the Industry reclaim its throne as the Industry leader in Entertainment:

✅ A rethinking of our collective copyright philosophy 

✅The development of universal and scalable copyright tracking technology 

✅ Subsequent technological innovation allowing anyone to remix, reinterpret, modify, or create.

Future by a16z is a must-read if you’re sick of traditional media

Sounds gibberish?

Imagine you want to remix the song of your favourite artist, and would be able to ‘legally’ split it up into multiple parts and add on top of it, produce and publish it, and even monetise it fairly with payouts to each relevant stakeholder in the song 🤯

Building a universal rail for copyrights which lets anyone legally access songs or parts of songs and build on-top of it, all backed on a blockchain would literally unlock revenue to the scale of Billions of $$, and open up a new ecosystem for creators.

Check out the entire article by Dave, right here.

If you’re a sucker for utopian views with pragmatic solutions, or just a music fan, this one would be right up your alley.

3) Billion Dollar Race for Music Copyrights 💸

We’ve seen what the future looks like, let’s snap back into reality and see what’s happening right now.

Because it involves a whole lot of 💰flowing into the Music Business

What do I mean?

A few months back, we covered a story on here about Hipgnosis Songs Fund, a company listed on the London Stock Exchange and owning a music catalog worth more than $2 Billion, including artists such as Shakira, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Chainsmokers and Mark Ronson among many others.

Founded by industry veterans Mark Mercuriadis and Nile Rodgers, the Hipgnosis kitty just got fatter by $1 Billion after Investment firm Blackstone decided to chip-into the music copyrights business 📝

Mark Mercuriadis with guitarist Neil Rodgers-the founders of Hipgnosis.

With an AUM of around $700 Billion, this investment is hardly anything for one of the world’s largest Private Equity Firms, but definitely a big statement in the music industry 👀

Cash-flows from royalties have really established themselves as an asset class insulated from the stock market volatility, and PE firms around the world are waking up to it

Low correlation is observed in the royalty business with the general economy; making it a safe bet and hedge in a portfolio.

The good folks at Music Business Worldwide break down the story of the mad race for copyrights in Music really well, so if this sort of thing ticks you, check out the full piece right here.

That’s it for today, have a good weekend everyone 🤘🏻