Decentralized music platform Stems raises $4 million pre-seed round

Quick Take

  • Stem’s funding round was led by Ideo CoLab, with additional participation from Merit Circle and Yield Guild Games, among others. 
  • Stem encourages more music collaboration between music artists and fans through NFTs and other web3 tools. 

Stems, a decentralized music platform, closed a $4 million pre-seed funding round. 

The investment firm Ideo CoLab Ventures led the funding round, with additional participation from Collab+Currency, Village Global and Polygon Studios. Notable crypto firms such as Merit Circle and Yield Guild Games participated as well, along with FireEyes, NoiseDAO, Jump, GSR, Akatsuki and others.

Stems is a decentralized music NFT platform that encourages artist and fan engagement through web3 tools. For instance, an artist can release their music stems — or a composite of drums, bass, guitar and other individual musical tracks — to the Stem community. Users can then remix the audio into new music NFTs, and the original artists receive royalties upon sale. 

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The startup will launch its platform on Oct. 6, at which time seven NFTs costing 100 MATIC each will be minted. 

Music NFT platforms have garnered increased interest in 2022. The music NFT platform HitPiece launched in August of this year (after a rocky beta period). Warner Music Group, a major American record label, partnered with OpenSea last month to facilitate music NFT sales.


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About Author

MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.