The Exec producer

The Executive Producer: A New Funding Model for Artists?

A few months ago, a music NFT sold for $100k.

This was a huge outlier sale in the current market so I started diving into it.

Turns out this wasn’t a typical NFT sale. It was an “Executive Producer Pass,” for an ambitious music project called Eternal Garden.

The buyer was C.Y. Lee — a prolific music collector— and in exchange for his $100k, he became an executive producer on the project. He gets insider access to the creators, while sharing his advice, ideas and contacts with the team.

When I speak to C.Y., he tells me he has similar exec producer agreements with 20 other artists and music projects.

“I’m trying to start a meme,” he explains to me on a call. Every artist should have a high-priced option for people to support them. “It’s like very expensive luxury merch. And that luxury product is called patronage. I’m giving it a name, or trying to apply the name of ‘executive producer’.”

In simple terms, executive producing means funding an artist and helping them to bring their vision to life. The executive producer gets credit on the release, but there’s no expectation of financial return.

“I’m expecting zero back,” he explains. “I just want to see what happens.” Of course, there’s a level of social status and culture-building by doing this transparently, often onchain. “I want to feel seen and be acknowledged,” C.Y. says. “It’s public, but it’s not screaming it.”

Executive producing is, therefore, a modern form of patronage in a world where the business model for musicians simply doesn’t work for most. And it makes it possible for artists to explore their biggest creative ideas. 

“Eternal Garden embraces completely in that,” C.Y. explains. “I don’t know what Eternal Garden wants to be or will end up being, but I sure as hell want to find out. It’s like building an aeroplane while it’s flying.”

How to fund an immersive music sci-fi world?

Eternal Garden is a music project with a big vision. Founder and artist TK describes it as a franchise on the scale of “Dune” or “Star Wars with its own storyline, novel and record label all under one banner.

TK has more than a decade of experience in the music industry, writing and producing with artists like Will Smith, Rihanna and The Weeknd, but he became frustrated with the existing model. “You don’t make [a lot of] money from streaming,” he says. “Unless you’re doing millions of streams. And touring isn’t as profitable as it used to be so it’s really difficult to make a sustainable career in music.”

TK had early success with music NFTs, which gave him some freedom to pursue his own music, but how could he fund the bigger ambition for Eternal Garden.

Pitching a record label with the Eternal Garden concept would have been impossible. Labels rely on formulaic singles, albums and commercial success to recoup their investments. The team also considered venture investments. “We had a lot of VC conversations,” TK explained. “But to be fully transparent we were taking a creator based project and trying to make it palatable for people to invest in us.” Inevitably, you have to dilute the creativity when you’re thinking about delivering a return to your investors. “There was an emphasis on certain concepts that normally would not have been so prioritised had we not been trying to raise money.”

Instead, after talking with C.Y., they created a luxury product as part of their offering called the “Executive Pass” — an NFT that allows someone to come in as an executive producer on the first season of the project, priced at $100k. C.Y. Lee purchased it and came onboard.

Finally, Eternal Garden had the freedom and funding to execute its grand vision, without the immediate expectation of profit or return.

Executive Producer: Skin in the game

What’s in it for C.Y. if there’s no revenue share or direct ownership? For him it’s all about having skin in the game and pushing culture forward in a direction he believes in.

“That’s the meta of what makes exec producing interesting. Having skin in the game of a story that’s playing out. You don’t have to be a main character. You want to be part of what makes the universe move forward.”

The agreement looks different for every project that C.Y. is involved in. For Eternal Garden, it’s the initial funding to start building. In exchange, the team gets on a call with C.Y. every two weeks to share their progress, while C.Y. shares input and advice from decades of working in tech startups. TK and his partner Claire Mirren also provide him with regular airdrops to mark the story.

For C.Y. it’s also the fastest way to learn. After being involved in dozens of projects at an executive producer level and even more as an angel investor, you get to see the patterns and the traps of taking something from zero to one. He can take those learnings and apply it to others. 

And it’s more fun.

“The vibes stay positive, and there’s good boundaries … I want executive producership to feel light and simple but still have value.”

On the flip side, with investments, you can become obsessed with the financial return. It clouds your judgement and often forces you and the team to make the wrong creative decisions.

For those with disposable income and a certain level of “made it,” why not use that money to push culture forward instead of chasing “number go up”?

A brief history of patronage

This concept of patronage isn’t new. For thousands of years, art and culture was funded this way. Leonardo Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Mozart, Beethoven and William Shakespeare all created their most notable work with the backing of patrons — many from the Christian church.

This allowed artists to create beautiful works of art that lasted through centuries. The artists were free to work on grandiose visions without delivering a financial return for their patrons or commercialisation of their art.

