Dance Together
To celebrate new music from Sia, we partnered with portfolio company and fast-spreading fitness experience, Dance Church, to bring Sia Dance Parties coast to coast. Hundreds took classes; thousands talked about it online. It should lay the groundwork for a number of major label artist partnerships to come.
Emo kids come to Discord.
Social media is NOT where meaningful artist-to-fan and fan-to-fan interactions happen. It’s happening in closed and safer places where our artists’ fans already exist in abundance…on Discord, Telegram, and WhatsApp. Building a highly engaged community with super fans on these platforms, however, is hard work. So, to launch a Discord server for Fall Out Boy, we turned to Levellr and its pioneering Community-as-a-Service software.
I can buy myself tanner!
On the (well-tanned) heels of her record-shattering #1 hit “Flowers,” pop icon and Crush client Miley Cyrus is partnering with founder and ‘Spray Tan Artist to the Stars,’ Isabel Alysa, to expand Dolce Glow’s disruptive line of at-home products across retail and D2C. Kim K, JLO, Kylie, Cardi B, Becky G, Miley, Selena Gomez, and dozens of others trust Isabel. Soon, the rest of the world’s skin will, too. This is Miley’s first significant startup investment.
Nice stems, Billie Joe.
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of their album Kerplunk, Green Day wanted to let their fans have some fun with one of their most iconic songs. With the master tapes to the album lost, they turned to Crush portfolio company AudioShake, which uses AI to pull songs apart into their different parts (called "stems"). They created vocal, drum, and bass stems for "1000 Light Years Away," then released the audio on TikTok, so that their fans could play along to the guitar part. With over 1.5 million views, it is the band's most successful Tik Tok to date.
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of their album Kerplunk, Green Day wanted to let their fans have some fun with one of their most iconic songs. With the master tapes to the album lost, they turned to Crush portfolio company AudioShake, which uses AI to pull songs apart into their different parts (called "stems"). They created vocal, drum, and bass stems for "1000 Light Years Away," then released the audio on TikTok, so that their fans could play along to the guitar part. With over 1.5 million views, it is the band's most successful Tik Tok to date.
Yola seizes the Día.
Crush Ventures partnered with Live Nation to launch an eponymous music festival around Yola Mezcal, a women-led craft mezcal brand, called Yola Día. One of Yola's founders is Swedish pop star, Lykke Li, a management client. The one-day festival in Los Angeles sold out. It featured performances by Megan The Stallion, Lykke Li, and Courtney Love, among others. The festival led to a key distribution relationship with Southern Glazer's and earned more media for the brand than everything leading up to that point in time. The NYT wrote a feature piece on the company.
Crush Ventures partnered with Live Nation to launch an eponymous music festival around Yola Mezcal, a women-led craft mezcal brand, called Yola Día. One of Yola's founders is Swedish pop star, Lykke Li, a management client. The one-day festival in Los Angeles last Summer sold out. It featured performances by Megan The Stallion, Lykke Li, and Courtney Love, among others. The festival led to a key distribution relationship with Southern Glazer's and earned more media for the brand than everything leading up to that point in time. The NYT wrote a feature piece on the company. Big plans and major headliners are coming together for the second year of the festival in 2021.
Play Weezy mode!
How do you help Funktronic Labs’ new skateBOATING game Wave Break launch on console and PC in a big way? You put an exclusive, stream-safe Weezer track in a first-of-its-kind Weezy Mode (thanks for the S/O Nintendo!) filled with skatable, iconic Weezer assets and DLC the day after Weezer headlines Summer Game Fest during the Summer that Weezer hits #1 on the charts, of course!
How do you help Funktronic Labs’ new skateBOATING game Wave Break launch on console and PC in a big way? You put an exclusive, stream-safe Weezer track in a first-of-its-kind Weezy Mode (thanks for the S/O Nintendo!) filled with skatable, iconic Weezer assets and DLC the day after Weezer headlines Summer Game Fest during the Summer that Weezer hits #1 on the charts, of course!
I’m not a businessman. I’m a business, man.
According to SignalFire, more than 50 million people worldwide now consider themselves “creators.” With their audiences in tow, top creators are entertaining their fans in countless new ways across a number of new, disparate direct-to-fan platforms. We’ve been there, managing and monetizing fan communities for OG creators (i.e. musicians) since...forever. Beacons is building the storefront for the creator economy. Their software empowers us to put everything that we need front-and-center to fans in one place: streaming, social media, CRM, content, merch sales, ticket sales, fan clubs, NFTs...everything. We’ve lit up a number of artists on the platform, like Sia and Green Day.
According to SignalFire, more than 50 million people worldwide now consider themselves “creators.” With their audiences in tow, top creators are entertaining their fans in countless new ways across a number of new, disparate direct-to-fan platforms. We’ve been there, managing and monetizing fan communities for OG creators (i.e. musicians) since...forever. Beacons is building the storefront for the creator economy. Their software empowers us to put everything that we need front-and-center to fans in one place: streaming, social media, CRM, content, merch sales, ticket sales, fan clubs, NFTs...everything. We’ve lit up a number of artists on the platform, like Sia and Green Day. Thousands of creators are signing up daily.
Feeling the music
Resonado Labs’s novel technology gives engineers a chance to reimagine sound design in a way the industry hasn’t seen in over a hundred years. To demonstrate the technology's game-changing potential, we helped Resonado create an exhibit at CES 2022 that featured Patrick Stump, the lead singer of Fall Out Boy, narrating a new kind of immersive in-home audio experience in which Resonado's speaker drivers were built into the furniture.