The Chainsmokers: EDM’s Investor Duo
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Happy Friday everyone!
Listening to podcasts on a daily basis has been a habit I picked up since Covid hit, and there’s an incredible amount of alpha available on the Internet , if you manage to find the right ones 🎙
From Technology, Investing and Business; to Music, Science and Hollywood, listening to a diverse set of podcasts has quenched my thirst for information and stories about pretty much everything I am passionate about learning.
So when one of my staple podcasts on all things Crypto- ‘ ‘ dropped an episode with the American DJ Duo- Chainsmokers, I had to rub my eyes and check twice to confirm what I saw 😳
Why would the Grammy-winning DJ pair, arguably one of the biggest artists of the past decade, appear on a nerdy podcast that talks about Crypto and Finance? 📊
I couldn’t help but go down the rabbit hole to find out more, and was blown away by the story of Drew Taggart and Alex Pall- two Americans in their 30s right now; but who were on completely different paths when they met in 2012, starting what would be the Chainsmokers as we know today 🎧
As far as their name is concerned, it isn’t as if the pair smoke packs of cigarettes regularly 🚬
“Honestly, we never thought it was all going to be this big. Alex used to smoke, [it] seemed clever, and the domains were open … We do love it, but no baby formula advertisements for us sadly, ’cause of it.”
How did it all start?
Alex attended New York University for art history and was working at an art gallery in NYC during the day, while playing at nightclubs when the sun set, along with a fellow DJ, the two of whom formed the original ‘Chainsmokers’
All this while, Drew was studying at Syracuse Universityand was an intern at Interscope Records before him and Alex met in 2012.
After 5 years of hitting night-clubs in New York, Alex’s partner was losing interest in The Chainsmokers, and having met Drew and connecting with his vision to create electronic music remixed on top of Indie music- a genre no one was targeting back then, Alex decided to buy out his ex-partner for $8000, and re-form the ‘Chainsmokers’
Since then, the pair have done quite alright for themselves 🤷♂️
📈 7 Billion + Streams on Spotify
💸 $100M + Collective Net Worth
🌍 Headlined music festivals around the world
💰$35M Venture Capital Fund
📊 57 Start-Up Investments
🤑 Highest-Paid DJs in 2019
🏆 1 Grammy Award
As Alex says on the Bankless podcast, the $8000 figure felt like $40M for him back then, but how about that for a ‘Return On Investment’?
How are The Chainsmokers unlike anyone else?
Whether it is being at the forefront of using Social Media to go viral, recognising the gap in artists not creating electronic music and remixing Indie songs or starting their own Venture Capital fund to invest in early-stage startups, The Chainsmokers are far from your typical DJ’s.
The episode is filled with anecdotes of how the pair used methodical ways to maintain an excel sheet of all the indie artists whose songs they wanted to remix, and music bloggers, whose articles they wanted to get published in, in order to break out from the noise and go viral.
And they did just that, with their 2014 single ‘#Selfie’ going viral and becoming a trend on Social Media, getting over 600M views on YouTube and hitting #1 on the Billboard EDM Charts 📈
Does the opening verse of the girl ranting to her friend in the washroom bring back any memories?
However, not everything was as rosy as it seemed 😶🌫️
Soon after #SELFIE went viral, The Chainsmokers were in fact dropped by their Record Label- Republic Records who feared that the duo would end up just being a one-hit sensation, with Alex revealing on the podcast that super-producer Rick Rubin, whose story we covered recently went as far as advising them to change their name and disappear from the scene entirely.
You know the age old saying in music, ‘You’re Only As Good As Your Last Hit’
However, not ones to be bogged down, the pair kept working on releasing electronic music with indie vocals, and have never looked back since, even winning a Grammy Award for ‘Best Dance Recording in 2017, for their hit single- ‘Don’t Let Me Down’
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Transition to Venture Capitalists 💰
From the typical DJ lifestyle of playing 180–200 shows a year across the globe and living out of a suitcase and on private jets, the duo talk about how they expanded into multiple businesses around Real Estate, TV & Film production and even a Tequila brand- JaJa Tequila🥃
However, their interest in Tech companies & startups was piqued when as Drew says on the podcast- they realised how similar DJ’s are to Start-Up founders- in their passion for building something from zero to one 🛠
Wanting a piece of that action, the pair started angel investing in a bunch of Tech startups, initially just to get a hang of how this side of the world works but eventually, realised that they had to institutionalise it to scale further.
Which is when their VC firm- Mantis , came into existence around two years back.
Since then, they have raised two rounds of funding amounting to more than $100M, and invested in early stage startups across domains such as Consumer, Social, Music, FinTech, Crypto, B2B Saas, Live Sciences and even AI/ML.
With 57 such investments, it’s safe to say that The Chainsmokers aren’t messing around when it comes to investing 😤
Our take on this?
Listening to The Chainsmokers episode made me realise how the lines between creators and investors is now blurring. There used to be a time when athletes and artists shed away from handling the business side of things, and left it to their managers.
We are now seeing a rising tide of the new generation of creators taking matters into their own hands, and leveraging their brand names to control their own investments, and becoming business savvy.
Recently, the pair also released their latest album ‘So Far So Good’ on the Music NFT platform- ‘ ‘, where they gave away free NFT’s denoting ownership in the royalties of their song to 5,000 select fans 💿
The Chainsmokers really get it don’t they?
That’s it for now, have a good weekend everyone 🍻
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Originally published at https://incentify.substack.com on July 1, 2022.
