Atwood Innovation Plaza Spotlight: beatBread

beatBread Provides the Funding That Empowers Artists to Stay in Control

Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter Emily Vaughn has built an impressive fanbase in her career. In 2021 alone, her music received almost 500,000 hours of listening time on Spotify, with 10.1 million streams from 2.6 million people in 172 countries. But even after achieving this level of success, Vaughn wanted to ensure that she could find the funding to reach new audiences while maintaining control of her music. That’s when she turned, not to a record label, but to a rapidly growing player in the artist funding space: beatBread.

beatBread offers funding to independent music artists for marketing, promoting, and growing their brand without asking for ownership of their intellectual property in return. Established in November 2020 by a team led by former Universal Music Group executive Peter Sinclair, beatBread has made hundreds of advances to artists and labels across multiple genres, six continents, and a broad range of career stages.

beatBread CEO Peter Advances offered through beatBread Sinclair. range from as little as $1,000 to as much as $2 million per artist for a limited share of existing catalog revenues, with options also available for unreleased music. All advances are repaid from a share of the artist’s streaming and airplay revenues over a period of the artist’s choosing. Advance agreements leave touring, publishing, synch, and merchandise revenue streams untouched and leave the choice of marketing and distribution partners in the artist’s own hands. The rise of beatBread has not gone unnoticed by the music industry. The company has signed white label agreements with a series of significant distribution and label partners, enabling businesses such as United Masters, Symphonic, and TooLost to offer advances to talent in their own ecosystems. In March, beatBread also signed a series of major music managers to join its first artist advocacy board, which will help guide future feature development on behalf of creators. Executives who have helped shepherd the careers of 21 Savage, Bruno Mars, and Kanye West are part of the group, demonstrating the huge potential of the company as a funding source for emerging artists. beatBread brings together a team with deep experience in music, finance, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to create new opportunities for artists and their managers. The AI team, based in Utah and led by beatBread cofounder John Haller, helps remove expensive haggling and time-consuming negotiations from the advance process with algorithms that use hard data to make a simple, easy-to-understand deal. Each agreement is uniquely customized for each artist, with choices and trade-offs made to suit individual needs. The company has additional operations in Los Angeles, Miami, and New York and has already made further significant inroads in the key UK market, signing artists and building deep relationships with music managers there.

With this type of success less than eighteen months into the company’s existence, it’s hardly surprising that finance and technology companies are taking notice. This year, beatBread closed a seed round led by Deciens Capital, extending the company’s fundraising to over $34 million to date. The investment will allow beatBread to further expand its feature set, offer larger advances to artists, and market its offering to an increasing number of musicians.

For Emily Vaughn and other rising stars, it means keeping their ability to stay in control of their careers without giving up control of their masters and music to get ahead of the game. It also means that more great music will reach worldwide audiences from artists who have more options than ever.

beatBread Cofounder John Haller.