Jungle, one of Medallion’s artist users and investors. Photo Credit: Medallion
Following a multimillion-dollar seed raise – and notwithstanding data showing a falloff in Web3 funding – artist-to-fan community platform Medallion has announced a $13.7 million Series A.
New York City-headquartered Medallion emailed Digital Music News with word of the nearly $14 million round. Founded in 2022 and billed as a provider of “web3 technology that helps artists launch digital worlds,” Medallion intends to put the capital towards “an ambitious technical roadmap,” including the development of “net new revenue opportunities” for on-platform acts.
Among the latter are Santigold, Greta Van Fleet, and My Morning Jacket, to name some, with Medallion indicating that it also “scaled to over 200,000 music fans in its first year.”
At the points’ intersection, the platform says its artist communities have achieved quicker growth than their counterpart groups, communities, and servers, respectively, on Facebook (an average of 86 percent more members on Medallion), Reddit (161 percent), and Discord (206 percent).
Regarding Medallion’s backers, self-described “cross-border crypto venture fund” Dragonfly Capital and Lightspeed Faction co-led the Series A, which drew additional support from Coinbase Ventures, Foundations Artist Management, and Metallica’s Black Squirrel Partners, besides a number of others.
“Medallion is building the infrastructure to enable artists to directly interact with their highest intent customers through new and exclusive products and experiences,” summarized Dragonfly general partner (and Goldman Sachs vet) Rob Hadick, “while simultaneously owning the customer relationship themselves and driving net new revenue opportunities around their IP. We believe this paradigm shift will permeate across the entirety of the creator economy.”
Meanwhile, in a statement of his own, Medallion head Matt Jones, previously CEO of Songkick, touched upon the importance of providing varied offerings via services that facilitate direct-to-fan interactions.
“Artists owning direct access to their fans is critical, but they also need more ways to deliver value for it to drive impact,” communicated Jones.
Medallion isn’t alone in working to help artists more effectively monetize the support of diehard followers, and the superfan space has drawn a substantial amount of funding on the year. Earlier in December, Renaissance revealed that it had raised $1.7 million across two rounds, for instance.
Before that, November had seen Vault Music, a Web3 business co-founded by former FanDuel CEO Nigel Eccles, launch a fantasy record label game described as “fantasy sports but for the music industry.” That same month, We Are Giant formally debuted and disclosed an almost $8 million raise.
