The Executive Producer: A New Funding Model for Artists?
A few months ago, a music NFT sold for $100k.
This was a huge outlier sale in the current market so I started diving into it.
Turns out this wasnât a typical NFT sale. It was an âExecutive Producer Pass,â for an ambitious music project called Eternal Garden.
The buyer was C.Y. Lee â a prolific music collectorâ and in exchange for his $100k, he became an executive producer on the project. He gets insider access to the creators, while sharing his advice, ideas and contacts with the team.
When I speak to C.Y., he tells me he has similar exec producer agreements with 20 other artists and music projects.
âIâm trying to start a meme,â he explains to me on a call. Every artist should have a high-priced option for people to support them. âItâs like very expensive luxury merch. And that luxury product is called patronage. Iâm giving it a name, or trying to apply the name of âexecutive producerâ.â
In simple terms, executive producing means funding an artist and helping them to bring their vision to life. The executive producer gets credit on the release, but thereâs no expectation of financial return.
âIâm expecting zero back,â he explains. âI just want to see what happens.â Of course, thereâs a level of social status and culture-building by doing this transparently, often onchain. âI want to feel seen and be acknowledged,â C.Y. says. âItâs public, but itâs not screaming it.â
Executive producing is, therefore, a modern form of patronage in a world where the business model for musicians simply doesnât work for most. And it makes it possible for artists to explore their biggest creative ideas.Â
âEternal Garden embraces completely in that,â C.Y. explains. âI donât know what Eternal Garden wants to be or will end up being, but I sure as hell want to find out. Itâs like building an aeroplane while itâs flying.â
How to fund an immersive music sci-fi world?
Eternal Garden is a music project with a big vision. Founder and artist TK describes it as a franchise on the scale of âDuneâ or âStar Wars with its own storyline, novel and record label all under one banner.
TK has more than a decade of experience in the music industry, writing and producing with artists like Will Smith, Rihanna and The Weeknd, but he became frustrated with the existing model. âYou donât make [a lot of] money from streaming,â he says. âUnless youâre doing millions of streams. And touring isnât as profitable as it used to be so itâs really difficult to make a sustainable career in music.â
TK had early success with music NFTs, which gave him some freedom to pursue his own music, but how could he fund the bigger ambition for Eternal Garden.
Pitching a record label with the Eternal Garden concept would have been impossible. Labels rely on formulaic singles, albums and commercial success to recoup their investments. The team also considered venture investments. âWe had a lot of VC conversations,â TK explained. âBut to be fully transparent we were taking a creator based project and trying to make it palatable for people to invest in us.â Inevitably, you have to dilute the creativity when youâre thinking about delivering a return to your investors. âThere was an emphasis on certain concepts that normally would not have been so prioritised had we not been trying to raise money.â
Instead, after talking with C.Y., they created a luxury product as part of their offering called the âExecutive Passâ â an NFT that allows someone to come in as an executive producer on the first season of the project, priced at $100k. C.Y. Lee purchased it and came onboard.
Finally, Eternal Garden had the freedom and funding to execute its grand vision, without the immediate expectation of profit or return.
Executive Producer: Skin in the game
Whatâs in it for C.Y. if thereâs no revenue share or direct ownership? For him itâs all about having skin in the game and pushing culture forward in a direction he believes in.
âThatâs the meta of what makes exec producing interesting. Having skin in the game of a story thatâs playing out. You donât have to be a main character. You want to be part of what makes the universe move forward.â
The agreement looks different for every project that C.Y. is involved in. For Eternal Garden, itâs the initial funding to start building. In exchange, the team gets on a call with C.Y. every two weeks to share their progress, while C.Y. shares input and advice from decades of working in tech startups. TK and his partner Claire Mirren also provide him with regular airdrops to mark the story.
For C.Y. itâs also the fastest way to learn. After being involved in dozens of projects at an executive producer level and even more as an angel investor, you get to see the patterns and the traps of taking something from zero to one. He can take those learnings and apply it to others.Â
And itâs more fun.
âThe vibes stay positive, and thereâs good boundaries ⊠I want executive producership to feel light and simple but still have value.â
On the flip side, with investments, you can become obsessed with the financial return. It clouds your judgement and often forces you and the team to make the wrong creative decisions.
For those with disposable income and a certain level of âmade it,â why not use that money to push culture forward instead of chasing ânumber go upâ?
A brief history of patronage
This concept of patronage isnât new. For thousands of years, art and culture was funded this way. Leonardo Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Mozart, Beethoven and William Shakespeare all created their most notable work with the backing of patrons â many from the Christian church.
This allowed artists to create beautiful works of art that lasted through centuries. The artists were free to work on grandiose visions without delivering a financial return for their patrons or commercialisation of their art.
