SOLE Industries:
Fast Facts

Sole Industries has developed an internally-regulated, SEC-compliant, financing marketplace for individual artists and their talents. Our exchange allows investment in individual stars (and rising stars) outside legacy studio systems.

By using our technology, individual and institutional investors can invest in individual performers’ careers, rather than bundled corporate studio securities with reams of different talent attached. Micro targeting offers greater flexibility and upside potential.

The Studio
Bundle Problem

Financing is a beautiful thing. It moves wealth from the hands of the idle to the hands of the active, where it can rapidly create more wealth. It then returns some of the newly-created wealth to the hands of the financier, who can then do it all over again.

This virtuous circle underpins all markets, and is capitalism’s foundation. However, the highly structured nature of the modern securities industry has applied certain brakes to this system, slowing down capital’s ability to improve lives, rinse, and repeat.

Most profitable creative endeavour these days take place under the auspices of studio corporations. These studios hoard masses of disparate IP and talent, forcing investors who want a little slice of the action to purchase the whole pie, blackbirds and all.

There’s no simple way to invest in specific talent. Patronage sites let you give money directly to creators, but with no quid pro quo. They are free to waste it as they like, without ever having to share back to their supporters after reaching fame and success.

The Sole Industries
Solution

Sole provides arts investors with a completely new way to invest in the arts. Participants on our platform can use our tokens to acquire a securities stake in an individual performer or creator, and can then watch the value of that stake grow over time.

Unlike patronage sites, we are not enabling funders to simply spend money supporting artists directly. We allow many different funders to partner with one artist, providing needed capital and expecting no product in return. The returns come later, as money.

Consider the case of Mike Merrill. In 2007, as performance art, he divided himself into 100,000 shares and sold 11,823 of them off to 805 different investors at $1 each. Each share is now worth about $5.25, and peaked at $18 during the height of his popularity.

Sole aims to provide an easy-to-use and SEC-conforming marketplace allowing any creative professional to engage in this form of direct, personal investment, and freeing investors from the burden of having to invest in whole studios, not individual talent.

Case Study: Lil Dicky

The widespread market need for an exchange like the one Sole Industries proposes is best illustrated by another real-world case study. Consider the experience of rap artist Lil Dicky, was forced to use Kickstarter to find backing for his creative endeavour.

Unfortunately for both him and his backers, they were unable to get updates and talk to the artist about their concerns, or his plans with their money. Rather than fostering creative group financing, Kickstarter dismayed his fanbase and built only acrimony.

How It Works

Our specialized securities market operates using an integrated in-house currency called “Soles” that acts as a trading token medium.

Funders buy Sole tokens for US currency, at a fixed, permanent exchange rate, and use their tokens to apportion support for specific fundees on our platform.

Fundees can convert invested Soles back into $US at the same fixed rate.

As fundees influence and net worth increase, the relative value of Funder’s investments increase, in terms of the number of Soles their stake is worth.

As Sole-enumerated stakes in specific creatives increase, funders can hold, trade or cash out their stakes using the same $US backing. This is how investors make their money, by collecting ownership in future stars early.

In this manner, fans and supports can be more than simply patrons of the arts. They can be partners through every step of the artistic process, from funding to profitability.

Traction & Accomplishments

Meet The Team

Parker Joyce, The Founder of Sole Industries, began the company in January of 2018. He was annoyed with the lack of granularity offered by traditional equities markets. Legacy markets offered no way for him to directly invest in the very things that he understood best: people. Unperturbed, he created the Sole marketplace specifically to allow any investor to participate in an exchange where any person could seek financing for their own unique brand, skills and talents.