A nighttime shot of Luxembourg, where ANote Music is based. Photo Credit: Cedric Letsch
European royalty-investment platform ANote Music has announced that it’s raised €3.3 million, and execs are now looking to draw further support from institutional investors with an offering that works “in a similar way to Bowie Bonds.”
Luxembourg-headquartered ANote Music, which bills itself as “Europe’s leading marketplace for investing in music royalties,” emailed Digital Music News today about the funding milestone and the institutional-investor expansion.
On the former front, “additional funding” has enabled the five-year-old blockchain business (which officially launched its platform in late July of 2020) to crack the initially mentioned €3.3 million ($3.64 million at the present exchange rate) in secured funding.
Within the total, the Algorand Foundation’s Algorand Ventures and Limewire stakeholder ACME Innovation are said to have contributed north of €500,000 ($551,235). Meanwhile, ANote Music likewise noted that it had obtained the Young Innovative Enterprise Grant from Luxembourg’s Luxinnovation “national innovation agency.”
This grant, higher-ups indicated, will allow ANote “to receive further backing from Luxembourg’s Ministry of the Economy.” In a statement, Luxinnovation senior advisor of start-up acceleration Sven Baltes reiterated that ANote had participated in Luxembourg’s Fit 4 Start acceleration program in 2019, with continued government support helping the entity “to grow and expand on an international scale.”
And in remarks of his own, Algorand Ventures EVP Ryan Terribilini added in part: “ANote Music is a natural fit for Algorand Ventures, as it represents a unique and exciting use-case for the tokenization of real-world assets, and offers a previously inaccessible asset class to our ecosystem. We are thrilled to see ANote leverage the lightning-fast speed, reliability, and security of the Algorand blockchain to facilitate the trading and distribution of payouts to investors and artists on their platform.”
Shifting to the institutional-investor side, ANote Music also took the opportunity to disclose its sponsoring of Music Royalties Enhanced Strategy Certificates (MRESC), which the company describes as a Bowie Bonds-like product designed “to meet the demand of ANote’s growing customer base of family offices and institutional investors.”
“This news reflects the growing interest that professional investors and family offices have in the music sector,” ANote founding director and CEO Marzio Schena said of the product, which has been designed for investments of over €125,000 ($137,604). “The second half of the year promises to be packed full of more news, as we plan to bring to market our first Asian music catalogue later this summer and launch the ANote Backstage Pass loyalty programme.”
At present, investors can purchase via ANote stakes in the IP revenue of metal artist Logan Mader, Justin Bieber collaborator Steve James, and German indie label Ever Ever Music, to name some, the platform’s website shows. Per the company, “90% of investors on the ANote platform are profitable, with average annual returns of more than 10%.”
Lastly, ANote is “on track” to top €500,000 in “total royalties distributed” by 2023’s end, with a current “active trading platform market cap of €25m,” according once again to the company. In other royalty-investment funding news, May saw anotherblock unveil the close of a roughly $4.4 million seed round.