This isnât to say that patrons were purely altruistic. Many gained enormous status, power and legacy through their contributions (e.g. the Medici Family) and indirect financial returns flowed from other places. It was still an exclusive club, too. The artists often had elite status or lineage to start with.
However, itâs clear this model resulted in some of the most lasting and impactful works throughout history.
Fast forward to todayâŠ
As society changed, so did funding models. We entered a more secular, capitalist society and artists were expected to âsellâ their work in a more direct way.
Artists turned to selling prints and editions, relying heavily on middle-men like galleries. Musicians packaged up records and sold tickets to live shows.
For music, funding became available in the form of advances from giant record labels and publishing companies. But there are strict terms and expectations that come with it:
âWeâll give you $100k to make your album, but we keep 100% of your revenue until that money is recouped.â Even after recouping, artists often only get a 15% cut of sales.
The result is productized music. 3-minute songs that fit a commercial formula to deliver financial returns to the major labels.
Thatâs not necessarily a bad thing, but there should still be space for grand visions that donât fit into a commercial box, or funding artists to develop through their earliest stages, before pushing for a financial return. And most importantly, backing artists from different backgrounds.
The executive producer portfolio
You can see all of this diversity in C.Y.âs projects. Eternal Garden is a large project with a team and production studio. But C.Y. also quietly backs individual artists with a small stipend to pay their rent or purchase new AI software to push their creativity â itâs like funding research and development, he says.
Heâs also involved in tech projects with a creative heart like INPUBLIC.FUN (a publishing platform built on Zora) and Supercollector (a music NFT platform).Â
In other cases, heâs part of a bigger circle of âexecutive producersâ who are all contributing to an artistic project. âYou donât have to be the only one â it can be as many people as the artist can martial to make it happen.â
Examples of this include the Black Dave token where dozens people support artist Black Dave with no expectation of return. âHi! Iâm Black Dave! I have ideas! I need your money to make them happen! This is not an investment, there is no return on this.â
Or SCENES â an album by UK producer Sound of Fractures â which was funded through a token crowdfunding model.Â
Sound of Fractures - The Community Funded Album
In July 2023, Sound of Fractures â the pseudonym of UK dance producer Jamie Reddington â launched the Sound of Fractures token to support his upcoming album SCENES.Â
Anyone could purchase 1 token for $10 and be a part of the project, with tiers rising up to âExecutive Producerâ level at 200 tokens. The exec producer role gives you credit on the album itself, as well as access to a private chat and weekly updates.
Three executive producers contributed over $2,000 each, alongside 59 additional backers.Â
âPlatform and brand incentives are often misaligned from creatives,â Reddington tells me when I ask why he chose this funding model. âInstead of traditional albums, my goal is to create projects that experiment with emerging technology and build community.â
Unlike most of the other executive producer agreements, Reddingtonâs model did include a percentage of revenue flowing back to his backers, but that mechanic was really secondary to the community aspect.
The funding allowed Reddington to build out his own website, publish his work without relying on existing platforms and middlemen, and promote his music to a wider audience.
Choose your own adventure
Ultimately, the executive producer role is one that creates a multi-player mode around creative projects.Â
âItâs a reality show inside a reality show,â says C.Y.
For projects like Eternal Garden and Scenes, people can get involved at different levels. They can stream or consume the final product, they can purchase an accessible NFT and watch the journey unfold, or they can be an executive producer and get involved at a deeper level.
Itâs a choose-your-own adventure. âThereâs the Eternal Garden story and then thereâs the story of the people who are participating in it.â
Creative projects of the future will look more like multi-player games than pure consumer products. âEvery massively multiplayer game that manages to survive is because the people in it continue to care,â explains C.Y.
Every artist should have a âluxury merchâ option
âI do have a bigger over-arching goal in mind,â C.Y. says as we zoom back out to his broader intentions. He wants all artists to offer an executive producer product in their merch store.
This is a call-to-action for every artist to think about a high-end option for people to support them on their website and merch store.
âWhat does an executive producer product look like in your catalog of merch? If enough artists have a list of merch from $1 stickers to a $10,000 executive producer item, then it starts to feel like it makes sense. You just need a couple dozen examples. Then itâs a trend.â
Pushing culture forward
While executive producing isnât unique to web3, the onchain infrastructure has unlocked a new way for capital to form effortlessly around projects that people believe in and want to be a part of.Â
And maybe we need to let go of speculation and financial return . âI feel like thereâs a lot of people out there that love a particular art form, and want to be involved at a level that doesnât involve an explicit financial outcome.â
Ultimately for C.Y. itâs really all about pushing the culture forward, building the world he wants to see and putting his money where his mouth is. âIâm in it. Iâm in this arena to try to make this culture work.â