This isn’t to say that patrons were purely altruistic. Many gained enormous status, power and legacy through their contributions (e.g. the Medici Family) and indirect financial returns flowed from other places. It was still an exclusive club, too. The artists often had elite status or lineage to start with.

However, it’s clear this model resulted in some of the most lasting and impactful works throughout history.

Fast forward to today…

As society changed, so did funding models. We entered a more secular, capitalist society and artists were expected to “sell” their work in a more direct way.

Artists turned to selling prints and editions, relying heavily on middle-men like galleries. Musicians packaged up records and sold tickets to live shows.

For music, funding became available in the form of advances from giant record labels and publishing companies. But there are strict terms and expectations that come with it:

“We’ll give you $100k to make your album, but we keep 100% of your revenue until that money is recouped.” Even after recouping, artists often only get a 15% cut of sales.

The result is productized music. 3-minute songs that fit a commercial formula to deliver financial returns to the major labels.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but there should still be space for grand visions that don’t fit into a commercial box, or funding artists to develop through their earliest stages, before pushing for a financial return. And most importantly, backing artists from different backgrounds.

The executive producer portfolio

You can see all of this diversity in C.Y.’s projects. Eternal Garden is a large project with a team and production studio. But C.Y. also quietly backs individual artists with a small stipend to pay their rent or purchase new AI software to push their creativity — it’s like funding research and development, he says.

He’s also involved in tech projects with a creative heart like INPUBLIC.FUN (a publishing platform built on Zora) and Supercollector (a music NFT platform). 

In other cases, he’s part of a bigger circle of “executive producers” who are all contributing to an artistic project. “You don’t have to be the only one — it can be as many people as the artist can martial to make it happen.”

Examples of this include the Black Dave token where dozens people support artist Black Dave with no expectation of return. “Hi! I’m Black Dave! I have ideas! I need your money to make them happen! This is not an investment, there is no return on this.”

Or SCENES — an album by UK producer Sound of Fractures — which was funded through a token crowdfunding model. 

Sound of Fractures - The Community Funded Album

In July 2023, Sound of Fractures — the pseudonym of UK dance producer Jamie Reddington — launched the Sound of Fractures token to support his upcoming album SCENES. 

Anyone could purchase 1 token for $10 and be a part of the project, with tiers rising up to “Executive Producer” level at 200 tokens. The exec producer role gives you credit on the album itself, as well as access to a private chat and weekly updates.

Three executive producers contributed over $2,000 each, alongside 59 additional backers. 

“Platform and brand incentives are often misaligned from creatives,” Reddington tells me when I ask why he chose this funding model. “Instead of traditional albums, my goal is to create projects that experiment with emerging technology and build community.”

Unlike most of the other executive producer agreements, Reddington’s model did include a percentage of revenue flowing back to his backers, but that mechanic was really secondary to the community aspect.

The funding allowed Reddington to build out his own website, publish his work without relying on existing platforms and middlemen, and promote his music to a wider audience.

Choose your own adventure

Ultimately, the executive producer role is one that creates a multi-player mode around creative projects. 

“It’s a reality show inside a reality show,” says C.Y.

For projects like Eternal Garden and Scenes, people can get involved at different levels. They can stream or consume the final product, they can purchase an accessible NFT and watch the journey unfold, or they can be an executive producer and get involved at a deeper level.

It’s a choose-your-own adventure. “There’s the Eternal Garden story and then there’s the story of the people who are participating in it.”

Creative projects of the future will look more like multi-player games than pure consumer products. “Every massively multiplayer game that manages to survive is because the people in it continue to care,” explains C.Y.

Every artist should have a “luxury merch” option

“I do have a bigger over-arching goal in mind,” C.Y. says as we zoom back out to his broader intentions. He wants all artists to offer an executive producer product in their merch store.

This is a call-to-action for every artist to think about a high-end option for people to support them on their website and merch store.

“What does an executive producer product look like in your catalog of merch? If enough artists have a list of merch from $1 stickers to a $10,000 executive producer item, then it starts to feel like it makes sense. You just need a couple dozen examples. Then it’s a trend.”

Pushing culture forward

While executive producing isn’t unique to web3, the onchain infrastructure has unlocked a new way for capital to form effortlessly around projects that people believe in and want to be a part of. 

And maybe we need to let go of speculation and financial return . “I feel like there’s a lot of people out there that love a particular art form, and want to be involved at a level that doesn’t involve an explicit financial outcome.”

Ultimately for C.Y. it’s really all about pushing the culture forward, building the world he wants to see and putting his money where his mouth is. “I’m in it. I’m in this arena to try to make this culture work.”