Turley’s Venture Fund Raises $10M for NFT Play

Entrepreneur betting on music is an untapped niche in the NFT Market

In high school, Cooper Turley flipped Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! trading cards for profit. His hustle has found several outlets since – journalist, DJ, trader, co-founder and investor.

Now, with $10 million in hand — some of it his, some of it from millionaire crypto entrepreneurs and investors — Turley has landed his next project: Changing the economy of making and enjoying music.

Largest collection

The key, no surprise, is NFTs. His venture, Coop Records, is an NFT venture fund focused exclusively on music. Turley, who says he has amassed the largest collection of music NFTs in the world, is the sole general partner, and limited partners trust him to find diamonds in the rough: musicians, songs and projects that make it possible to buy , sell and mint NFTs.

While NFTs generally suffer greatly in the bear market, Turley says music NFTs remain an untapped niche. He estimates that 2,000 artists have minted a music NFT and 10,000 collectors have bought one.

“This is a way for anyone in the world to participate in a secondary market with a limited amount of digital goods,” Turley told The Defiant in a recent interview.

ICO ban

But NFTs are only the first step. Just as crypto tokens enable people to invest in early-stage companies as if they were shareholders, these tokens can also enable “investing in artists in a way that you would invest in a technology company, where you can buy Tesla stock , you can buy a Tesla car.”

Turley studied music business at the University of Colorado in Denver. On the side, he worked as a music journalist covering up-and-coming artists, and as a curator for electronic music blogs and, briefly, as a DJ.

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Realizing that the music industry was not the most lucrative career choice, he turned to crypto. He was active in the ICO boom from 2017 to 2019 and wrote white papers for a few protocols.

After the 2018 crash, Turley, fresh out of college, kept at it, attending developer conferences and writing for crypto-native publications, including The Defiant.

He started trading crypto and contributed to decentralized protocols’ on-chain governance. Turley co-founded Friends With Benefits, the tokenized social club that has raised money from venture capitalists and been profiled in The New York Times and The Washington Post. He invested in the NFT platforms Zora and Foundation, and he helped a music streaming app, Audius, launch its own token.

All flow

The limited partners who invested in Coop Records cut checks for $50,000 to $1M, Turley said. Most of the money will go to music NFT companies seeking pre-seed or seed-stage investors. About 10% will go to upcoming artists and the rest will be used to buy music NFTs on the open market.

“From a platform perspective, I think there’s an opportunity to really bring in a wave of composability that didn’t exist before,” he said. “For example, you have a distributor who puts your song on Spotify or Apple or Amazon music, but there are all streams that happen in silos.”

Turley envisions a future for musicians in crypto that goes beyond buying and selling digital collectibles. Musicians would see revenue from streaming instantly, instead of the three to six month wait they suffer with Spotify.

Fans can also invest directly in an artist as if they were a publicly traded company, buying shares for $5 in, say, Kanye West. He understands that it is going to say no.

Artists who give ownership

“I think the idea of ​​an artist giving ownership to their fans is scary, because people think that the fans are going to dictate when they put out music, who they put out music with,” he said.

Art has always attracted investors. But turning a piece of art, whether it’s a painting or a song, into an NFT invites financial speculation in a way that will make some artists uncomfortable.

“There’s almost a kind of pressure that’s put on artists, and so the artists now have to juggle not only the creative practice of releasing music, but also the financial implications of having NFTs, tokens, etc.,” Turley said. “But I think for the future, the best, most forward-thinking artists will be very able to handle and be able to do some really cool things with it.”

Making this plan a reality is going to take some time. First, Turley hopes to build out the music NFT space. Even that poses its own obstacles.

High potential

“Most fans of music don’t understand why you would want a song to be an NFT,” he said. “The reality is that most people just passively listen to a song on Spotify. They don’t really know who that artist is. They don’t really know much about the project other than it’s on the radio.”

Although he’s most associated with the electronic music scene, Turley will look to invest in artists with the deepest connections to their fans, the ones who could become the next STS9, or Lotus, or Pretty Lights.

“For other investors in the space who want exposure without doing a deep dive,” he said, “Coop Records can kind of be the vehicle where you can put your capital and feel confident that I’m going to invest in companies that have a high potential for success.”