Joyner Lucas and his manager Dhruv Joshi’s Tully app recently received a strategic investment from Sony Music Entertainment, boosting the capital for the artist collaboration platform. After receiving the investment and using the app to making his Billboard Top 10 album ADHD, Lucas spoke to GroovyTracks about why he developed Tully.
“Artists need to have control over their work,” Lucas tells DX. “We sweat and bleed for this stuff, and it means everything to us. I built Tully to make it possible for me to have that control, know where all my stuff is and never have to rely on anyone to tell what’s mine and who owns what or how.”
Tully, which was founded in 2015, offers digital tools for streamlining the creative process in music. Artists and songwriters are able to record ideas, save beats, store masters and more on the secure cloud-based application.
The app also allows engineers to pull up projects before studio sessions, providing instant access to audio files and lyric sheets. Tully’s ability to facilitate remote work adds to its intrigue too, especially amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“As a manager, I have to juggle a lot of relationships for every song that Joyner creates,” Joshi notes. “You have to get clearances and split sheets from lawyers, producers, collaborators, everyone. You have to make sure that you have the rights for beats and samples, and you have to do that all while making sure that Joyner has what he needs to make it happen.”
He adds, “I had never found a way of doing this that didn’t end up costing a lot of time, a lot of money, and not be easy to track. It could get really hard to get a song to the finish line so, when we designed Tully to give me the controls I need to get it done and keep Joyner in the loop. It’s a game-changer for the industry.”
Sony’s investment will help Tully expand its offerings ahead of the Tully Artist Management Platform, which is scheduled to launch in the third quarter of 2020.
The program is billed as having “unparalleled transparency and control for artists.” Invite-only previews of the Tully Artist Management Platform will be available in May.
Check out the Tully app here.