Fundraising Won’t Save a Weak Business Model

MusicTech Insights #13 | Curated by Garry Yankson

This issue is guest curated by Garry Yankson, who is a creative entrepreneur and business advisor working at the intersection of music, film, technology, branding, and the cultural & creative industries. Over the past 15+ years, he has helped more than 200 founders, artists, and creative ventures with business development, fundraising, international growth, and go-to-market strategy.

Today, his work focuses on helping creative entrepreneurs build stronger business models through WLFG Blueprint while developing IP-driven projects at Proplyd Productions.

Fundraising Won’t Save a Weak Business Model

Hi, I'm Garry.

I spend most of my time with creative founders, artists, and startups who are trying to enter new markets, raise money, or sell assets. Go-to-market, exits, grants, venture capital, strategic partnerships—different paths, but always the same question: what are we actually financing?

In the creative industries, we often fall in love with the vision first. The story, the artist, the technology. I love that. It’s why I do this work.

But fundraising should never be used to hide an unclear business model.

A good raise accelerates something that already makes strategic sense. It helps a team move faster, secure rights, or prove a repeatable model. A bad raise only buys more time for confusion. Especially in MusicTech, founders must be precise. Where does the real value sit—in the data, the rights, the workflows, the catalogue, or the brand?

The strongest creative companies are not the ones with the most beautiful deck. They are the ones that connect cultural relevance with execution discipline.

That is also why I’m building WLFG Blueprint—an online program designed to help artists and creative founders structure their projects to maximize results. Because in this industry, we don’t need less ambition. We need better architecture.

Vision is the spark. Business model is the heart. Execution is the lifestyle. Do not raise money to avoid hard questions. Raise money when those questions have made your model sharper.

With love,G.

IFPI: Global Music Report 2026

Global recorded music revenues grew 6.4% in 2025 to reach US$31.7 billion, according to IFPI. For founders, this is useful context: the market is still growing, but growth alone does not guarantee startup success. The real question is where your business model captures value.

For me, this is exactly why CCI (Cultural and Creative Industries) founders need to understand market structure, not just creative opportunities.

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Music as an Asset Class

The paper by Sasha Stoikov, Aadityaa Singla, Umu Cetin, and Luis Alonso Cendra Villalobos, explores music royalty assets through a financial lens and compares certain long-term royalty assets to traditional investment classes. Whether or not every founder agrees with the framing, it shows something important: music is increasingly analysed as infrastructure, cash flow and asset strategy.

This is exactly why I believe that Creative Tech and Music Tech can evolve toward new forms more diversified than SaaS. And this is why my current personal venture, Proplyd Productions is all about creative assets while including tech in workflows.

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The Creator Economy: MIDiA Research

MIDiA Research creator economy work is useful because it frames creators as independent producers of content, goods and services. For MusicTech founders, this matters: many tools claim to “help creators”, but the best ones understand how creators actually monetise, work, distribute and build leverage.

This is one of the core audiences I’m building WLFG Blueprint for.

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AI slop in music streaming

This research by Stanley Wu, Josephine Passananti, Viresh Mittal, Wenxin Ding, Haitao Zheng, Ben Y. Zhao, on AI-generated "slop" in music streaming raises a critical issue for MusicTech: lower creation costs do not automatically create value. If the market is flooded with low-intent content, trust, curation, provenance, and rights clarity become even more valuable.

How can we improve content identification, ensure fair compensation, and better protect musical works and creators? These will be some of the biggest challenges as generative AI continues to reshape the music industry.

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