Viberate, a global live music industry ecosystem will commence their ICO for VIBE tokens this upcoming week on September 5th with a live performance from one of the co-founders DJ UMEK, the techno legend from Slovenia. The event will be live streamed on the Viberate Facebook page and LiveStream.com.
Viberate is enabling music artists to accept cryptocurrency payments from event organizers. The platform has a comprehensive database listing of artists and musicians, in addition to events and venues that will make it accessible for organizers to sign up the right artist or venue for any event.
As music industry veterans, the team, of course, wants to make it special, UMEK will have a special set prepared for the ICO launch, he stated:
“Of course we’ll throw a party for when the crowdsale launches! What kind of a music service wouldn’t do that? I prepared a special 90-minute set and I’ll play it in our offices in Ljubljana.”
“We want as many people as possible to celebrate this special event with us, so we’ll stream the set live on Facebook. I hope the neighbors will understand that we might cross a line with loud music for a while. They’ve invited anyway.”
Before the ICO begins, Matej Gregorčič, CEO Viberate pronounced 5 reasons to participate in the ICO:
1) The Team
When we were raising our seed round everyone told us to emphasize our team in our presentation. So, in the end, our deck was around 30% of the people, working on the project. One of the investors then told us in the simplest way possible, why they invest into teams and not projects. I’d rather invest into a great team with an OK idea than into a crappy team with a great idea. You can have the best idea in the world, but can’t execute it with a bad team.
The founders have worked together for 15 years, we’re not just business partners, we’re friends. Music has been our central focus for the whole period and we know everything there is about the music business. We are experienced managers and skilled team leaders, joined by loyal employees, who follow our vision and share our passion. We worked with big international clients such as Philip Morris, Vodafone, Hewlett-Packard and many others, who trusted us with their event management budgets.
2) Solving Our Own Pains
We started the project because we were lost in the flood of trends in music. New artists emerge daily and it’s hard to be on top of things, no matter how experienced you are. When you’re solving your own problems, you’ll go the extra mile to nail it. We’ve always followed the rule that said: “If we want it to be good enough for clients, it first needs to be good enough for us.” The same goes for Viberate.
3) Keeping it Real
The ICO boom has seen some insane valuations for projects that were barely existing as an idea, scribbled on a napkin. Vasja already shared our thoughts about uncapped ICOs, but it’s not only about not having a cap, it’s also about where you set it. In order to develop all planned features we need around $6M and then we need all the money we can get to advertise it globally. We could spend hundreds of millions on advertising, but we set our ad cap at another $6M. It’s a lot of money, but global campaigns cost much more than that. Still, it’s enough to kickstart the service and go from there.
4) We Actually Exist
This isn’t really an argument when you’re raising money from VC funds. But apparently, it is when you’re selling tokens. Viberate already exists as an awesome service, where you can explore the world of live music, find new acts or if you’re a musician — open up a profile and use it to monitor the popularity of your career.
By buying Vibe tokens, you are contributing to a project that already has value and a vibrant community covering our backs. The database you see today was built with the help of over 50 thousand contributors.
5) Music Isn’t Going Anywhere
The guys at Hacked.com said it best: “Live music isn’t going away, and becomes more valuable as recorded music sales continue to decline. The potential to provide disruptive services which actually benefit the industry they target is great, and even a 10% take of the industry leader in ticket sales would equate to almost a billion dollars in annual revenues.”
Recorded music is nowadays mostly a promotional tool to help drive ticket sales. For most of the musicians, their primary revenue source is live shows and there’s no sign of changes here. A lot of artists are giving away their music to fans for free and hope that they will show support by attending a live show. That’s why we decided to put our focus entirely to the live music segment because we’re sure it will only get bigger. I could easily write ten more reasons about why I think you should sit behind your computer on September 5th.
For more information on the Viberate crowd sale click here.