Matt
Jones.

Matt Jones runs Medallion out of a 19-person office at 450 Broadway, in the stretch of Manhattan where the pretense is that no one is hustling. The premise of the company is that streaming solved discovery and did approximately nothing for devotion. The top five to ten percent of an artist's audience, he says, drives the majority of consumption and sales. That audience is not addressable on Spotify. It is addressable on Medallion.

Medallion is a white-label platform. An artist signs up, gets a branded digital environment they actually own, and can sell things there - early access to tickets, exclusive drops, premium formats, direct writing to fans, a paid format called Digital Deluxe that packages audio, video, and imagery around a release. The artist owns the customer relationship. The artist owns the data. Medallion takes a cut of platform sales and, notably, does not charge the artist to be on it.

This is the point in the pitch where most people note that streaming has trained a generation of fans to expect access for free, and that trying to sell them anything is a losing bet. Jones's counter is empirical. Medallion posts an average per-stream rate around fifty-six cents, which is roughly 560 times what YouTube pays. On a per-fan basis, the platform is reportedly running about twenty times the economics of the majors. This does not mean fans are richer than they were a year ago. It means, when given somewhere to spend, they spend.

The investors have noticed. In December 2023, Medallion closed a $13.7 million Series A co-led by Dragonfly and Lightspeed Faction, with Coinbase Ventures, Infinite Capital, J17, The Chernin Group, Third Prime, and Zeal Capital joining. So did Metallica, via Black Squirrel Partners. So did Guy Lawrence of Disclosure, Jungle, Mt. Joy, Tiga, TAG Music, and Bill Silva Entertainment. It is possible to read the cap table as a festival lineup. It is more useful to read it as a thesis: when the artists own the platform they use, the incentives stop pointing sideways.

Two things about that funding round are worth pausing on. First, three of the biggest checks - Dragonfly, Lightspeed Faction, Coinbase Ventures - are crypto-native funds. Medallion is not a crypto product. It has no NFTs at the center of the experience, no token, no wallet. Jones has said in interviews that the team looked hard at blockchain and NFT integration and decided against it, in favor of things that work like normal software for normal artists and normal fans. The crypto funds wrote the checks anyway. Second, the round takes Medallion's total funding to just over $22 million, which is a modest number for the ambition. Jones is not raising to run. He is raising to build.

The through-line is what makes him worth paying attention to. Jones has been running versions of this company since he was seventeen, promoting concerts in the UK. In 2008 he started Crowdsurge, a direct-to-fan ticketing platform. In 2015 Crowdsurge merged with Songkick, the concert discovery service co-founded by Ian Hogarth. He and Hogarth were co-CEOs; by January 2016 Jones was the sole CEO. In December 2016, Songkick filed an antitrust suit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster, later amended to accuse them of stealing trade secrets. In 2017, Warner Music Group bought Songkick's concert discovery business. In 2018, Live Nation acquired the ticketing assets to settle the litigation. Across Crowdsurge and Songkick, Jones raised more than fifty million dollars and ran a global team of 175.

He is not, by any reasonable measure, on his fourth idea. He is on his third company for the same idea. The tools keep getting sharper.

What Medallion actually sells.

Digital Deluxe is the piece worth understanding. It is a paid, native format that layers artist-curated audio, video, and imagery over a release, and it lives inside Medallion rather than on Spotify or Apple Music. Think of it less as a competitor to streaming and more as a competitor to the twelve-track album with a hidden bonus disc that used to justify the sixteen-dollar price tag at Tower Records. Jones is trying to invent, in 2024, a paid music format. This is the kind of thing people mostly stopped attempting after streaming won.

Around Digital Deluxe sits everything else: fan communities that, per Medallion, have outperformed comparable Facebook Groups by 86%, Reddit by 161%, and Discord by 206%; early-access ticketing that connects to the artist's existing ticketing infrastructure; direct-to-fan merch; and a growing set of tools for artist teams to actually see who their most valuable fans are. The bet is that once artists can see the top five percent, they will want to treat them differently. The bet appears to be paying off.

Why now, and why him.

The reason artists have not owned their fan relationships is that owning them has been more expensive than not owning them. Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube all offered enormous distribution at the cost of the customer relationship. Streaming platforms offered global scale at the cost of everything downstream of discovery. The math worked - if you were counting listeners rather than counting the small number of fans willing to pay you money. That math is what Medallion is trying to change.

Jones is the right operator for this because he has spent two decades in the seams. Crowdsurge sat between artists and Ticketmaster. Songkick sat between fans and venues. Both companies made money on infrastructure the majors did not want to build. Medallion sits between the artist and the streaming platforms, and it is being built by someone who has run the antitrust playbook and knows exactly how the platforms respond. The Ticketmaster fight in particular seems to have shaped how Jones thinks about dependency. Medallion is architected so that no single platform can turn off the artist's oxygen.

The company has also assembled a bench that reads like a small industry summit. Alumni of Songkick, Spotify, Instagram, YouTube, Warner Music, and Live Nation are inside. So are operators from e-commerce and consumer software. This is not the profile of a startup trying to disrupt the music business from the outside. It is the profile of a company staffed by people who know exactly how it works and have decided, after years of watching it work that way, to build something else.

Publicly, Jones is understated. He posts on his Substack, he writes on Medium, he shows up on podcasts, and he tends to talk about the platform in terms of what artists can now do rather than what streaming got wrong. The founder story is not the point. The point, three companies in, is that the top five percent of a fanbase has always been the thing worth building for, and until Medallion the tools for actually reaching them did not exist.

Whether Medallion becomes the default infrastructure for the direct-to-fan economy is not yet decided. What is decided is that Jones will not stop making the argument.