Medallion, a direct artist-to-fan platform that enables white-label fan experiences and digitally native commerce for artists, has closed $13.7 million of Series A funding. The round was co-led by Dragonfly and Lightspeed Faction, alongside technology investors such as Coinbase Ventures, Infinite Capital, J17, The Chernin Group, Third Prime and Zeal Capital, as well as music industry investors including Bill Silva Entertainment, Black Squirrel, Guy Lawrence of Disclosure, Foundations Artist Management, Jungle, Mt. Joy, Method, Tiga and TAG Music. Black Squirrel was founded in 2020 by former Morgan Stanley executive Paul Donahue, METALLICA and its in-house leadership team (Tony DiCioccio, Marc Reiter and Vickie Strate),WG&S founder Eric Wasserman and artist management firm Q Prime, which represents METALLICA.
Medallion intends to use this capital to accelerate an ambitious technical roadmap to deliver net new revenue opportunities for artists and immersive experiences for community members around pivotal artist moments.
Since launching in 2022, Medallion‘s technology has enabled artists to launch community-driven digital environments and target their highest intent fans to deliver exclusive access to drops, merchandise and experiences. Medallion-powered communities quickly became artists’ fastest-growing community channel, attracting 86% more members than their Facebook groups, 161% more than Reddit and 206% more than Discord.
Medallion‘s most recent product release is Digital Deluxe, a chart-eligible format in the U.K., Australia and Germany. The premium product seamlessly integrates exclusive audio and visual content to tell the story behind the music. Jungle‘s most recent album landed at #3 on the U.K. charts, propelled in part by launching an experiential Digital Deluxe version of the album within their Medallion community. As consumers continue to embrace collecting physical music formats, Digital Deluxe offers fans a premium digital alternative with more immersive content straight from the artist.
“Artists owning direct access to their fans is critical, but they also need more ways to deliver value for it to drive impact,” said Matt Jones, CEO of Medallion.
While streaming has opened up access to music and social media and created new channels for direct distribution, the full potential of direct artist-to-fan connections has not been realized. Medallion‘s artist-centric approach and emphasis on digitally native fan experiences is helping usher in a new, transformative period for artists.
“Artists are starting to understand they are not just content creators, but brands themselves, and as a result are building multimodal businesses that go beyond simply music and content,” said Rob Hadick, general partner at Dragonfly. “Medallion is building the infrastructure to enable artists to directly interact with their highest intent customers through new and exclusive products and experiences, while simultaneously owning the customer relationship themselves and driving net new revenue opportunities around their IP. We believe this paradigm shift will permeate across the entirety of the creator economy.”
“Artists only have direct relationships with a fraction of their fanbase. Medallion solves this problem by unlocking direct artist-to-fan connection,” said Will Leas at Lightspeed Faction. “The team has a history of building pioneering technology for the world’s biggest artists, and we are thrilled to back them on this journey.”
Medallion is led by technology, e-commerce and music industry veterans from Songkick, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, Grailed, Warner Music Group and Live Nation. Prior to the Series A round, the company raised more than $9 million of seed funding in 2022 from investors including The Chernin Group, Polygon Ventures, Mike Shinoda, Betaworks, Red Light Ventures and Noise DAO, along with current Medallion artists iLLENNIUM and Tycho.