Music-marketing startup Un:hurd has announced a new ‘seven-figure’ funding round that includes several prominent investors from the music industry.
Kobalt founder Willard Ahdritz, Musiio founder Hazel Savage and Trapital’s Dan Runcie are all chipping in to the round alongside Leansquare VC and Mindset Ventures Music Tech.
Alongside the round, Un:hurd said that it now has more than 185,000 artists and labels signed up to its platform, which ranges across automated advertising, playlist pitching and release-cycle planning.
The company also revealed new partnerships with Amuse, Kosign and Bandsintown; announced plans to launch an Android app this November; and launched a new vertical called ‘Artist Deals’ that will see it offering advances to “high potential” artists who are building momentum using its tools.
CEO Alex Brees talked to Music Ally about the news, starting with those industry investors.
“What’s really important to me is that we have people who have either been there and done it in the music-tech space – which by the way, is very hard to find – or people that have a deep understanding of what’s going on in the sector,” he said.
“Ultimately, this means we make fewer mistakes, we learn our industry in granular detail quickly and we use this information to understand what we should be focusing on. Combining this knowledge base with our own understanding of what’s going on in the industry gives us a really good encyclopaedia of knowledge to keep us innovating in the right areas.”
Un:hurd launched four years ago, and the time since has seen a growing number of startups – and talk within the industry – focusing on how labels and artist teams can make smarter use of data and automation in their marketing campaigns.
“We were one of the first start-ups to talk about leveraging data to reduce uncertainty with marketing decisions. But now, we see a new one at least every month,” said Brees.
“It’s great, I think the more businesses we have trying to solve the problem of cutting through the noise, or giving artists back time to focus on creating music, the more likely we are to solve this problem as an industry.”
“I think AI has expedited these initiatives, it’s really easy to use AI to create marketing ideas and so naturally this opens doors for businesses to exploit,” he added.
“What we need to be conscious of is those businesses that are creating their own models vs those that are leveraging big models to create ‘generic’ ideas – that isn’t really going to help artists in the tailored and nuanced way they need.”
The new ‘Artist Deals’ vertical is an interesting shift for Un:hurd, taking it away from being just a tool used by/for artists into being a label-style funding source too.
“We’re sitting on music from over 185,000 artists. Some of this music is great music and I was listening to a few of our artists one day when I thought: I want to lean-in more,” is how Brees described the origin story for this.
“Both our tech platform and our agency team have delivered some incredible marketing results over the last year, whether it’s working on The K’s and their number 1 album, Tinie Tempah’s relaunch, Future Utopia or some big records we can’t speak about,” he said.
“We know how to grow an artist’s profile. So, we’ve developed an A&R model which uses proprietary statistical calculations to identify artists who meet criteria we deem important and reflect a healthy core audience.”
“We then use our marketing advances model to offer the marketing spend we feel would make the biggest impact on an artist’s career and we work out a deal with the artist. It’s a really beautiful and equitable offering for our community.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source musically.com ’
