Over the past months, an increasing number of high-profile acts including Arlo Parks, Wet Leg, Justin Bieber, Disclosure and Shawn Mendes withdrew from planned tour dates in an effort to protect their mental wellbeing, raising a lot of questions about the sustainability issues affecting the creative industries nowadays. 

The World Health Organisation recognises 10 October as World Mental Health Day. On this occasion, given the relevance of this topic within the creative industries, our team wanted to dedicate a specific blog article to this important topic to raise more awareness,  provide you with an extensive report created by Function Central and explain how ANote’s services can help to bring a better balance to an artist’s career and life.

Simplification vs. pressure

Beside a significant simplification in the process of both producing and releasing music, which lead to a very competitive field with nearly 100.000 new tracks released daily, the most recent technological innovations in the music sphere imply an ever increasing demand from fans for consistency in content creation. This demand is not only constrained to the artists primary content - music - but also expanded to all other social media platforms, such as TikTok, Instagram, Patreon and other direct-to-fan platforms where daily new content is expected to be released. As a result, for an artist to be able to make a living from its passion nowadays, it requires higher than ever levels of consistency and diversified creativity.

The role of funding

Additional layer of pressure comes from the key role played by funding for an artist’s career. As recently highlighted by MIDiA Research, artists generally go through many of the same challenges faced by start-ups: at the beginning, they face a high degree of uncertainty and a high failure rate. Once they’ve made it to the top, artists are expected to keep on innovating and re-inventing their careers in order to remain at the top. In all these stages, funding assumes a key role for further developing an artist or a music project - for activities such as recording a new album, launching marketing and promotional activities or financing a tour - yet funding solutions are scarce to most artists and the deferred payments between music consumption and seeing the funds in the bank account typically don’t allow artists to take their projects to the next phase.

How ANote Music helps

The relative lack of financing opportunities in the market - often due to scarce consideration or knowledge on music royalties by traditional financial institutions - often pushed artists to give up partially or even entirely the ownership of their works to bigger players in what often turned out to be unfair deals. This not only added an extra pressure from the outside to what the artists had to deliver, but in some cases it also led to the artist losing complete control over their careers, or even missing out on receiving royalty earnings from their creative works. It is for instance the case for Skylar Grey, whom in June 2022 had to sell her music catalogue - including tracks she collaborated on with Eminem and Rihanna “Love The Way You Lie”, Diddy’s “Coming Home” and Dr.Dre’s “I Need A Doctor” Grammys performance - to get over the legal expenses for her divorce.

At ANote Music we seek to provide an alternative to the traditional financing possibilities for the artists and lift the burden that lack of finance often brings to an artist’s mental health. We do this by connecting artists to a network of investors and music fans. Through our platform, music rights holders can offer a portion of their music catalogues up for auction and get funds immediately, while keeping full control over:

• Which royalty rights (master, publishing, or others) to include in the catalogue listing;
• What percentage of the catalogue to list and how much to keep in own hands;
• How long the catalogue will be listed for: in case of a limited listing period, the artists are entitled to receive back the rights after the investment period expires;
• What minimum valuation the catalogue should get: as the artist can propose a potential price per share.

Through our platform, artists have access to an alternative and efficient way to monetise their royalty-based assets and receive upfront money to finance their creative process or private projects, without the constraint and stress of having to sell the entirety of rights from the songs they’ve created throughout their career and with investors who will always remain passive partners.

Guide to supporting the mental health & wellbeing of musicians

Last but not least, we’ve partnered with Function Central, who created an elaborate guide to give some theoretical context and healthy practices on how to overcome mental health issues for musicians, as well as increasing general mental wellbeing within the industry.