Jul 19, 2022

On-trac to transform the music industry

At Infinity VC, we’re proud to be able to support startups and businesses who aim to bring fresh perspectives to their industries. In particular, we love to get behind those creating breakthrough technologies, allied to transformational business models – and our latest investment in the music industry is no exception.

Trac is the first music technology platform that gives recording artists the chance to monetize their content and market themselves to a global audience. We first invested in trac with seed funding in October 2021, and joined another investment round this April to help them scale their business and increase their market share. In this blog, we’ll explore trac’s innovative approach, how it helps independent artists, and trac’s bold plans for the future.

Dashboard of the trac platform. Trac provides hundreds of thousands of artists with new ways to turn their music into money and their passion into a career.

A time of change in the music industry

Research from MRC has found that music consumption is increasing, and grew in the United States by 11.3% in 2021 alone. But the overall business landscape within the music industry has fundamentally changed in the last few years, and continues to do so today

The traditional model of artists pursuing contracts with record companies is increasingly being side-stepped. Instead, many acts are choosing to pursue a more independent path, and exert more ownership, control and influence around the business side of their music. However, to achieve this, they need support in successfully managing where their recordings are distributed, how they can monetize their act, and how they can build a more sustainable financial future.

Roster management in trac platform. Trac’s mission is to accelerate the growth and maximize the success of every artist.

Giving independent artists a fair deal

Cardin Campbell, a founder and CEO of trac, created trac.co to support musicians in successfully managing where their recordings are distributed, how they can monetize their act, and how they can build a more sustainable financial future.

Trac was created in 2020 by technology and marketing expert Cardin Campbell to help independent artists solve these challenges. It’s an artist monetization platform that gives them all the virtual infrastructure they need to monetize their content, brand and likeness with their fans directly.

The platform encompasses distribution, merchandising, publishing, NFTs and other functions, all in one place. It also allows artists to easily and quickly get their music onto all the major streaming services, including YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok and SoundCloud.

The result is that artists have wider and more accessible opportunities to be creative, to remain fully independent, to maximize profit and revenue, and to avoid the restrictions (both creative and financial) of unfavorable contracts.

“Hundreds of thousands of artists of all levels and genres around the world use trac to streamline the artist experience and take their business to the next level,” Cardin, CEO and founder of trac explains. “We are particularly building our platform to cater to the mid-tier artists looking to fully monetize their music career and bring everything they need into one platform.”

Trac’s workforce consists of more than 40 people, working fully remotely in locations all over the world. They support trac’s users in a variety of different areas, including Content Approval, Customer Support, Engineering, Product, Creative, Marketing and Brand.

An ambition to grow

Trac is now actively exploring ways to tokenize the independent artist economy, using technologies such as smart contracts and the blockchain. This will ultimately help artists sell their music even more easily, build stronger brands and communities, and more effectively track their impact and reach.

Crypto withdrawal in the platform. trac offers automatic payment in crypto currency as well as local currency, so the musicians can choose how they get paid.

“We aim to refresh our brand image, build out our product offerings, grow our internal culture / infrastructure, and engage directly with more artists using the platform,” Cardin adds. “Our ultimate vision is to be the destination for every artist to turn their aspirations into reality, because no artist should have to work a day job to support their growing music career.”

This revolutionary approach is what attracted Infinity VC to investing in trac. We hope to help drive forward trac’s push towards a creator economy, including the rollout of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), which will run on their own unique artist tokens to incentivize engagement. The investment will also be used to help trac expand its engineering and operations teams.

“I think the idea and focus on the creator economy was a plus, specifically around the music industry and its timing for disruption,” says Kyle Riefenberg, Brand Marketing Manager at trac. “Additionally, I think Cardin’s passion for the project and his technical background ultimately won over Giorgi [Alexizde, Infinity VC Managing Partner].“
“Giorgi has a great technical mind and team behind him as well,” adds Cardin. “Being in technology, we felt aligning with such a fund would be a great way to get the support we know we’d inevitably need when it comes to tech.”

To explore all the capabilities of trac in more detail, take a look at their website trac.co.