TweelX Is the Music Stock Exchange of the Future

The Company: TweelX

What They Do: TweelX is a unique “music stock exchange” that allows investors to purchase shares of songs that either haven’t hit the mainstream yet, or songs that might have been hits previously but aren’t earning much income. It provides a unique relationship that supports the writers of these songs while potentially making it very profitable for the investors if a song were to be cut, receive radio airplay, or commercial placement. “We have two goals,” says president Jeff Tweel, a hit songwriter with cuts by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard and a former Senior Creative Director for Curb Records. “We want to supply the content side of our website with as much quality content as we can attract, writers and artists ranging from the name artists to the unknown up-and-comers. Then, we want to attract investors, buyers if you will, who shop our inventory and hopefully see an opportunity to invest in music again, perhaps in hit songwriters or the unknown songwriter.”

Songs Include:  Kenny Rogers’ “I Can’t Unlove You” and Reba McEntire’s “Somebody’s Chelsea.” “We hope to expand our usership to where it is exponentially larger than it is now, particularly established copyrights — what we call branded songs that have already been recorded and have some earnings history and have some association of a name value,” Tweel notes.

Why You Should Invest In Emerging Artists: It provides a chance for the investor to support an unknown writer while also being able to share in the writer’s potential success. “The term we’ve coined is an affinity investment,” says Tweel, “where someone has have an affection for a particular kind of music, or an artist that they may hear on our site, or have seen live somewhere, and they want to show some support for that artist or help that artist’s career. It’s kind of a different form of crowd funding with an equity based reward, as opposed to what Kickstarter and other companies do.”

The Bottom Line: When looking towards the future, Tweel remarks, “Our vision is to have both [songs and investors] metrics or numbers of users become as large as we can realistically manage, and become market makers for investors and artists to join in a market and become partners. And essentially help tear down another barrier between creators of music and consumers of music. They say the best innovations are ones that solve a problem, and one of the ongoing problems is the barriers between the creators of music and the consumers of music, and we see ourselves as another way of tearing down some of those barriers and making a market between those two groups of people.”