Pianity raises €5.85M for its music-focused NFT marketplace; looks to hire country and artists relations managers

Paris-based Pianity, a developer of a music NFT platform designed for trading and collection of digital artworks, announced on Wednesday that it has raised $6.5M (approx €5.85M) in its Seed round of funding.

The round was led by Digital Renaissance Foundation, Big Brain Holdings, and Longhash Ventures, with participation from IOSG, LD Capital, Sebastien Borget (co-founder and COO at TheSandBox), ViaBTC, ArkStream Capital, Arweave, and Ronny Shibley, CTO and co-founder at Gorillas.

Capital utilisation

Pianity claims that the funds will be invested in partnering with major music companies worldwide. The company will also expand its workforce with a team of country managers and artists relations managers. 

Pianity will open offices in the US and Latin America to support its expanded reach across the music industry. It will also support the development of a mobile application and additional functionality for Pianity’s streaming services, such as creating an NFT playlist and building a library.

Besides the expansion, the investment will also enable Pianity to scale up artist onboarding and increase the depth and breadth of its music catalogue – including the addition of more artists and music genres – while also allowing the company to partner with major music festivals.

Kevin Primicerio, CEO and co-founder of Pianity, says, “NFTs open up great opportunities for all artists because they are transforming the music industry business model. With NFTs, artists can monetise their music like never before, which is something they couldn’t do with traditional streaming platforms. We’re excited about this funding round because it enables us to move forward in transforming the business model for online music.”

Connecting artists with their fans

Founded in April, 2021, by Kevin Primicerio, Simon de Kinkelin and Lancelot Owczarczak, Pianity is a music NFT platform – built on environmentally-conscious Arweave technology – where musicians and their community gather to create, sell, buy, and collect songs in limited editions.

Arweave technology uses a form of database to store data that cannot be deleted or changed and uses economics to incentivise people to store the data for long periods of time. This combination makes either public or private data permanent.

Pianity claims that its pioneering approach, which includes free listening for all, enables deeper connections between artists and their audience. The company treats music as fine art, which results in artists gaining a new source of independent revenue while simultaneously enabling fans to grow and showcase their music collections.

The company’s profit-sharing community redistributes 50 per cent of its earnings in tokens to all active users each week. For example, if $1,000 of NFTs were sold in a week, Pianity takes 20 per cent per their fee ($200) and then the rest would be redistributed to active users. The amount users receive is based on the size of their NFT collection and the volume of transactions. Pianity developed this system to reward collectors for their support to musicians.

To date, it has sold nearly 11,000 NFTs and has over 20,000 users on the platform. Artists have collectively earned over $1.9M from NFT sales.

According to a statement, Pianity is releasing new artists on their platform this week, including Big Narstie, Luciano and Elephanz. The company is already working for jazz pianist Sarkis Ricci. “NFTs have been a game-changer in my career as a new source of income,” he explains. “I sold 100 copies of a never-released composition on Pianity for over $150,000. That’s the kind of value that only a very few can reach on streaming platforms. With NFTs, we can connect directly to our audience and create value around music.”