The Dose
This week: basketball players become owners, Drake turns OVO into an even bigger business, the major labels place another bet on AI, SoundCloud gives artists a new way to sell directly to fans, and the creator economy admits it still has no idea what creators are worth.
🏀 SPORTS
Unrivaled is worth $650 million. Its players own roughly 30% of it.
Unrivaled just raised more than $100 million at a $650 million valuation, nearly double where it was valued last year.
The more interesting number may be 30%.
That’s approximately how much of the company belongs to its player equity pool, now worth close to $200 million.
More than 95% of Unrivaled players have some form of equity in the league, according to co-founder Alex Bazzell.
That makes Unrivaled interesting far beyond women’s basketball.
For decades, athletes have generated enormous value for leagues and franchises while ownership accumulated somewhere above them. Unrivaled is testing another model: the talent helps build the asset and owns part of the asset.
There’s a lesson here for musicians, creators and anyone whose name or work creates demand.
Getting paid more is great.
Owning part of what your work makes valuable can change your life.
Tennis wants creators in the room.
The ATP brought creators nominated by TikTok, YouTube, Meta, Twitch and Snapchat to New York this week for a closed-door summit about the future of sports fandom.
It’s an indicator of where sports media is headed.
Creators used to sit downstream from leagues. The league produced the event, traditional media covered it, and creators reacted.
Now leagues increasingly see creators as part of the actual distribution infrastructure.
The athlete who understands this has an advantage too.
Being elite at your sport creates attention. Knowing how to communicate, entertain and build an audience lets you carry that attention somewhere you own.
The smartest athletes are becoming athletes, media properties and businesses at the same time.
🎤 HIP-HOP
Drake built OVO into an asset somebody wanted to buy.
Authentic Brands Group has acquired a majority stake in OVO’s intellectual property, while Drake retains a significant ownership stake and will continue shaping the brand creatively. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.
OVO started in 2008 with Drake, Oliver El-Khatib and Noah “40” Shebib.
Now it has 12 flagship stores, an apparel operation and enough standalone brand value for Authentic (the company behind brands including Reebok, Champion and Sports Illustrated) to want control of its IP.
The lesson for artists is bigger than merch.
A great artist brand can eventually become an asset independent of the music.
A world built around the artist can create enterprise value.
The labels are buying into the AI revolution now.
Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group and Warner Music Group all participated in a new $76 million funding round for Stability AI, the company behind Stable Audio.
Days later, Universal and Sony continued pursuing their copyright case against AI music company Suno, including allegations involving music obtained from YouTube for AI training.
Watch what the industry is doing.
The central AI question in music is starting to look like this:
Who owns it? Who licensed it? Who gets paid?
The companies with the most to lose from generative AI are positioning themselves to participate financially in the technology they believe will survive.
Artists should be thinking along similar lines.
AI is becoming another layer of the music business. Understanding the rights, economics and tools early could matter much more than deciding whether you personally like AI-generated songs.
SoundCloud wants artists to sell music again.
SoundCloud has started testing direct song purchases on artist profiles, and says it will take zero commission.
The beta currently includes roughly 200 U.S.-based Artist Pro creators with Fan Support enabled. Fans can buy and download tracks without leaving SoundCloud, with artists receiving the purchase proceeds minus applicable fees and taxes.
That may sound like a small product update.
There’s a bigger idea underneath it.
For years, musicians have been taught to optimize almost everything around streams.
But 100,000 passive listeners and 1,000 people willing to actually buy from you are two very different kinds of audiences.
Maybe streaming becomes discovery.
Maybe your real business happens one layer deeper:
Discovery → fan → buyer → community.
Artists who learn how to move people through that progression have much more control over their careers.
🌎 CULTURE
The creator economy has a pricing problem.
How much is a creator actually worth?
Apparently, nobody really knows.
Half of marketing and procurement leaders surveyed by Billion Dollar Boy said they misprice creator fees, while 40% said they felt they had overpaid.
Agencies and technology companies are now trying to build better pricing benchmarks for a market where wildly different rates can be attached to seemingly similar creators.
Follower count clearly isn't enough. Neither are engagement or raw views.
A creator with 50,000 followers who can sell tickets, drive purchases or reach exactly the right 500 industry decision-makers could be far more commercially valuable than someone generating millions of disposable impressions.
That means creators should increasingly understand the composition of their audience, not merely its size.
X is changing what it pays creators for.
Beginning September 8, X plans to roll out its new Original Content Rewards Program, replacing its existing Creator Revenue Sharing program.
The new system explicitly rewards original material including reporting, analysis, commentary, videos, images and other work reflecting a creator’s own perspective or expertise.
Qualified payouts will be tied to impressions from Premium users in the Home Timeline.
You may want to keep tabs on it if X isn't currently your primary platform.
Platforms spent years rewarding behavior that encouraged reposting, reaction farming and engagement bait.
Now at least one major platform is explicitly putting more economic weight behind having something original to say.
For creators, that suggests a simple experiment:
Take an idea you already know unusually well and publish genuinely useful native commentary around it for the next 30 days.
Original expertise is becoming a distribution strategy.
💊 This Week’s Takeaway
Own more of the machine.
Look at what happened across completely different industries this week.
Unrivaled gave athletes equity in the league.
Drake turned the identity surrounding his music into valuable intellectual property.
SoundCloud is experimenting with direct artist-to-fan sales.
The major labels bought equity in an AI company.
The common thread is ownership.
If you're an artist, athlete or creator, you might want to eventually stop asking how you get paid.
And start asking how you’re adding value and how much of it you own.
🎙️ THE DOSE IS COMING BACK
The Dose already exists as a podcast.
Soon, we're tearing it apart and rebuilding it into something completely different.
The new Dose will be a live, AI-assisted show hosted by monikker, with an AI co-host and producer who can research, challenge, fact-check and follow whatever rabbit hole comes up in real time.
One episode might start with hip-hop and end with the business of professional basketball.
We might investigate what Björk is working on, then go backwards through the records that changed modern music.
We might break down a marketing strategy.
Or wax poetic about the culture of a specific city.
Or ask an AI to help monikker get better at freestyling.
The goal is to cover music, sports, business, culture, creativity and everything connecting them.
Existing episodes of The Dose are available now.
The completely reimagined version is coming soon.