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Music Tech Investment: How Raised In Space Is Lifting Music Tech
Music Tech Investment
How Raised In Space Is Lifting Music Tech
Linda Wallem – Raised In Space
OUT OF THIS WORLD: Zach Katz and Shara Senderoff are the entrepreneurs behind music and tech investment firm Raised In Space, named after the “new population of modern day thinkers who aren’t held down by the gravitational pull of old school industry tradition.”
Raised In Space, founded by artist manager and Ithaca Holding’s Scooter Braun, tech entrepreneur Shara Senderoff and industry vet Zach Katz in 2019, was created to reinvent the music industry’s relationship with technology by discovering, investing in and scaling platforms that unlock new revenue streams and raise the value of music.
Providing investment from $500,000 to $5 million to innovators in areas including creation, registration, distribution, fan engagement, touring, ticketing and monetization, Raised In Space zeroes in on industry minds to elevate conversation around the industry’s greatest challenges.
Pollstar: What is the concept and purpose of Raised In Space?
Zach Katz: When Shara and I started thinking about what it is that we can collaborate on and do together, it was absolutely in the field of innovation and technology. We saw that the music industry needed somebody who was an insider to come along and help focus on the right companies and the right opportunities that were coming from the world of technology. And we also saw that there are a lot of great, young, well-intentioned and intelligent girls and guys trying to bring solutions and innovations into the music industry, but unfortunately didn’t have the benefit of having a music industry insider to guide them.
Tell us how Raised In Space benefits the live business sector, especially during the COVID shutdown. Is it a good time for a reset?
Shara Senderoff: Our view has always been to bring innovation into the music industry. What we’re trying to do is improve [returns] and understand how to spend marketing dollars that bring people a return and then generate new revenue streams. So when we talk about live specifically, obviously we’re trying to sell tickets. And that’s a big focus on the marketing side, which is not only selling the tickets to a tour. We know how significant of a revenue stream touring is in general, but it’s necessary to understand who the people are that are in those seats.
One of those is Wave. How does it differ from some of the gaming platforms offering virtual concerts?
Katz: Though there’s been probably close to 100 livestreaming companies that have popped up, none of them have really differentiated between one another and none of them have confidently allowed us to believe that they’re going to be here post-COVID.
Wave has been around for five years, but we didn’t hear much about them initially because their focus was virtual reality. VR is taking a very long time to reach any kind of mass scale. Initially, The Wave was doing virtual concerts, but they were tied to VR devices that just didn’t fit into the hands of everybody. To their credit, they pivoted to create a platform and technology that, unlike Fortnite, is completely artist-centric.
Wave is cross-platform in various video games and social media platforms. They got so much support and investment from people like us because this is an expansion of performance that’s going to live beyond COVID.
Audigent is another innovator you’ve made an investment in.
Senderoff: Audigent is the data marketing company that utilizes audience data to target directly to fans. What it has set out to do is utilize data aggregated into one place, which simply they refer to as an audience bank. When you have a pool of your own audience, you effectively become the real estate owner of your fanbase, which has never really happened before. Everyone else has owned and siloed our data. That’s the simple version of what Audigent does.
It allows artists to go directly into their fan base to advertise to clean audiences, clean meaning they remove the duplicates, the bots, the fakes, the auto-loaders. Ad agencies have been marketing against fakes. Audigent is bringing a solution to the music business that allows you to market and actually sell your tickets and your merch to real fans who will actually want to come to your show, because we know from other data that they’ve already come. They’ve already indicated they’re your fan.