Have you ever found a song before it blew it?
I’m sure we all have - and it’s our mission to help prove that.
When we started Coop Records in 2023 - our team had a goal of using crypto to show that you were one of the first to discover new music.
But the path of getting there wasn’t easy. Crypto is intimidating and hard to use. Artists don’t want to be associated with it and the music industry is slow when it comes to putting new songs into this new world.
We’re here to change that - and today we’re proud to announce that we’ve raised $4.5m across two rounds of funding led by 1kx and Nascent with support from 1confirmation, Coinbase Ventures, PTC Crypto, Scenius, Variant, Infinite Capital, Mask Ventures and Noise DAO along with angels Particio Worthalter, Roneil Rumburg, Adam Levy, Brian Flynn and Ben Giove.
Here’s the backstory.
When I joined crypto in 2017 - I was fresh out of college with a music business degree.
I was doing music curation with my now business partner Jake and while I loved music more than anything - was unsure how to make a sustainable career out of it.
So I went heads first down the crypto rabbit hole, doing everything from ICOs, to DeFi and DAOs prior to the 2021 NFT run.
It was during this time that I worked closely with Audius to help launch their AUDIO airdrop - one of the most game changing moments for artists in crypto’s history. This time gave me a very clear intuition that crypto could be used to make a huge difference in artist’s lives and I became obsessed with marrying these two worlds together.
It was right around this time that Nifty Gateway started to become popular and artists started to drop collections that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in minutes.
This was the new biggest wealth creation event as artists realized the potential for putting their work onchain.
Out of this came new platforms like Sound - offering a very direct way for artists to sell their work as NFTs and in this era, the meme of “Music NFTs” was born.
Living in LA at that time - it was impossible to escape NFTs. They were all around you and everyone was looking to get a piece of it.
And while the promise of creating direct relationships with fans was pure in its intention - it missed the market in its execution. For a variety of reasons - the space got ahead of itself and ended up digging a hole that we are still climbing out of today.
As someone at the forefront of that time and space - we entered into a rebuilding phase. To move forward, we had to learn all of the reasons Music NFTs did not work and start building towards a new future.
This was the genesis of Coop Records as we know it today.
Coop Records is officially a year old. Here's everything we've done and learned about running an onchain record label.
Back in 2023 - we set out with a vision to be the premier partner for distributing music onchain.
The business was to distribute music to platforms built on crypto rails. We wanted to make it easy for artists to sell their work onchain while removing all the friction and hassle of doing so. We used the best tools that existed at the time.
We didn’t touch any masters or publishing and worked directly with artists to create wallets and upload their songs to new platforms to earn extra income - all without asking them to sell their fans on a new world they knew nothing about.
To date - we’ve onboarded 200+ artists including major acts like Zeds Dead, ODESZA, Subtronics and San Holo along with rising stars like Disco Lines, Barry Can’t Swim, Sammy Virji and MPH.
These are acts that have real momentum in the electronic sector and that we believe will be some of the biggest names in dance music in the years to come. Curation is extremely important to us - and we’re looking to work closely with the artists we see a strong upside in.
And we’ve done it thanks to amazing label partners like Ninja Tune, Deadbeats, Boom Records, Good Good Music, bitbird, UKF and many more.
But we quickly learned that if we wanted to do this effectively - it meant owning the full stack and building an end-to-end experience for artists and fans alike.
So in 2024, we launched cooprecords.xyz - our flagship site and home to our catalog of nearly 1000 songs.
We built a reliable engine for selling songs as collectibles - generating nearly $2m in earnings for artists across more than 125k collectors.
We built the Coop Protocol, cooprecs.fun and a new onboarding flow.
But we didn’t stop there.
This past week - we launched our first iteration of a true music launchpad.
Simply put - we reframed our collectibles as presales for songcoins.
With 17 coins live for viral tracks like The Days (Notion Remix), Tell U Straight and We Rise - we’ve seen more than $2m in volume across a small collection of viral tracks from our catalog.
Be early to new music.
In aggregate these songs have done over a billion streams and yet only a fraction of a fraction of those fans even know these coins exist.
That’s why we believe this is the tip of the iceberg. We want to create an app where anyone can be early to new music and we’re using this raise to accomplish that.
We see a clear window to reshape the way that artists finance their projects and for fans to prove that they were there for the journey.
With artists earning a % of every transaction paid out in real-time - we believe this new mechanism for music curation can act as an alternative to record deals, giving artists a more direct means of getting paid from the fans who support them most.
It’s still early for crypto consumer apps at large - but we believe our strategy can trojan horse crypto into the hands of the world’s most die-hard fans, and give them tokens that represent their fandom.
So we’re going big to end the year - ramping up the number of artists we’re bringing onto the platform during this curated phase in anticipation of opening it up through an invite-based system in 2026.
To date - Coop Recs has been fueled by crypto-natives.
These are the buyers responsible for backing the songs and driving the vast vast majority of earnings today.
In this new chapter, our sights are set on reaching real music fans where they’re at.
That means having a slick mobile app that lets anyone buy these songs without knowing anything about crypto. Email sign ups, Apple Pay, credits, all the small things that make it possible for real fans to tap in.
It means onboarding music they care about and finding ways to bring more direct value and utility back to these coins and the fans that collect them.
It’s unlocking new net incentives for music promotion that not only benefits the artist, but the fans that are driving a song’s virality.
All that goes to say - we’ve got a jam packed year ahead and could not be more stoked to keep chipping away at a vision that started long ago.
Great songs aren’t written in a day — they’re composed, refined, and shared at just the right time. We see Coop Records the same way.
Share Dialog
Cooper Turley
Support dialog
678
