Snap has announced that, as of August, it will launch a “Snapchat Sounds Creator Fund” which provides monthly grants “of up to $100,000” to top creators using its ‘Sounds’ feature, to “support the independent and emerging artists that are driving creation on Snapchat,” Ted Suh, Snap’s Global Head of Music Partnerships, says.
There are a couple of caveats: creators must be based in the U.S., and must distribute their music on Snapchat via DistroKid – and that $100,000 number is a monthly total: the T&Cs say that “Grant Recipients will receive a $5,000 grant.”
How many artists will get grants and who will get them? Snap says these decisions will be “as Snap determines in its sole discretion.”
This approach of paying creators to generate content for platforms is fairly standard practice now: YouTube’s Shorts Fund aims to pay out $100m to creators by the end of 2022, and Snap pays the creators of the top snaps in its Spotlight feed. But this is interesting in that it is purely focused on music creators.
Snap is a company at an interesting point in its journey. On one hand, it has 332m Daily Active Users, a sandboxed community of young-ish users who are motivated to be creators using the platform’s many tools, and the company has recently launched a subscription tier, plus an inevitable NFT integration.
On the other hand, the company – like many of its tech peers – is feeling a financial crunch. After Snap revealed that it missed its already-reduced financial forecasts for Q2 2022, its market cap is now $16.1bn – less than half of what it was at the start of the year, and only 12% of its peak market cap ($131.41bn) in September 2021.
This new fund may be another in a string of forward-facing announcements designed to un-spook investors, whilst also being recognition of the importance of music on the platform.
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