HIFI ACQUIRES THE MUSIC FUND

Financial-rights company HIFI has acquired The Music Fund, which uses artificial intelligence to power a smart-pricing algorithm that affords artists innovative funding solutions based on their music's streaming performance while allowing creators to retain 100% of their copyrights and future earnings. The deal will provide HIFI—already tracking hundreds of millions of dollars in royalty income—with new artist funding options.

Music Fund co-founders John Funge and Thomas Jerde, who both have backgrounds in data science and finance, will join HIFI as Chief Technology Officer and VP, Data Science, respectively.

“Our prediction model enables us to underwrite a variety of short-term financing solutions for artists at absolutely no risk to them, empowering them to record music, go on tour or market current projects without having to sign away any long-term rights," Funge said, adding, "We’re looking forward to leveraging our automated valuation model to deliver an entirely new class of innovative financial products to the music-creator community.”

HIFI, founded in July 2020 by tech entrepreneur Damian Manning and backed by Matt Pincus, has thousands of artists and their teams using its royalties dashboard. It boasts a product called Cash Flow that pays artists bimonthly based on forecasts of royalty income.

We'd love to tell you how the technology works, but every time we read about it we have an overpowering desire to nap.