Our Underlying Magic: A Venture Capital Approach to the Arts
Inspired by powerful startup accelerators like Y-combinator and Techstars, MOC uses a cohort-based system to bring artists together, create collaborative communities, and drive innovation. Our unique investment model, which uses mutual economics to align interests of our large network of creators with our investors, allows us to tailor funding to the needs of artists as they develop and commercialize their IP.
The “starving artist” trope exists because industry standard (across most creative industries) encourages artists to give up control of their intellectual property to outside intermediaries rather than maintain control and scaling it themselves.
Midnight Oil Collective recognizes that the intellectual property created by artists can be worth billions of dollars. Instead of taking control of that potential away from artists, we empower our artists through business, legal, and financial resources and treat them like burgeoning CEOs.
Our model:
Encourages artists to retain equity in their work
Empowers artists to be the primary managers over the work as it scales and evolves
Provides financial, legal, and business support to help artists attract talent, create leaner and more equitable production structures, and create financial structures that direct profit to the pockets of the people creating the work
Provides the important initial capital to start the production process
Funding Structure
Project Timeline
Carried Interest as Profit Share
Leveraging the industry standard of a 50/50 split between investors and intermediaries, our Spark Fund cuts artists into the upside of the community profit while allowing them to maintain majority ownership of their work.
This incentivizes cooperation and aligns interests across our cohorts.
