Ever heard a song and just knew it would be a hit?
If you think you have an “ear” for picking winners, or better yet, chart toppers, and you have a few bucks to invest, meet Jeff and Chase Tweel.
In today’s Tennesseean, Jaquetta White reports that the father-son duo have a new Nashville startup called Tweelx – a company based on a new business model for publishing music and gathering capital to fund the making of the what could be Billboard’s next number 1.
According to the Tennessean, the company named for its founders and a truncated version of the word "exchange," plans to sell shares of songs, in the form of a percentage of publishing royalties, to individuals, record labels and anyone else willing to part with $100 or more per investment.
"It's kind of like speculating in stock futures," said Jeff Tweel, who created the company with his son, Chase Tweel, and serves as its chief operating officer. "Or, as my Texas friends say, 'Finding oil while it's still in the ground.'"
TweelX is not unlike a crowd funding service where artists, filmmakers, songwriters, and others can upload samples of their work along with their stories, and people who like the work give them money.
The difference between crowdfunding groups like Indiegogo or Kickstarter though is that when a song is uploaded to Tweelx, songwriters agree to a nonexclusive, "song-by-song" publishing contract.
The contract requires them to relinquish exclusive publishing rights for a particular song in favor of the TweelX shared model, which gives a cut of any royalties earned by the song to the songwriter, along with TweelX and investors.
By working this way.fans and others who give cash aren’t given a one-time gift, for instance an autographed album or something else in exchange for their monetary gift.
Instead, this gives them a stake in the artist’s work – a percentage of royalties earned – a shared revenue stream.
Songs sell for $100 to $250 per share, with a maximum of five shares, or 25 percent of royalties, available for public consumption in any given song.
The remainder of ownership is split between TweelX, which receives 25 percent, and the songwriter, who receives at least 50 percent and as much as 75 percent depending on how much public investment is made.
About 150 songs by 25 artists have been uploaded to the site since its launch.
Songwriters maintain rights to master recordings and are not required to sign an exclusive agreement giving TweelX the rights to all of the songs they write.
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