🎧How to Invest in Artists and Music NFTs : Metrics That Matter💥

5 min readFeb 4, 2022

Recently I wrote an article on why we should all invest in Music NFTs.

I’ll now do the classic link with the word 🎧here💥 to get you to click and read it in case you haven’t. I even added some emojis to get your attention even more and make it more enticing!

Anyways, back to my article.

So yea, we should all invest in Music NFTs.

But with all the unfortunate ridiculousness that is going on right now with NFTs including Opensea’s fraud problem, and the bubble that will surely pop soon, how do you know what’s a worthy investment for Music NFTs?

As stated in my last article, I believe that investing in musicians is extremely similar to investing in a startup.

So that’s the first tip. Look at the musicians.

Ash what in the name of music does that sentence even mean. That was barely English. You always do…

Yes, I know. Keep reading.

Let’s state all the things you should look for when investing and for fun compare them to startup terms (at least things I would look for).

Team = The artist / band
Traction = Fans
Coachable = Doushes/humble?
Bonus: Market = genre

Why is this list so short? Because similar to early-stage startup investing, you are taking bets more on people and minimal market evidence than you are with their revenues.

Why? Because there ain’t shit yet 🙃.

They haven’t built out the product yet or have the resources to sell yet (some of the time).

Anyways, let’s break down each one, shall we?

Team = The Artist /Band

What’s the work ethic like? Do they know the meaning of hustle?
Are they naturally talented? Do they sound good live to you?
Are they creative with their musical compositions/lyrics?
Are they different? Different could be good. In fact, it could be very good. Kid Cudi was different. So was Chance. So was Kota. So were so many great musicians.
Are they good performers/people persons?
How long have they been performing/music-ing for?
What is their background? Maybe they have connections in the industry?
Super important: are they resilient?

Traction = Fans

How many followers do they have on socials and in how long?
How often do they interact with their socials and fans? Is their community strong?
How many “die-hard” fans do you think they have?
What is their weekly/monthly/yearly growth?
How many streams do they have in how long? What is their weekly/monthly/yearly growth?
How many platforms are they on and how many playlists on those platforms are they on?
How many shows have they performed and where?
How many offers have they gotten / connections do they have already?
Do they have managers already and if so what is that deal? Is it already too bad to get involved with? Are those people good people / easy to work with?

Coachable = Doushes/Humble?

This one is pretty self-explanatory. If they are super talented and super humble/eager to learn that’s great! If they already think they are the shit, probably good to watch out. Chances are they will self-destruct eventually.
Bonus: If they have a drug problem, that is a serious obstacle that could hurt them

Bonus: Market = Genre
Believe it or not there are genre markets.

Even though all is via the internet, is digital, and global, it still potentially could matter.

You can compare the streams of different artists in different genres to see the success of each genre and then calculate an artist’s trajectory of success from there.

So now that we went through my little list of things I would look for. Let’s compare artist metrics to a famous startup metric method called:

***“The* *Berkus Method” (ft. Asher Fishman)***

That was cool. I liked the sound of that. Ok, I had my moment. I’m done.

The Berkus Method for angel investors was actually slightly modified back in 2005 by Allan McCann who changed the title of the risks from:

technology — execution — market — production

investment-marketing-execution-development

Let’s translate each thing now into “music language” .

“Investment Risk”

Investors+Board of Directors+Advisory Board = Record Labels, Managers, Publishers, Distributors.

Basically, anyone else that has significant influence in the artist’s career, screw up their progress or get in the way of your ROI / sabotage a good thing.

“Marketing Risk”

Customers = Fans

This basically goes back to what I said before but to sum up

How many followers do they have on socials and how often do they interact with their socials and fans?
What is their weekly/monthly/yearly growth?
How many “die-hard” fans do you think they have?
How many streams do they have in how long?
How many platforms are they on and how many playlists on those platforms are they on and success on them/in those regions (some platforms are region-based i.e China etc)?
How many connections do they have already they can leverage /piggyback

Execution Risk

Management/Team/Employees = Team attitude/any managers that can get in the way.

Are they resilient? Will they keep going no matter what? Are they super humble/eager to learn? If they already think they are the shit, probably good to watch out. Drug problems can affect progress and poisonous managers are just as bad as drugs.

“Development Risk”

Developers = Speed/cost of band members/audio engineers +equipement for progress/creation, and how long/much it will take to make a good hit (bonus/debatable metric: for what the market is feeding off now)

Conclusion/Shameless Self Promotion

So those are some metrics I would look at when looking at a potential investment in a Music NFT for an artist and more specifically an indie artist.

Contrary to popular belief, there is ALWAYS a way to measure investment, even in the world of NFTs.

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