Artists’ royalties and performers’ equity: A ground-up approach to social impact investment in creative fields

In this paper we argue that new models of artists’ royalties and performers’ equity can form the basis of social impact funds in the arts. Following the principle that those who contribute value should own part of it, we model social impact funds using a “value creation” lens, starting with royalties, profit shares, and other rights granted to visual artists, performers, and playwrights (referred to collectively as “art-ists”). We draw on data from DACS, the United Kingdom manager of the Artist Resale Right (ARR) and copyright licensing, as well as Arts Council England. We build on case studies of the Artist Pension Trust and Olav Velthuis’ suggestion of applying football (soccer) transfer fees to the arts, in order to argue for an artist-centric view of sustainable investing in the culture sector. This proposal complements cultural impact investing funds started by LISC and Upstart Co-Lab while creating more diversifiable, flexible, and artist-centric systems to address problems of risk and diversification of early-stage investment in creative work.